Authors: Philippe Auclair
Éric set out to change with a doggedness he hadn’t always shown in the past when things didn’t quite go his way. He acted out of personal necessity, but also because he had been shamed into remembering his duty by the kindness and understanding of others, and especially of his manager. This would be his gift to Alex Ferguson, just as, six-and-a-half years earlier, he had literally defied the elements to present Auxerre with an unhoped-for victory at Le Havre, almost bringing tears to the eyes of his mentor Guy Roux. This eagerness to please those who trusted him most points up an essential sincerity at the heart of Éric’s character, which should be properly weighed against its perceived flaws. There is true poignancy in his admission: ‘I was behaving like a child’. When deciding to mend his ways, wasn’t he behaving like one again? And by succeeding in doing so, wasn’t he proving himself worthy of the love he craved?
Back in the world of grown-ups, there was still a court action to deal with, as everyone was reminded of when, on the 27th, a newly unemployed double-glazing fitter named Matthew Simmons was bailed and told to appear at Croydon Magistrates Court on 24 March, the day after Cantona’s own appearance at the same court. Football was keeping British justice busy at the time. On 14 March the Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, together with his Wimbledon counterpart Hans Segers and another member of the so-called ‘Crazy Gang’, the razor-elbowed striker John Fashanu, were among five suspects questioned by police about their role in alleged bribery and match-fixing for the benefit of Far Eastern gambling syndicates (all of them were eventually cleared in court, but ordered to pay their costs; Grobbelaar and Segers were later banned by the FA for breaching betting regulations). One month earlier, George Graham had been sacked from his managerial post by Arsenal after acknowledging he had received a ‘Christmas gift’ worth £425,000 from Norwegian agent Rune Hauge, in exchange for the facilitation of a transfer. According to the game’s folklore, Graham had just been unlucky: it was rumoured that numerous high-profile managers had received ‘brown-paper bags in service stations’ to thank them for their part in closing a deal, a practice which everyone within football agrees predated professionalism.
But what a year 1995 was! In late February, 170 English fans rioted in Ostend and were deported from Belgium on the eve of the aptly described European Cup Winners Cup ‘clash’ between FC Bruges and Chelsea, while one of their heroes, the ‘pocket-sized Rottweiler’ Dennis Wise, found himself in the dock for assaulting a taxi driver (he was cleared on appeal). Hooligans had caused the abandonment of an Ireland-England international in Dublin. The papers spoke of ‘a game in chaos’, and dubbed the present campaign ‘the season of sleaze’. They had every reason to do so. In fact, had it not been for the identity and the previous record of its perpetrator, Cantona’s offence would not have warranted more than a footnote in a litany of far more serious misdemeanours. But its very public nature crystallized the attention of opinion-formers. Cantona had built a formidable career by swimming against the current; when the river finally burst its banks, it was quite natural that he had to be the first to be cast away. He became a symbol of the game’s moral decrepitude, a symbol who, after having been crucified by the media, would stand trial on 23 March, the day after a 3–0 victory over Arsenal had brought Manchester United back within three points of Blackburn in the Premiership.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that, a year hence, England too would stand trial. UEFA had awarded the privilege of hosting the 1996 European Championships to the country where football was born. This highly controversial decision – which turned out to be an inspired one – was meant to be a gesture of goodwill towards the football authorities in England for their courage in addressing the problem of hooliganism, and a spur to pursue the government-endorsed drive towards eliminating the ‘cancer of the game’. Extreme conditions sometimes require extreme treatment.
The throng that assembled for Éric’s walk to the scaffold was worthy of a royal engagement – Charles I’s execution springs to mind. Reporters and photographers turned up in their hundreds, and came to blows to claim a vantage point. No fewer than twenty television crews vied for space. One cameraman hired a hydraulic lift to give himself the best possible chance of catching every single step of Cantona’s progress from the Croydon Park hotel to the entrance of the Magistrates Court, 200 yards away. The police had offered Éric a car to take him to the tribunal, but Éric refused. This was his show, after all. The King would walk, and, as noted by a contemporary columnist, ‘dozens of snappers’ retreated before him, walking backwards, ‘in a bizarre parody of a royal protocol’. The way Éric had dressed for this coronation of a kind bewildered his co-defendant Paul Ince (who was cleared of common assault). ‘So we got up in the morning,’ he recalled, ‘and I’ve got me suit on – the nuts, know what I mean? I knocked on Éric’s door and he’s standing in jacket [
on the lapel of which he had pinned a small replica of the Statue of Liberty
], white shirt, long collars like that, unbuttoned so you can see his chest. “Éric, you can’t go to court like that!” I told him and he says, “I’m Cantona, I can go as I want.” So he got in the dock and he got fourteen days in prison. I thought, “Oh my God! It must be the shirt. It has to be the shirt, Éric!”’
Fourteen days in jail. A few miles away, on the very same day, Alex Ferguson was collecting a CBE from Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Indie-rock band Ash was making its first appearance in the British Top 60 with ‘Kung Fu’ (with, yes, Steve Lindsell’s photograph reproduced on the sleeve). How surreal could it get? Cantona, in truth, could have been punished even more severely: the maximum sentence for the offence he had committed was six months’ imprisonment and a £5,000 fine. A few words fell from Éric’s lips: ‘If they lock me up, that’ll be a new experience.’ The chairperson of the bench that sent him to prison was one Mrs Jean Pearch, 53, a retired music teacher and mother of four who told him: ‘You are a high-profile public figure with undoubted gifts, and as such you are looked up to by so many young people. For this reason, the only sentence that is appropriate for this offence is two weeks’ imprisonment forthwith.’ Cantona’s admission of guilt and expression of remorse, which were conveyed in a contrite statement read out to the court by his barrister, David Poole QC, had not been enough to save him from jail. Éric gave a half-smile when a French interpreter confirmed the sentence. He had understood everything, of course. An appeal was immediately lodged against the verdict, but a request for bail was rejected. Éric was locked in a cell for three hours until Judge Ian Davies of Croydon Crown Court finally set him free, on condition he paid a £500 guarantee. He had spent this time signing autographs for well-wishers.
A few minutes later, Éric, flanked by the now ever-present Ned Kelly, finally made his way out of the court, but not without some difficulty. The crowd of newspapermen and television crews had been swelled by a group of youths who taunted the freshly convicted footballer, screaming, ‘Scum!’ and, ‘You’re going down!’ Or should they have shouted: ‘You’re going out of the country’? For, outside Britain, the pariah’s future elicited more than curiosity or outrage. Strange ideas took root in strange places. Casai de Rey, chairman of Sao Paulo FC, had already told the Brazilian press that he was about to make an offer for Cantona to Manchester United (he never did). In Italy, Massimo Moratti stuck to his ‘one declared passion, and that is Éric Cantona’. Internazionale would soon make a move for ‘a great player and a man of culture, not at all stupid’, and this despite the fact that, at the beginning of the month, FIFA had extended Éric’s ban worldwide, as its statutes demanded it did. Two days after sentence was passed on Cantona, the irrepressible Moratti faxed Manchester United, ‘to sound out whether they [were] prepared to sell the player’.
Should the sentence be upheld on appeal, which would be heard eight days later, there was little doubt that Cantona would quit English football in even more dramatic fashion than he had run away from his own country. On the night of the verdict, another of Éric’s advisers, who doubled up as vice-chairman of UNFP, the French footballers’ union, Jean-Jacques Amorfini, was interviewed on French radio. ‘They are all out to get him,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you, he won’t stay in that country a lot longer. I think people are trying to make Cantona disgusted with England and, obviously, I believe he is going to have to leave the country.’ Amorfini went further, and suggested that Manchester United were partly to blame for his client’s plight: ‘We are dumbfounded and absolutely shocked because Manchester United’s English lawyers advised a guilty plea so English justice would show clemency.’ What Amorfini didn’t take into account was that the club genuinely expected that this would be the case, even if there was a measure of disingenuity in Martin Edwards’ statement that ‘the whole thing has got out of hand. He [Cantona] has been punished three times for the same offence.’ For how could the Manchester United chairman argue that a football club, the FA and the Crown Prosecution Service somehow shared the same jurisdiction? But his shock was not feigned. Everyone was ‘stunned’ by the harshness of the punishment. Gordon Taylor said that the court had made an example of Cantona because of his fame: ‘It looks as though footballers are being made the whipping boys for many of the [
sic
] society’s ills. We are in danger of getting [in]to a lynch-mob mentality.’
In France, too, the reaction was one of disbelief, and was voiced in language which suggested another hundred year war was about to erupt between the two countries. The national coach Aimé Jacquet, who had just given the captain’s armband to the future Lyon and Rangers manager Paul Le Guen, denounced the Croydon magistrates’ verdict as ‘absurd, incomprehensible, out of proportion’. Michel Platini, by now president of the 1998 World Cup organizing committee, added one adjective: ‘disgraceful’. Philippe Piat, the chairman of the French PFA, chimed in: ‘It is really shocking to send someone to jail because he reacted to [the provocation of] a convicted criminal. It is another proof of the English ostracism of the French who live there.’ Piat added, somewhat gnomically, ‘We all remember the campaigns against Merle, the rugby player, and Gachot, the motor racing driver.’ Jean-Pierre Papin urged that Matthew Simmons ‘should be banned for ever from every stadium’, which he was, but for one year only, the longest ban that he could be served with under the terms of the 1989 Football Supporters Act. There were few dissenters in the family that had risen to defend its beleaguered son. When Noel Le Graët stated, quite reasonably, that ‘the demands and extreme media coverage of high level sport impose some duties on the players and managers’ and that they ‘must have exemplary behaviour and cannot consider themselves above rules and laws’, few were prepared to listen.
Thankfully, oil was poured on these choppy waters when, on 31 March, judge Ian Davies commuted the original sentence to 120 hours of community service, a popular kind of punishment with disgraced sportsmen: the snooker player Jimmy White, for example, had been requested to clean an old people’s home to atone for a drink-driving offence. A handful of diehard Manchester United supporters, Pete Boyle among them, who had secured the first ticket available for the tribunal’s public gallery, ran out of the court, shouting, ‘The King is free! The King is free!’ One of these fans, thirteen-year-old Sebastian Pennels, had risked the wrath of the court by presenting Éric with a good luck card during the hearing. An interpreter was on hand to pass on the verdict to Cantona, who again greeted it with the hint of a smile. Judge Davies, summing up, said: ‘We express the hope that he [Éric] will be able to be used in carrying out his public duty by helping young people who aspire to be professional footballers [ . . .] and others who merely aspire to play and enjoy it. Cantona reacted in a way that was out of character and would not have done so but for the provocative conduct aimed at him.’ He concluded with words that must have tasted like honey to Éric: ‘Whatever the defendant’s status, he is entitled to be dealt with for the gravity of his offence and not to make an example of a public figure.’ Short of an acquittal, Judge Ian Davies could not have done more to satisfy the player’s thirst for justice. With his common sense and fairness, he had also made sure that, should Éric play football again, it would be in England, and for Manchester United.
It’s time to bring Guy Roux back into Éric’s story again.
‘Canto’s mother called me on the day of his appeal. Nobody had ever interrupted one of my training sessions in thirty years. But she was beside herself with worry. Éric had told her that, should the judge uphold the sentence, he’d beat him up! Oh dear . . . I told her: I am not God. But . . . I knew Béatrice Main, who’d been under-prefect of Château-Chinon, and was now President Mitterrand’s
chef de cabinet
[private secretary]. Fourteen years before, I’d agreed to do a picture of our team with Mitterrand, who was then campaigning for the presidency. He had retained a soft spot for Auxerre, and had even told me once, “If you ever have a problem, call Béatrice, and we’ll see what we can do.” I told her that I had never bothered the President before – I wasn’t going to ask his help for a parking ticket, was I? – but that we were now facing a serious situation: Cantona was facing the judges. Her reaction was predictable: “We are not going to give lessons to the English, who invented the independence of the judiciary!” Yes, I said, of course, but I’ve found a way round it. If the President sends a cable to the Queen, saying, ‘If Cantona goes to jail, it will have a serious adverse effect on the relationship between the youth of England and the youth of France,’ maybe it will be of some use . . . She replied, “You’re absolutely mad. I knew it.” “Well, could you just tell him?” It was on a Wednesday, the day the
Conseil des Ministres
[Cabinet] met at the Elysée Palace. She told me she’d call me back in the afternoon. And she called me back at 3 p.m.: “Only mad people succeed on this earth of ours. The President has asked a high-ranking civil servant to send a cable to the Home Office.” At 3 p.m., Cantona had his sentence commuted, and went back home.’