Cantona (42 page)

During Éric’s first two seasons in particular, on the rare occasions when he failed to ignite Manchester United’s play, reporters and columnists were quick, often ridiculously so, to point out the eccentricities of the flashy foreigner’ (an expression used by Emlyn Hughes, you’ll remember, to characterize Cantona the day after he moved from Leeds to Manchester United); these, they implied, had been the undoing of his team, which needed ‘last-ditch tackles’ (no equivalent of this in French, by the way), not backheels and, yes, ‘flicks’. Now that British-born footballers account for less than half of the starting line-ups in the Premiership, it is worth recalling how, in the early 1990s, suspicion, not expectancy, accompanied the arrival of so-called ‘imports’ in the English League. Cantona played up to every single prejudice held by the traditionalists who ruled, played and watched the game; he reinforced these prejudices as much as he demonstrated their shallowness; and, through his success, proved them utterly devoid of judgement by behaving precisely as his fiercest critics would expect him to do. He was unpredictable, undecipherable, manifestly untamed; he also brought four championship titles to a club that had spent twenty-six years in the desert. The verbal abuse that greeted him in every ground in England, save Eiland Road and Old Trafford, of course, did not differ much from the opinions of many commentators: it was a brutal and brutish magnification of their pronouncements. Such supporters probably agreed with Emlyn Hughes’s characterization of Cantona as the ‘dark, brooding Frenchman’ of Manchester United. His comment was – if I can be forgiven this oxymoron – a coarse distillate of the pundit’s instinctive rejection of a Frenchman who embodied all that is the most foreign in a foreigner. Those who question Cantona’s greatness would do well to remember who had the last word in this particular battle.

The night it all went wrong in Galatasaray.

‘I’m not interested in the image people have of me. When I’m on the catwalk for Paco Rabanne, for example, there’s no ulterior motive, I’m just giving pleasure to my own body. The most important thing is to feel at ease within your body, without cheating yourself. To pose for a beautiful photograph is a selfish pleasure – but in life, nothing is innocent.
“Tout est égoïsme” [
everything is selfishness
].’

Éric had come back to Manchester from Paris on the morning’s first flight three days before the BBC opened its evening news programme with images of crowds assembling on Piccadilly to celebrate the title. His mind was still swimming with images of the previous night’s celebrations – France had beaten Sweden 2–1 at the Parc des Princes, and seemed poised to achieve qualification for the 1994 World Cup, in no small part thanks to him. He had struck a penalty shortly before half-time to cancel out Martin Dahlin’s opening goal, the first spot kick he had been entrusted with since his debut with
Les Bleus
nearly six years previously. Then, with eight minutes remaining on the clock, he had met a hopeful punt by Jocelyn Angioma with the tip of his boot to make it 2–1 to the French. With Papin injured, much had been expected of him in the lone striker role, and he had responded magnificently to that expectation. Dizzy with the champagne that had been flowing until 2 a.m. in a Champs-Elysées nightclub, he was already thinking of what lay in wait, which he didn’t doubt would be another celebration. For the third year running, Éric Cantona would be a national champion. No other player had ever achieved this with three different clubs. He had said – and would say again – how little he cared for the trophy won under the aegis of Tapie and Goethals with Marseille in 1991 (though he had played a crucial part in establishing a platform for its conquest); but those collected with Leeds and, especially, Manchester United, were a different matter altogether. He, a Frenchman, once a pariah in his own country, had taken the English title twice in two years for two clubs. The feat was unprecedented, and brought tangible proof that England had not been the destination of an exile desperate for a new home. He belonged there – and how.

As Albert Square filled with the songs of supporters drunk with joy, he lay on his bed at the Novotel, answering phone call after phone call, somewhat apprehensive (as he later admitted) of the tidal wave of fervour that was sweeping through the city – even there, in the suburb of Worsley. One of Éric’s callers was Steve Bruce, who told him that all the United players were expected to turn up at his home in Bramhall that evening. Alex Ferguson had given his blessing to the party. The last of the newly crowned champions to arrive was Andreï Kanchelskis, at midnight, by which time beer and champagne had already been consumed in prodigious quantities. Éric’s new friend Bernard Morlino was there too, watching Mark Hughes (wearing the Frenchman’s red cap) and Cantona mimic memorable passages of play from the title-winning season, encouraged by the whole team. More drink was fetched in the early hours of the morning. As Gary Pallister put it, ‘We were all steamrolled.’

Éric loved these heady moments of alcohol-fuelled bonding – not that he was a heavy drinker himself. He’d still be nursing his first flute of champagne while others were beyond counting which pint of lager they were on. Despite Alex Ferguson’s concerns and efforts to stem the culture of ‘drinking schools’ (which led to United getting rid of talented but uncontrollable characters such as Paul McGrath), it was still customary for United players to hold ‘sessions’ that baffled non-English observers such as Henri Émile, who often visited Cantona in England to pass on messages from Gérard Houllier and, later, Aimé Jacquet. Some evenings he spent with Éric’s family (‘Wives have a huge influence on players in football. They often get married when they’re very young, and I knew I could use this as a lever in certain areas – and I did’), others in the company of Cantona’s teammates. ‘What I discovered in England,’ Émile told me, ‘was the pleasure shared by the players. Éric was in the thick of it. He was the catalyst of the group. He commanded a great deal of respect. The English had really adopted him, even when things went a bit mad, as they do in England, with the beers, the cigars and the rest.’ This is not to say that French professionals never let their hair down; but their celebrations – generally held in far more salubrious surroundings than the country pubs favoured by the United players – never reached a similar pitch. They also lacked the communal dimension Éric relished so much, which gave him a sense of belonging to another family, a family united by its love of football and its delight in success. Something like paradise. Heaven knows how the hungover players managed to gather enough strength to beat Blackburn 3–1 later on that afternoon, but they did, in front of 40,447 delirious spectators, at least one of whom, a student, had walked all the way from London to be there. A poignant touch was added to the occasion by the presence of Gérard Houllier and Michel Platini in the stands; Éric knew better than anyone how much of the joy he felt was due to their unremitting efforts on his behalf. Touts quickly ran out of tickets, which had been changing hands for up to £150 before kick-off. Éric, playing with a broken wrist, heard the Old Trafford crowd sing his name to the tune of
‘La Marseillaise’
and paraded the Premier League trophy around the pitch at the final whistle, arm in arm with Peter Schmeichel (his son Raphaël’s hero), the top of the trophy balanced with one hand on his head, the most fitting of crowns for the new king of Manchester.

The title, United’s first in twenty-six years, was also a victory for what the press misguidedly described as Ferguson’s ‘4-2-4’. But the romantics could be forgiven, as this triumph marked the rebirth of wing play in English football, more than a quarter of a century after Ramsey’s ‘wingless wonders’. A twenty-first-century analyst would describe United’s organization in that 1992–93 season as a fluid 4-4-1-1, a lethal counter-attacking machine in which Mark Hughes, the lone frontman, would hold the ball long enough for Cantona, the withdrawn striker, to play it into space on the flanks, where Giggs and Kanchelskis could be expected to bomb forward, by which time the team’s formation could indeed be described as a 4-2-4 – but this 4-2-4 bore no relation to the revolutionary tactical set-up that Brazil had dazzled the world with at the 1958 World Cup. Though most United players were comfortable on the ball, their game was not based on keeping possession, with the patient build-up and exhilarating changes of tempo that were a hallmark of the
Seleçao –
not yet, anyway, as a number of unsuccessful European campaigns would soon demonstrate. More often than not, when faced with Continental defences more adept at keeping their shape than their Premier League counterparts, United’s coil would fail to spring. Nevertheless, Cantona’s contribution to the evolution of the English game towards a more ‘modern’ type of football remains grossly undervalued in my view. He was the first to demonstrate the value of the so-called ‘9-and-a-half’ – in practice, an old-style no. 10 who positions himself further down the pitch, and combines a playmaker’s vision with the finishing of a high-class striker – against the classical British flat back four. Dennis Bergkamp, possibly the greatest-ever exponent of that role, would only be signed by Arsenal two full years after United had become champions again. When the question of Cantona’s greatness is raised, his pioneering role in defining a new playing position (at least in England) is overlooked too often. In that sense, he can be talked of as an innovator, even if he was not driven by a desire to create something radically new. What is true is that he could best express himself in that transient and ambiguous space behind, and created by the movement of, the front man between the lines, as it were. He had the immense stroke of luck to play for a manager like Alex Ferguson, who was a born pragmatist in the best sense of that word, and therefore ready to alter the shape of his team to accommodate an exceptional talent.

On this at least everyone agreed: Cantona had made the difference, indeed ‘he
was
the difference between this season [1992–93] and the last’, as Peter Schmeichel put it. ‘English strikers are predictable,’ the big Danish ’keeper said, ‘and Éric brought the element of surprise from French football: it wasn’t just the goals he scored himself, but the way he created openings for other players to score.’ Statistics bore Schmeichel’s point out. Once United had concluded their campaign with a 2–1 win away at Wimbledon on 9 May, their seventh victory in seven games, ensuring that the record of the 1992–93 season would match exactly that of the famed 1966–67 side (24 wins and 12 draws), Éric not only had the best goals-to-games ratio of any United player in the championship (9 in 23, plus 2 in the FA Cup, compared to Hughes’s 15 in 41 and Giggs’s 9 in 40), but also topped the assists chart, with a quite phenomenal 13. Ferguson’s team had lost only one of the games Cantona had been involved in; and he had played a decisive part in 22 of the 46 goals his team scored during that period. This was a stunning return on United’s paltry investment of £1.2m a little over five months previously; but, despite what hindsight tells us, it was then still too early to infer from that success that Cantona had at last found a permanent home.

Laurent Chasteaux, a French reporter from the communist daily
L’Humanité
, had paid Éric a visit in mid-April, when, with United four points ahead in the league table and two games to go, Cantona was all but assured of his second consecutive English league title. This is what the journalist was told: All United supporters wonder if I’ll stay at the club. That’s a question I also ask myself. My only clue to an answer is, as ever, pleasure. The day I’m bored going to the training ground, I’m off. I come, I go, I’m only passing through.’ Tempting as it is to read remarks like these as mere gesturing for the gallery, it’s worth keeping in mind that Alex Ferguson took them very seriously. In the book that was rush-printed immediately after the capture of the championship (with the self-explanatory title
Just Champion)
, Ferguson wrote: ‘I think if Éric is here today, tremendous. But if he is gone tomorrow, we just say: “Good luck, Éric. Thanks for playing with us. You’ve been absolutely brilliant.” Honestly, we just don’t know what’s going to happen. How do we cope without Éric? By switching off and not actually expecting anything at all beyond the next twenty-four hours.’ Or expecting the unexpected, which, after a while, became as predictable as Éric’s attire at the civic dinner organized by the city of Manchester in honour of its trophy-winning team: while his teammates turned up in club-crested blazers and matching trousers, Cantona waltzed in wearing an expensive designer silk jacket over a T-shirt. Joking demands of ‘Fine him!’ were met by a benevolent smile from the manager. The devil could get away with anything, it seemed.