Authors: Philippe Auclair
The days of the ‘closed shop’ and the ‘Big Four’ still lay a few years – an eternity, it seems – ahead, and other managers had achieved similar miracles in the recent past: Bobby Robson with Ipswich Town; Brian Clough, first with Derby County, then with Nottingham Forest; and Graham Taylor with Watford, albeit in a less pleasing style. What Wilkinson had done deserved praise nevertheless, not that many were willing to give it unless they read the
Yorkshire Evening Post
, and didn’t buy it in Sheffield. His team could certainly match any opposition in physical terms – David Batty never claimed to be a poet on the ball – but in the context of early 1990s English football, to dismiss Leeds as a collection of brutes intent on destruction would have been grossly unfair. True, they scored most of their goals with headers, long-distance strikes and through creating mayhem in the opposition’s box; but in Strachan, Speed and McAllister they also possessed footballers of genuine class and vision, not that anyone seemed to care outside Eiland Road, where supporters took a twisted kind of pleasure in their vilification. To them, Revie’s considerable success and the manner in which it had been achieved had never been celebrated as they should have been by a press in thrall to the teams Leeds fans most despised: Manchester United, of course, and London clubs such as elegant West Ham, glamorous Chelsea and classy Arsenal. This perceived injustice made them revel in their difference; they might as well give the others good reasons for hating them so. Cantona, the arch-maverick, the anti-hero par excellence, fitted perfectly with their vision of a world divided between ‘them’ and ‘us’; that he belonged in the second category soon became clear.
The
Yorkshire Evening Post
informed its readers of Éric’s arrival at the club on 1 February, and, judging by the reactions of some of those readers, that particular edition might as well have been dated 1 April. But a few hours after the newspaper went on sale, Cantona was sitting in the stands at Eiland Road in person, watching his teammates put Luton to the sword 3–0. Leeds, who shared the top spot of the old first division with Manchester United at the time, but had played one game more, remained underdogs in the title race. The club’s fortunes had improved so quickly since winning the second division championship in 1989–90 that many supporters could not bring themselves to believe that Wilkinson’s thin squad could last the distance over forty-two games.
The manager spoke of ‘the biggest gamble of his career’, but was he really taking such a huge risk? How many proven international strikers could you get for a down-payment of a mere £100,000? Nîmes and Cantona were only too happy to agree to a loan rather than a straight purchase, desperate as they were to extricate themselves from their current situation. Wilkinson – who had never seen the player in the flesh before signing him – had until 15 April to make up his mind, by which time there would only be four games to play in the league. Should he decide to close a permanent transfer deal, Leeds would have to disburse another £900,000. But only then. And Wilkinson was a shrewd gambler, who already had a fair idea of how and when he would play his trump card. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he told the local press, ‘[Éric] doesn’t have a reputation, because I don’t believe what I read in the papers.’ This was a slightly disingenuous statement, it must be said. As we’ve seen, Cantona’s new boss had sounded out a number of people before driving to meet Cantona in Sheffield, not just to be reassured about the player’s qualities (which all of Europe knew about), but also to establish how much of his ‘reputation’ was based on fact. None of those he had approached had pretended that Éric’s behaviour had been a model of propriety. They had stressed, however, that when properly managed (that is, when his idiosyncrasies were not automatically construed as acts of rebellion), Cantona responded by repaying the trust put in him, sometimes beyond everyone else’s expectations.
After a low-key presentation to the media, in which his interpreter had to keep a straight face when telling the journalists that ‘the problems I [Éric] have had have been little ones that have been exaggerated’, Cantona joined his teammates for his first practice match at Thorp Arch training ground, on 3 February. ‘It took Éric a matter of minutes to impress the players,’ Gary McAllister told me. ‘During the warm-up, we already saw a few strikes, a few volleys, and it was obvious this was a very special player.’ The Scottish midfielder sensed that Cantona could bring something that was lacking in an otherwise well-drilled and efficient unit: ‘a bit of flair, a bit of imagination – in other words, what you need to create space to play in and open gaps in defences’. Leeds possessed a terrific goalscorer in Lee Chapman (one of the best headers of a ball in the league), while Rod Wallace provided coruscating pace and penetration on the wing; but, full of guile and running as Wilkinson’s midfield was, it lacked a true
fantasista
and sometimes appeared devoid of solutions in the face of aggressive defending. David Batty played the role of anchorman, and tackled as if his life (and, sometimes, the life of the opposition players) depended on it. The twenty-two-year-old Gary Speed could be relied upon to ‘cover every blade of grass’ and pass the ball cleanly, without fuss, but not without skill. He could also strike the ball venomously with either foot. McAllister, the most elegant player in that superb quartet (which was complemented by ageing England international Steve Hodge), added threat in dead-ball situations and could alter the flow of play with the accuracy of his long passing. Last, Gordon Strachan, the club’s diminutive skipper who had won seven major honours with Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen in the early 1980s, provided the experience of over fifteen years in the professional game, plus cunning and boundless energy. Together with Chapman, these four men had taken Leeds to the top of the championship table; but, to remain there, they needed a footballer who could make the difference on his own.
Éric was lucky. The tone of the Leeds dressing-room was struck by what the English call ‘honest’ players, decent, generous-minded men who did whatever they could to accommodate the brooding foreigner. What’s more, the Scottish contingent which had long been prominent in the club of Bobby Collins and Billy Bremner, and to which belonged Strachan and McAllister, the two natural leaders of the squad, held no prejudice against a representative of the Auld Alliance, unless it was a favourable one. A moot point? Most certainly not, if one thinks ahead to the complicity that would be a hallmark of the relationship between Alex Ferguson and Cantona: together against
les Anglais
, the Auld Enemy.
According to McAllister, language didn’t prove as much of a barrier as outsiders feared it might be. ‘His English wasn’t that bad, you know!’ he told me. ‘I think he chose his time to let you know that . . . but he joined in the banter. He understood the British dressing-room humour very quickly, the taking the mickey . . . The players made a big effort to put him at ease, and that’s one of the reasons he settled in so quickly.’
Their support extended beyond the privacy of the training ground. Strachan used his regular column in the
Post
to defend Éric’s decision (‘quite a gifted player’) to leave Sheffield Wednesday: ‘He is of course a seasoned international, which, for me, makes it difficult to understand how anyone anywhere could really ask a player such as Éric to go anywhere for a trial. I cannot see a British player of a similar standing ever agreeing to go to an overseas club on a week’s trial.’ Gary Speed enthused just as publicly about the tremendous impression the recruit had made: ‘he’s big and strong, very dangerous in the air and packs a good shot’ – quite a compliment coming from one of the fiercest strikers of the ball at the club.
The Leeds supporters lapped up the praise their Frenchman was receiving, and couldn’t read or hear enough about the club’s most exotic recruit since the arrival of black South African Albert Johanneson in 1961. Barely a day passed without a mention of Cantona in the
Post
, who were granted the rare privilege of a one-to-one interview with the player on 7 February, so rare a privilege, in fact, that this revealing article would be one of only two such pieces published in English until Éric left Manchester United and England in May 1997. I use the adjective ‘revealing’ with a caveat; for what was so revealing in the conversation Éric had with journalist Mike Casey was not so much his answers as the questions he was asked, only one of which had to do with football.
The interpreter was a young Yorkshirewoman named Julie Halford, who was predictably wowed by the Frenchman, and became the subject of an interview herself. Such was Éric’s aura that even those who merely talked with him were deemed worthy of being talked to themselves. ‘Speaking with Cantona,’ she said, ‘is more like taking part in
The South Bank Show
than in
Match of the Day.’
How could it be otherwise? Éric’s legend went before him. The
Post
and its readership were interested in this mythical creature, an accretion of second-hand anecdotes and unverifiable rumours, which Cantona did nothing to refute on that occasion. He philosophized (‘I am only considered mad in today’s society. I think in an ideal society, I would be considered normal’), lifted a corner of the tapestry that concealed him (‘It bothers me if I’m recognized, and it bothers me if I’m not’), only to let it fold back in place with half-serious gnomisms about his personality (‘I don’t like looking at myself in the mirror. I always wonder who is the person I’m looking at’). The arrangement suited all parties. The press and the general public got the story they craved, while Éric retained his
quant-à-soi
, and could find some kind of peace in the bubble he had created for himself. Protected by his eccentricities, both knowing and sincere, he could position himself safely in the distance, aware that no one would seek to approach him too closely. Had they chosen to do so, they would have had trouble recognizing the chimera of their imagination in the flesh-and-blood Marseillais who traded dirty words with his teammates in the communal bath. Éric welcomed this cautiousness. ‘I like the mentality of the English,’ he said. ‘They are warm and reserved at the same time. They give you respect. I like that.’
The relief Cantona felt at leaving the turmoil of the previous months behind alleviated the loneliness of his new life in Leeds. Isabelle and Raphaël had stayed behind in the South of France, and would only join him once it became a certainty that the club wished to retain him on a long-term contract. With the exception of Wilkinson and Chapman (who was considered an ‘intellectual’ of the English game, as he had passed an impressive number of O- and A-levels), the people who surrounded him spoke almost no French. Éric had met his captain Gordon Strachan once before, but on the field of play only, when France and Scotland had come head-to-head in a World Cup qualifier two-and-a-half years previously. Everywhere he looked, Éric saw the faces of strangers. Still, all did their best to put the newcomer at ease, with some success.
‘Everyone seemed to take to him straightaway,’ Gary Speed told Rob Wightman. ‘The way the Leeds dressing-room was then, they would have welcomed anyone. That’s one reason why we won the title, because of that. First of all he came over on his own and we socialized a lot – that was the way to get to know him. [ . . .] We just tried our hardest to welcome him in and he seemed to thrive on that and it really showed on the pitch.’
The Leeds supporters played their part too. The excitement surrounding Éric’s arrival at Eiland Road was such that, on 8 February, 5,000 of them made the (admittedly short) trip to Oldham in the hope of seeing the debut of the player the
Sunday Mirror
had already nicknamed ‘Le Brat’. The result came as a disappointment to them – Oldham prevailed 2–0 – but their wish had been granted. A calf injury sustained by Steve Hodge in the first half led Wilkinson to usher Cantona onto the field after the interval, much earlier than his manager had planned. In truth, Éric did not see much of the ball that afternoon, and spent most of the game’s last 45 minutes watching it sail above his head. He touched it less than a dozen times, still attempting a few of his party tricks (a backheel, a bicycle kick) when it finally got to his feet, but, apart from a weak header which hardly troubled goalkeeper Jon Hallworth, failed to exert any influence on the encounter. Leeds’s defeat had highlighted not so much what Cantona could bring to the club than what it was missing when Lee Chapman, who had broken a wrist in January, could not provide a focal point for his team’s attacks.
‘I found it physical to play in,’ Éric told a
France Football
reporter at the final whistle, acknowledging that he had ‘had a bad day. But the only surprise was that Leeds lost. After one week in Sheffield and one week in Leeds, I knew that the tempo was high here. I was expecting it. I had prepared myself for it.’ The assessment he made of his own performance showed a Cantona who was able to take a step back and view his future with calmness and equanimity. ‘I think I’ll have fun here,’ he said, and for two reasons: he believed that skilful footballers could create space for themselves despite the frantic pace of the action; and, crucially, the bond between players and fans was closer than anything he had experienced before. ‘I’ve never felt like playing in cold stadiums,’ he said, ‘where spectators are 30 metres away from the pitch. I lose myself in that empty space.’ It would take time to adapt, of course, but he was willing to show patience and humility. ‘I’ll understand more with each day that passes. It’s the same for the language. It won’t be harder, it’ll be just as difficult. To learn is always difficult.’
Éric applied himself to the task of ‘learning’ with a single-mindedness and a modesty that won his teammates over. His dedication in training (which, later on, would have such an impact on the youngsters coming through the ranks at Manchester United) provided another proof of his desire to blend in. Unusually for the time, a number of Leeds players, Gary McAllister among them, used to stay on the pitch after practice sessions to work on free-kick routines, shots at goal and the like, as Cantona had always done himself. ‘Sessions’ of a different kind regularly followed in various watering holes (preferably in the countryside, away from Wilkinson’s gaze), in which Éric could relax all the more easily given that his drinking companions accepted that he sometimes needed to withdraw into his own world. He wanted to be left alone? So what? Let him do it. He wasn’t sulking. He had just left his country and his family behind him, for goodness sake. As Gary Speed said: ‘I don’t think you’d ever pin him down. You couldn’t say, Éric, come out for a drink, mate! Sometimes he was just there. He was his own person.’ Cantona appreciated the attention he was given a great deal, but appreciated even more the freedom he was granted to be himself. As McAllister told me: ‘Éric is a player who responds to being accepted; sometimes, it’s about a bit of love, and he had that at Leeds United.’