Cantona (18 page)

The Montpellier squad had gathered in Aix-les-Bains, at the foot of the Alps, to prepare for the next season. No fewer than four of Marc Bourrier’s heroes were there: Guérin, who hadn’t wasted any time after the phone call mentioned above, Paille, Cantona (who, curiously, turned up for training sessions in a Tottenham shirt), and the supremely elegant Laurent Blanc, who could play in any position on the field with equal grace and efficiency. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if these young men captured the country’s imagination with their club as they had done with the
Espoirs
? French football, hobbling from scandal to scandal, desperately looked for some kind, any kind of redemption. The Paille– Cantona brotherhood provided journalists and supporters with a promise to focus on. Most of the hype was well meant, but both players were aware of the destabilizing effect it was having on the team as a whole, and attempted to deflect as much of the media attention as they could. ‘I’d rather play
pétanque
[Provençal bowls] than answer your questions,’ Éric retorted to a reporter who had been chasing him. Stéphane, who had roomed with his friend for the past two weeks, was more diplomatic in his answers. ‘My role is not to “stabilize” [Cantona],’ he said. ‘I’m not his father. But I believe that it can only benefit everybody – him and me. For the moment, everything’s OK.’ On one of the rare occasions when Cantona agreed to talk to the press, his message conveyed a hint of the difficulties to come. ‘[Stéphane and I] don’t think [our relationship] is incongruous, or surprising. What we find shocking is that people talk so much about it,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got friends. I have a friend in Marseilles who is a fishmonger. That doesn’t mean he’s going to play with me. [ . . .] We get on well on the pitch, we get on well in life. That’s all. Now, the ball is the priority.’

Still, the pressure increased. St Étienne were beaten 2–1 in a warm-up match. On 6 July Montpellier disposed of FC Porto in another friendly, in a Parc des Princes where Éric was barracked from the first minute to the last. Middle finger raised, he let the Parisian crowd know his feelings. The league championship had not started, but both Cantona’s and Paille’s unease was increasingly palpable. ‘We’re upset that people talk so much about us,’ Stéphane said. ‘We fear that it’s going to ruin everything,’ Éric added. ‘I have travelled a bit; and I notice that when something works well, journalists aim to ruin it. Why should that be? Because you sell far fewer articles about trains when they arrive on time than when they come off the rails.’ Cantona could feel what was in store for them. ‘What I want people to understand is that we get on perfectly together. We have fun wearing the same kit, but we’ve got to stop talking about it. Because if people keep repeating the same thing, everybody’s eyes will be on us, and it’ll only take a mediocre game to be cut to pieces.’ Such a game hadn’t been played yet, but there was already a sense that nostalgia had proved stronger than common sense when the duo had listened to their hearts and chosen Montpellier. There could be, would be, no second ‘miracle of Highbury’.

An ankle injury prevented Éric from featuring in Montpellier’s first competitive match of the season, which his side won 4–1 against AS Cannes on 22 July, thanks in part to a brace of goals by Laurent Blanc, whom Jacquet then thought of as a number 10. Cantona also missed the next game, which proved more of a harbinger of things to come, when his side surrendered 2–0 at Mulhouse. A blip, nothing more, was the verdict given at the time. For who could have guessed what a shambles the season of all hopes would turn into? The media, predictably, made much of Éric’s comeback from injury, with headlines such as ‘The Return of Hope’ on the day he finally lined up alongside Paille on 1 August. Not for the last time, whoever wrote Éric’s scripts showed a genuine feel for drama; for his opponents were none other than Bordeaux, the club which he and Stéphane had been so close to joining less than three months previously. Truth be told, Cantona had a superb game, but his teammates, Paille included, did not. Bordeaux left the Stade de la Mosson with a 2–1 victory, and when this scoreline was repeated in the following game, against a shockingly brutal PSG, Montpellier, everyone’s outsiders for the title, found themselves last but one in the division. Éric had scored his first goal for the club that evening, but this didn’t prevent those who wished him to fail from pointing the finger at the negative influence he and Paille allegedly exerted on Jacquet’s team.

Their coach unwittingly gave ammunition to their critics by saying: ‘Our idea was to create a group, a “club” with players who come from the area. Then we had the opportunity to get Paille and Cantona . . . Can you imagine me refusing Paille or Cantona? So we changed everything! We built the team around this duo. Their presence is a bit stress-inducing . . . but it is because of them in particular that [the team is] difficult to manage.’

Jacquet was right, especially as far as Paille was concerned. Stéphane’s international career had taken off after Éric’s scathing attack on Henri Michel had made the Marseille striker a pariah in
Les Bleus
set-up. Paille had been selected seven times on the trot since, giving so-so performances that didn’t make the watching public forget what (or rather who) they were missing. Michel’s team had floundered dreadfully against Cyprus (1–1) in October of the previous year, a game in which the Sochaux forward had been conspicuous by his absence, and which triggered the replacement of the French manager by Michel Platini a few days later. The triple
Ballon d’Or
stuck with Paille, while saying quite openly that he couldn’t wait to bring Cantona back into his lineup, a move that would effectively push Stéphane to the sidelines. As of 1 July 1989, the date when Éric’s suspension would come to an end, the two spiritual brothers would be direct competitors for a place in the French team, as dropping Jean-Pierre Papin to the bench was highly unlikely. After the festival to which Cantona and JPP treated French supporters on 16 August, when they roasted Sweden 4–2 in Malmö, pairing Cantona and Paille became unthinkable.

France hadn’t won away from home for five seasons, and the Swedes were no mugs. But Cantona, who had been fasting for well over a year – he hadn’t played for his country since a 2–1 victory over Spain in March 1988 – seemed intent on delivering the most perfect ninety minutes of football he was capable of.

He characteristically said afterwards: ‘I didn’t miss the French team. I was following all its games, as a supporter. I was preparing for my return. That’s it: I was getting used to my return [to the team]. I hadn’t forgotten anything. I like
les gens rancuniers
[people who hold a grudge], it’s a form of pride. I was thinking about the day when I’d come back.’

The game’s last goal – Éric’s second of the day – summed up his contribution to what was unanimously celebrated as the beginning of a new era. His astonishing flick, fully extended, wrong-footed one of the world’s most experienced goalkeepers, Thomas Ravelli. Minutes earlier, one of his crosses, which Papin dispatched with his customary flamboyance, had prompted exclamations of ‘Genius!’ in the press box. Paille was watching this beautiful slaughter from the dugout. He didn’t know it then, but not a single cap would be added to the eight he had won to date, partly because of his best friend’s performances. Football can be a cruel game.

Paille, Blanc and Cantona flew back from Malmö in the private plane that Louis Nicollin had chartered for them. It was not a soft landing. Éric could revel in the praise that was bestowed on him. Platini gushed about the ‘talent and the character’ of the prodigal son. Henri Michel, who now assumed the function of National Technical Director of the French FA, nodded magnanimously in approval. The England manager Bobby Robson enthused about the ‘awful lot of good’ Cantona’s return had done to
Les Bleus.
On the other hand, the glow Éric felt dissipated in a matter of precisely seventy-two hours. Montpellier travelled to Marseille, and fell 2–0 at the Vélodrome, leaving them with a haul of just four points after six games. The over-hyped fight for the title had turned into a struggle against relegation.

The manner of this defeat irked Cantona more than the result. Rightly or wrongly, he felt that some of his teammates hadn’t been trying as hard as they should have done. He had seen Marseille’s
modus operandi
from the inside, and would constantly allude to dark deeds in the years to come, to the point that he would describe Tapie as ‘a demon’ on the record. There is no evidence that Marseille bought their victory over Montpellier; but it was later established that they tried to buy one other league game, against minnows Valenciennes. The scandal erupted in May 1993 and led to OM being stripped of their championship title and relegated to the Second Division.
¹³
In any case, frustration was building up in Éric and would later turn to fury.

The seriousness of Montpellier’s situation affected Pailles form far more than Cantona’s. Both men were remarkable for their highly strung sensitivity, not the greatest of assets in the cauldron of professional football, which they dealt with in contrasting ways. Paille, the worldlier of the two when it came to business, didn’t possess the more natural defence mechanisms which protected Cantona throughout his career. When Éric had to, he could overcome his shyness and deep-seated feelings of insecurity by harnessing his competitive instincts – what he described as his ‘fear of losing’ – whereas Paille’s game suffered in proportion to the doubts others harboured about his abilities.

Prompted by Éric, Jacquet’s stellar but ill-balanced collection of individual talents finally found a common resolve for a few weeks. Lyon were beaten 2–0, Nantes held 1–1 at home, Toulouse vanquished 1–0 at the Stade de la Mosson, and Montpellier rose to eighth in the league. Cantona didn’t score in those games, but could easily have been chosen as man of the match on each occasion, as he deserved to be when France all but blew its last chance of qualifying for the 1990 World Cup when conceding a 1–1 draw in Norway, at the beginning of September. Paille, meanwhile, was unrecognizable as the lightly built but elusive striker who had scored over a goal every three games for Sochaux between 1982 and 1989. But it would be grossly unfair to rest Montpelliers problems on his shoulders alone.

‘I don’t believe Montpellier had the structure or the management to deal with what was expected of us,’ he told me. With some justification, Stéphane could identify his team’s lack of equilibrium as one of the pivotal reasons for its failure. Laurent Blanc as a number 10, anyone? Éric’s friend could see that Aimé Jacquet ‘didn’t fancy playing both of us [Paille and Cantona] together’. He could also see that the former Bordeaux manager – without malice – trusted another forward, Daniel Xuereb, more than he did a player who had taken responsibilities in the recruitment policy that aren’t normally the prerogative of a twenty-four-year-old.

Little by little, Paille found himself pushed out of the picture, while Éric fought on like a man possessed. The golden age of the
Espoirs
was all but a forgotten dream, the hope to build a new Arcadia a hollow fancy. Montpellier briefly flashed in the pan with flattering victories (against Racing and Toulon), only to see every spark extinguished by disheartening defeats (Nice, Metz, Sochaux). Panic set in. There wasn’t a plot to lose any more. Mézy was dispatched to South America to watch Carlos Valderrama in a Colombia-Israel friendly. The fuzzy-haired playmaker (whom Jacquet thought ‘too slow’) would be back by 3 November at the latest, two weeks after Montpellier had been beaten again, this time 1–0 by struggling Lille. Paille’s display earned him 1 point (the lowest mark possible) in
France Football’s
report on the game, and the lid finally went off the pressure-cooker that was Montpellier’s dressing-room. It was no surprise to find out that the explosion had been provoked by one Éric Cantona.

On Saturday 21 October, as the Montpellier players were trooping back to their dressing-room in the wake of their eighth defeat of their season, Jean-Claude Lemoult grumbled to Éric’s old acquaintance Michel Der Zakarian (some sources say Gérard Bernardet): ‘Can you believe it, they [Lille] only had one chance, and they put one goal past us! The problem is that we don’t score ourselves.’ Cantona misheard, or misunderstood, or simply gave way to his frustration. He sincerely believed that the diminutive midfielder (1.63m) had criticized his own strikers, the woefully out-of-form Paille and Éric himself, for not converting the opportunities they had. Four days earlier, an ugly argument between the ‘stars’ (Paille, Blanc, Júlio César, Guérin and Cantona) and the ‘water-carriers’ (Baills, Der Zakarian and Lucchesi) had already threatened to degenerate into fisticuffs. This time, Éric lost it. He hit Lemoult with his shoe, and threatened to punch his lights out. A scuffle erupted. Lemoult – rather bravely, given his size – defended himself. Once a semblance of order had been restored, Loulou Nicollin, clearly upset, addressed Éric in these terms: ‘In my fifteen years as a chairman, this is the first time one of my players has hit a teammate. It’s serious, it’s unacceptable – you’re fired.’

The next day – a Sunday – Nicollin was called at home by Tapie; someone (but who?) had informed the OM president of the fracas. All friendliness had gone from his voice. Marseille would not have Cantona back from loan under any circumstances . . . So, who spoke? A mole within the dressing-room? Cantona’s entourage, out of spite? Or was it simply football’s bush telegraph at work?

By Monday morning, Nicollin realized that the affair had become common knowledge, even if
L’Équipe
waited until Wednesday to publish the story. Surprising as it may seem, many journalists wished it to go away. A fight in a dressing-room? So what? There was one of those every weekend. Éric had been crucified before – couldn’t we just forget about it this time? Cantona had enemies, but fewer than he thought. The club’s supporters could not comprehend how Nicollin could cast away Montpellier’s hardest-working, most effective player at the precise moment when his combativeness and his goals were most needed. The chairman’s resolve wilted under pressure. He got in touch with Cantona and suggested they meet in the incongruous setting of Nicollin’s company car park, where an uneasy agreement was reached.