CANTONA
PHILIPPE AUCLAIR
CANTONA
THE REBEL WHO WOULD BE KING
MACMILLAN
First published 2009 by Macmillan
First published in paperback 2009 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2009 by Macmillan
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Copyright © Philippe Auclair 2009
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To Jean-Marie and Marion Lanoé
Contents
FOREWORD
1. I AM THE KING! I AM THE KING!
2. AUXERRE: THE APPRENTICE
3. AUXERRE: THE PROFESSIONAL
4. FAREWELL TO AUXERRE
5. THE VAGABOND 1: MARSEILLES AND BORDEAUX
6. THE VAGABOND 2: MONTPELLIER
7. THE VAGABOND 3: MARSEILLES, AGAIN, AND NÎMES
8. DECEMBER 1991: THE FIRST SUICIDE ATTEMPT
9. A STRANGE KIND OF GLORY: LEEDS, 1992
10. FAREWELL TO DREAMS: EURO 92 AND EXIT FROM LEEDS
11. MANCHESTER UNITED, AT LAST
12. THE HOMECOMING: 1992–93
13. THE WORST NIGHT OF ÉRIC’S LIFE
14. THE CONSECRATION: 1994
15. THE ROAD TO SELHURST PARK: JUNE 1994 TO JANUARY 1995
16. SELHURST PARK
17. THE AFTERMATH AND THE RETURN OF THE KING: APRIL–DECEMBER 1995
18. THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE: JANUARY–MAY 1996
19. THIS IS THE END, BEAUTIFUL FRIEND, THIS IS THE END: MANCHESTER 1996–97
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Foreword
Les Caillols – the village square.
The sign reads: ‘No Ball Games’.
I’d originally thought of giving this book a different title: The Life and Death of a Footballer. This was not to satisfy a desire for gratuitous provocation. Éric Cantona, the footballer, really died on 11 May 1997, when he swapped his Manchester United jersey with an opponent for the last time.
Throughout the three years that this book took to research and write, the idea that this ‘death’ – a word Cantona himself used liberally when speaking of his retirement – was also a suicide became a conviction of mine. In January 1996, when he was at the height of his powers, he turned down the chance to rejoin the France team. He chose not to be part of an adventure that would lead to a World Cup title in 1998. Why and how you shall see for yourselves. At this stage, it should be enough to say that this apparently incomprehensible decision fitted in with the strange logic of his progress so far, an eccentric parabola the like of which French and English football had never seen before, and are unlikely to see again.
There have been many accounts of Cantona’s life, perceived failings, failures and achievements over the years; too many of them published in the immediate wake of his prodigious success with Manchester United to stand the test of time. Some have focused on his ‘troubled personality’, and sought clues to his ‘instability’ and tendency to explode into violence. Others were mere picture books or collections of match reports which could only satisfy the hungriest and most easily sated of fans. Some (particularly in France) were attempts to make a martyr of him, a victim of the establishment or of xenophobia. Others deplored the self-destructive undercurrent in his character, which had prevented him from becoming one of the game’s all-time greats.
One thing united these attempts at making sense of the man who transformed English football to a greater extent than any other player of the modern age: as I soon discovered, even the most thoughtful and penetrating of them were reluctant to question the mythical dimension of Cantona. To question – not to deny, as so many of his deeds instantly became, literally, the stuff of legend.
Éric himself helped build this legend. His sponsors exploited it with glee. It provided writers with tremendous copy. A strange balance was thus found: it was in nobody’s interest to look beyond the accepted image of a prodigiously gifted maverick, a gipsy philosopher, a footballing artist who could be exalted or ridiculed according to one’s inclination or agenda. Cantona attracted clichés even more readily than red cards.
I’ll not claim to have unearthed a truth that had proved elusive to others; my ambition was to write this work as if its subject had been a sportsman (or a poet, or a politician) who’d left us a long time ago. Which, in Cantona’s case, is and isn’t true. It is true because he scored his last goal in competition twelve years ago and because the Éric who still exerts such fascination, the Éric one wants to write and read about, ceased to exist when he last walked off the Old Trafford pitch. What followed – his efforts to turn beach soccer into an established sport, which were remarkably successful, and his attempts to be accepted as a bona fide actor, which were largely ignored outside of France – are part of another life, a life after death if you will, which I will only refer to when it has a relevance to what preceded it. It isn’t true because his aura has not dimmed since he stopped kicking a football. Manchester United fans voted him their player of the century several years after he’d retired, ahead of the fabled Best-Law-Charlton triumvirate. More recently, in 2008, a poll conducted in 185 countries by the Premiership’s sponsor Barclays found him to be this competition’s all-time favourite player. That same year, Sport magazine chose the infamous Crystal Palace ‘kung-fu kick’ as one of the 100 most important moments in the history of sport. Ken Loach has made him a central figure in his latest film, Looking for Éric. The ghost of Éric Cantona will haunt us for some time to come.
True, legends have a habit of growing as actual memories are eroded by time. But I didn’t want to ‘debunk’ this legend: those looking for scandalous titbits and innuendo will be disappointed, I’m afraid. But I wished to interrogate the myth and chart Éric’s steps from promise to damnation, then redemption and idolatry, with the exactness of a mapmaker. What I can promise is that there will be a few surprises along the way.
The first decision I took was an easy one for me, even though it intrigued several of my friends, and will puzzle a number of readers. I informed Éric Cantona that I was writing a book about him, first by fax through a mutual acquaintance, doing it twice for good measure, then in person, on the occasion of one of his regular visits to England. I was told that he was aware of my project and that I could consider this an unspoken assent. I had confirmation of this when he thanked me for my undertaking during one of his visits to England, and that was that.
He had, after all, already put his name to an autobiography published shortly after he’d won his first title with Manchester United in 1993, Un R�
�ve étrange et fou, which was so haphazard in its overall conception, and so inaccurate in its detail, that it clearly showed that the idea of going over the past made little sense for him. I was also wary that his entourage might try to exert a control over the finished work that I wouldn’t be willing to accept. Éric’s previous chroniclers have all encountered the same problem: their subject has been demonized to such an extent that those who love him feel a natural urge to protect him with a fervour bordering on fanaticism. To achieve what I’d set out to do, I had to refuse to choose a camp, something which would have been impossible had Cantona himself been looking over my shoulder. In fact, he’d have been holding my pen.
I must conclude this short foreword with a word of apology and a recommendation. I know that it is not customary for a biographer to appear as transparently in his narrative as I do in these pages, but I strongly felt, mutatis mutandi, that my own experience of England, where I settled five years before Éric, could inform what is also a reflection on exile in Britain. Following Erik Bielderman’s advice, I also took the liberty to extract from my original draft a number of digressions – some of them of an anecdotal nature, others more akin to essays – which, whilst giving a sense of context to Éric’s story, would also have interrupted the narrative flow: the first of these is both a coda to this foreword and a prelude to what follows. The reader should feel free to skip these asides and peruse them at leisure should he or she feel so inclined, which is very much my hope. But I must now leave the stage to the man who really matters: Éric Cantona, and start where it all started, a rocky spur above Marseilles, a city unlike any other, where a footballer unlike any other was born.
Marseilles often appears not to be part of France at all. A Parisian friend had told me: ‘Marseilles is the only city in France where you don’t feel you’re in province’. I, coming from Rouen (Flaubert’s home town), know all about the province – the cafes which empty at 9pm, the picturesque town centres with their gothic churches, markets, maisons de bourgeois and opulent civic buildings. Beyond the city walls, space has been found to house those who have less money, the immigrants in particular. For them, concrete tower blocks and, should they be more affluent, bungalows and pavilions have been built, dotted on land which was cultivated not that long ago, with not a shop in sight. A drive away, hypermarkets and vast branded warehouses are selling anything from sportswear to cheap leather sofas. This drab, mind-numbing template is repeated from Lille to Strasbourg, from Nice to Bordeaux. Marseilles, however, seems out of place on this map of prettiness, pettiness, anonymity and boredom. My friend was right: to the first-time visitor, Marseilles does not look, smell or feel remotely like it belongs to La République. Tourists hardly ever visit Cantona’s hometown. Holiday-makers, wary of its reputation for excess and violence, troubled by the extraordinary number of ‘foreigners’ who walk its streets, might stop briefly in one of the dozens of restaurants which serve approximations of the traditional bouillabaisse around the magnificent old harbour. They then move on to the more reassuring surroundings of the Riviera resorts, unaware that they’re leaving behind the most beautiful and vibrant of cities.
There’s a whiff of danger about the Massalia of the Greeks, their first settlement in the western Mediterranean, which has been inhabited far longer than almost any other region in France. When Marseilles makes the national news, you can pretty much bet that the news is not good. Torched cars. Corruption scandals in the local administration. Drug traffickers and mafiosi. Local rap artists preaching insurrection (or something similar, but oddly incomprehensible, because of the ‘funny’, unsettling nature of their speech). Supporters of Olympique de Marseille throwing flares on the pitch, beating up visiting fans, reprising their thirty-odd years’ war against Paris-Saint-Germain. Éric Cantona.
So Marseilles and its 1,600,000 inhabitants are pretty much left alone, which suits them fine. Cantona is truly one of a breed: Marseillais care little for their reputation. Their sense of dignity, the conviction that they are, somehow, not just different from, but superior to the rest of France, feeds on the unease they sense in those who come from the outside. Half a century ago, their image, shaped by the novels, plays and films of Marcel Pagnol, was more benign. Pagnol’s Marseillais played cards, drank pastis, told tall tales with an endearing, song-like accent. The sardine that blocked the harbour of Marseilles was one such story, which I heard many times around respectable tables in my youth. ‘Ah, those Marseillais . . .’ – only there was a note of affection for the Southerners. Their amusing pomposity somehow redeemed their tendency to listen to the hot blood rushing in their veins rather than to the cool voice of reason. How things have changed since then. All because of the immigrants, of course, whom non-Marseillais are quick to call ‘foreigners’, missing the point that Marseilles’ cosmopolitanism is of a unique kind. Whoever comes to the old Phocea takes root in its fluid, amazingly fertile soil, and that includes the hundreds of thousands of ‘pieds-noirs’ and ‘harkis’ (the predominantly Muslim soldiers who remained faithful to the Republic throughout the war of decolonization) who fled Algeria in 1962 and disembarked at the Vieux-Port. Most of them had left with nothing; but public opinion did not see victims in the refugees who carried their belongings in cardboard suitcases. They were the cause of all their own problems, and of those they had inflicted on the métropole – the terrorist attacks, first by the independence fighters, then by the OAS loyalists. This first wave was soon followed by the mass immigration of Arabs from the Maghreb, who had been invited by the French government to lend their arms to the manufacturing and construction boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Quite naturally, like the banished colons, the formerly colonized settled in vast numbers in the Marseilles region, mostly in the huge housing estates that sprang out in the eastern and northern parts of the city. Zinédine Zidane would be born in one of those ugly, featureless ghettos.
Such was the hostility towards the new arrivals (‘they’ve kicked us out of Algeria, now they come to eat our bread’) that the perception of Marseilles changed markedly over less than a decade, and not for the better. It shouldn’t have, or certainly not to that extent. Every Marseillais’ ancestor had, once, been an exile himself, and the Cantonas were no exception.
A matter of history, perhaps. From the day the city was founded – some six hundred years before the birth of Christ – Massalia’s doors have always been open to the populations of the Mediterranean. Some came there in search of trade; others sought a refuge from poverty or persecution. At some point in the eighteenth century (no one knows exactly when), Catalonian fisher-men had established a small colony on one of the hills surrounding the harbour, not far from the Pharo and the Fort St Nicolas: it bears their name to this day (‘Les Catalans’). Closer to us, tens of thousands of Italians, mostly from the impoverished South, had made a beeline for Marseilles. Reminders of this constant flow of population are everywhere to be seen, including in the village where the Cantona clan built a home, Les Caillols, which is where I found myself in search of Éric in the autumn of 2007.
London, April 2009
1
Éric’s studio at home in Auxerre.
I AM THE KING!
I AM THE KING!
‘As soon as I walked, I played football. My parents have told me: as soon as I saw a ball, I played with it. This is something I have in me . . . Maybe, on the day I caressed a ball for the first time, the sun was shining, people were happy, and it made me feel like playing football. All my life, I’ll try to capture that moment again.’
To find the house in which Éric Cantona was born, you board a gleaming, air-conditioned tram that takes you uphill from the heart of Marseilles’ Old Town. Just before La Palette, ten minutes at the most from the quayside of the Vieux Port where fishmongers sell live sea bream on a multitude of small slabs, you find yourself suddenly in Provence. The trees growing alongside the boulevard will bear olives in the autumn; the road’s gradient becomes steeper; and the pine-covered hills of the Garlaban
, the backdrop to Marcel Pagnol’s Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, draw nearer. A few modern housing estates are peppered between tile-roofed villas enclosed in small walled gardens.
Once in the village of Les Caillols, the names on the mail boxes tell their own story. Hardly any of them sounds ‘French’. Italian, yes; Spanish, too. Every Marseillais has an ancestor who was once an exile, and the Cantonas were no exception. No French city is more truly cosmopolitan; the social division of the city does not prevent an easily carried elegance in the rapport between the communities. Only in London have I seen so many friends and lovers cutting across racial and ethnic distinctions. Marseillais we are first, French second – maybe. In a video he shot in 1995, shortly after the end of the eight-month ban which nearly precipitated his second and final retirement from the game, Éric Cantona chose to address the camera clad in a T-shirt on which can be read: ‘Fier d’être Marseillais’ – Proud to be a Marseillais. Alone among the conurbations that have doubled or trebled their size in the last fifty years because of the influx of North and Western African immigrants, Marseilles exudes the sense of vitality and youthful exuberance one would associate with cities where new lives can be made.
As I walk along the dusty alleyways that arrow from the Grand-Rue, each of them leading to a modest house set in a clump of small trees, a lady – Madame Ferrero – calls from her doorstep. She’s seen me jotting a few words in my notebook, and I realize that I must look out of place. In Les Caillols, no one wears a suit when summer lingers so warmly in October. There is curiosity in her voice, but no abruptness. Am I looking for something? she asks. When I tell her I have come to see the place where Éric Cantona grew up, she points out to a hill in the distance. ‘You see that white house, there?’ It’s hard not to. It is already halfway up the mountain, pink and white against the green of the pines; gigantic compared to the modest dwellings in the village. ‘That is where they lived.’
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