Authors: Philippe Auclair
The news was greeted with relish by those who had stood by him back in January, the former Manchester United midfielder Pat Crerand among them. ‘I’m delighted that Éric has the courage to turn around and show two fingers to a lot of people in England,’ he said. ‘So many clowns have jumped on the bandwagon.’ Brendon Batson, speaking on behalf of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who had voted Cantona their player of the year in 1994, gushed: ‘we didn’t want to lose a talent like Éric’s. Now we just hope that when he does reappear on a football pitch that he receives a decent reception.’ Many shared his apprehension, like the fan who called a local radio station to say he wondered whether ‘he [Cantona] could cope with what he’s going to get next season’.
But while others celebrated, and fretted, Éric slipped away to France. He had more urgent matters to attend to. Isabelle gave birth to their second child, Joséphine – named after Cantona’s beloved grandfather Joseph, who had died in 1991 – on 7 July. Then, one week later, the new father had another birth to attend – his own, in the guise of a theatrical character. He drove to the Avignon festival to attend the premiere of
Ode à Canto
, a play written and directed by the alarmingly prolific Gérard Gelas, which claimed to be based on Antonin Artaud’s
Trip to the Land of the Tarahumaras.
‘Play’ might be the wrong word, as it was little more than a comic dialogue between a regal Cantona – the actor Damien Rémy, clad in the red of Manchester United, collar up, of course – and an aspiring footballer called Lorenzo. Éric took his seat among the few hundred spectators of the Théâtre du Chêne noir, where Gelas had been based since 1967. French television cameras were there too, all of them trained on the footballer’s face in the small crowd. Thankfully, the King was amused. ‘I felt close to the main character, all through the play,’ he said. ‘That shows how an actor can do anything. We’re just footballers, and I don’t know if we can do anything but play football. It’s a good thing that the main character says things I might not have said myself, but which I could have said, yes.’ Cantona was referring – obliquely – to the political subtext of the farce, in which unsubtle references were made to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, renamed
‘Affront National’
by Gelas. I must say that my blood froze when I watched a video recording of
Ode à Canto.
The odd declamatory tone and self-conscious poetry of the lines reminded me of an amateur staging of one of Dario Fo’s anarchic plays I had once attended in the Auvergne, a ghastly memory that will never leave me. But I could understand how Cantona was taken with passages such as ‘. . . Marseilles, bitten by the wind of corsairs, children of Greek sailors, Italian stonemasons, Armenians, Algerians or Africans . . . Marseilles, which affords herself the luxury of being an island in the midst of a continent . . .’ If every man’s an island, that one suited him, the son of Les Caillols, born and raised on a rocky spur, sharp and unyielding as stone itself. A Marseillais, always.
The hero of Gelas’ imagination left the Provençal sun soon after his consecration on the stage.
Ode à Canto
would be one of the playwright’s most resounding successes; his troupe toured with the play for three years at home and abroad, carried by the notoriety of its subject. Cantona himself travelled back to Manchester, where Alex Ferguson had organized a pre-season friendly between his team and Rochdale. Unaware that he might be breaking the terms of his ban by taking part in this match played behind closed doors at The Cliff, Éric found himself in the eye of yet another storm. On 30 July, five days after the game had taken place, FA spokesman Mike Parry read the following statement to the usual shoal of ‘sardines’: ‘We became aware of the fact that Éric Cantona had played through newspaper reports and have written to Manchester United asking for their observations, and to ask them under what sort of conditions the match was played. The ban imposed on Cantona said that he should be suspended from all football activities until the beginning of October, so we assume Manchester United have a plausible explanation. We’d just like to know what it is – to clear the matter up.’
The price tag – £7.5m, second only to Alan Shearer’s, and £3m more than Newcastle recruit David Ginola’s – that
The Times
’s new ‘interactive team football’ game had put on Cantona suddenly looked far less attractive, even if the affair didn’t make much noise at first. The sporting public was looking elsewhere. Linford Christie had failed at the World Athletics Championships, and Jonathan Edwards was about to produce a staggering triple jump of 18.29m to win the gold in Gothenburg, setting two world records in the process. England’s cricket team had woken up at last against the West Indies. Manchester United fans were getting used (with a great deal of difficulty) to the idea of living without Paul Ince and Mark Hughes, who had been sold to Inter and Chelsea respectively, while Andreï Kanchelskis was – rightly – said to be on his way to Everton. They didn’t know that a furious Cantona had headed straight back to France when he had heard that the FA was considering bringing another charge against him.
They wouldn’t have to wait for long. Jean-Jacques Bertrand delivered Éric’s ultimatum in Paris, on 7 August. ‘Éric Cantona will not return to England unless the FA goes back on its decision, which forbids him from taking part in training games behind closed doors for his club,’ he said. The authorities were given a strict deadline: ‘Friday the 11th of August, 1995, at midnight.’ The ploy worked. The FA, who had faced almost unanimous criticism in the media for their rigid stance, crawled back under a rock: ‘[We] received a response from Manchester United in regard to our inquiry about Éric Cantona. We are entirely satisfied with their explanation and we have conveyed that to the club’. But the camel’s back appeared to have been broken for good before Éric’s persecutors had beaten a sheepish retreat.
Cantona had faxed a transfer request to his club, as was acknowledged by United’s press officer Ken Ramsden. ‘[Éric] was very upset at the recent inquiry by the FA concerning his involvement in the training session of 25 July,’ he said. ‘He told Martin Edwards that he felt he had little future in the English game and that his career would be best served by a move abroad,’ which everyone guessed meant Inter Milan in Italy. However, ‘The board has considered the request very carefully but is not prepared to agree to it, believing that it is in the best interests of both the club and player that he remains with them.’ Alex Ferguson’s task was to convince Cantona that his ‘best interests’ would indeed be protected if he chose not to carry on his threat of leaving. In public, he just expressed the hope that ‘things [would] settle down over the next few days’. Away from the cameras, while still trying to bring the protracted transfer of Andreï Kanchelskis to Everton to a satisfactory conclusion (it had now been referred to the Premier League), Ferguson embarked on a quite extraordinary rescue mission to Paris. Perhaps he felt a degree of responsibility in the affair, even though he had genuinely believed that the confidential friendlies he had scheduled against teams such as Oldham, Bury, Rochdale and apparently a few others as well, did not fall within the scope of ‘organized matches’ which Cantona was not permitted to play in. All he had wanted to do was to involve Éric in the day-to-day life of his team, keep him fit, and sate his hunger for the ball. It hadn’t helped that United had flown out to Malaysia for one of their money-spinning summer tours almost immediately after the friendly which was at the heart of the dispute: Éric had literally been left behind.
As soon as he had been informed that Cantona was packing his bags, Ferguson had driven to Worsley, where he had found a distinctly unresponsive Frenchman who had chosen to rely on room service to avoid mingling with the seagulls waiting for him in the restaurant. Ferguson could and did empathize with the plight of his player, to the point that, had it not been for a late-night conversation with his wife on his return, he might well have concluded that losing Cantona was unavoidable. But Cathy Ferguson felt that her husband shouldn’t yield so easily, and slowly brought him round to share her point of view. The next morning, Ferguson, who had barely slept, informed Bertrand that he wished to speak to Éric, who had now left for France, and that he was willing to head for the airport straight away. Cantona’s adviser agreed to a meeting, which would take place on 9 August, the day after the manager was due to attend a book launch in London. Wine tends to flow freely on such occasions, and that night was no exception. A relaxed Ferguson made some unguarded remarks to his dinner companions, a number of whom were journalists who immediately informed their news desks that they had better dispatch their special forces to Heathrow and Roissy. How could Ferguson beat his pursuers?
The phone rang in the room he’d booked at the George V hotel. It was Jean-Jacques Amorfini, one of Cantona’s closest confidants as well as the vice-chairman of the French PFA. He would come and collect Ferguson in the evening. All he would have to do would be to follow the porter when he turned up at his door, which he did shortly before 7.30 p.m. as arranged. The two men made their way through a maze of corridors, through the kitchen, down to a side exit where Amorfini was waiting, holding two motorcycle helmets. Ferguson donned his, and sat on the pillion of a Harley-Davidson. The bike roared and quickly slipped out of sight in the Parisian streets. Its destination was a quiet, almost deserted restaurant – its owner had taken the precaution to place a
‘fermé’
sign on the door. Éric was there, as were Jean-Jacques Bertrand and a secretary.
Cantona, delighted as he was by his manager’s presence, at first showed no signs of going back on his decision. Soon, however, Ferguson turned on the charm and used his remarkable powers of persuasion to change Éric’s mind. He told him how Maurice Watkins and United had taken the fight to the FA, how public opinion and the press had shifted in his favour in the past week or so and how he, Ferguson, was sure that ‘everything would be all right’ in the longer term. These were the words Éric wanted to hear, spoken by the very man who could give them meaning.
A couple of weeks later, on the occasion of a short trip he made to Amsterdam, where he presented the Dutch Young Player of the Year award to Michael Mols of Twente Enschede (whose hero he was), Cantona explained how ‘morally, it would be impossible for me to leave Manchester United after what the people there have done for me’. Ferguson and his assistant Brian Kidd had shown ‘more respect’ towards him in these troubled months than he had ever experienced in his entire life, he said, and never more poignantly than on that evening in Paris. Talk soon drifted to other subjects, as happens when old friends get over a misunderstanding and choose to go back to shared convictions and memories to feed the conversation. Player and manager now reminisced about great games of the past, as they hardly needed to articulate what they both knew would happen: Cantona would come back to Manchester. Ferguson had handled him magnificently, and could justifiably write four years later: ‘Those hours spent in Éric’s company [ . . .] added up to one of the more worthwhile acts I have performed in this stupid job of mine.’ Stupid? Really?
On Monday 14 August Cantona reported for training at The Cliff, four days after Manchester United had called a press conference to pass on the good news. The Italian transfer window had shut shortly before, as Amorfini angrily reminded a reporter who had contacted him on the phone, and there was no question of Éric joining Inter as a ‘joker’, that is, signing a pre-contraa agreement and waiting until the reopening of the transfer market in November to become a
nerazzuro.
‘His future is secure with us,’ Ferguson announced. ‘I haven’t had much sleep, but I’m happy the job has now been done.’ That much was settled. But there were still another seven weeks to go before Cantona could resume playing for United, when Liverpool, supposedly their main rival for the title (according to the bookmakers), would travel to Old Trafford on 1 October.
The abrupt departure of Ince, Hughes and Kanchelskis, who had been at the heart of United’s surge over the past three years, had left many observers unimpressed with the team’s chances for the new season. Cantona’s success had convinced several of the main league contenders to look beyond Britain’s borders for reinforcements. The brutally tedious 1–0 victory of Everton over Blackburn in the Charity Shield was perhaps the last occasion when traditional ‘British’ values decided the outcome of a domestic trophy game. Few guessed so at the time, but both clubs were throwbacks and would soon slump into mid-table mediocrity – in Blackburn’s case, relegation, a mere four years after securing the 1994–95 Premiership title. It could be argued that football, one of the most insular, not to say most reactionary of businesses, entered a new century earlier than many other manifestations of working-class culture in England. This was football’s ‘Big Bang’, a decade after the London Stock Exchange had mutated into a hitherto unknown beast thanks to deregulation. Football swooned into cosmopolitanism, at a time when it had become habitual for summer holidaymakers to ride donkeys in Corfu rather than Blackpool. Suddenly, each club had to have their foreign ‘star’ (a bit like most indie-pop bands had to have a female bassist or guitarist towards the end of the 1980s). David Ginola joined Newcastle; Dennis Bergkamp, incredibly, swapped Inter for Arsenal; Ruud Gullit now wore the blue of Chelsea – and let’s not forget the dazzling Georgian Georgi Kinkladze, who would enchant Manchester City fans for three memorable seasons.
Not everyone thought that 1995–96 could be a high watermark in Cantona’s career. Some still maintained that the reopening of the Italian transfer market on 1 November – for a week only – would see Moratti pounce again, this time decisively. Rob Hughes was one of the very few observers who believed that with his namesake Mark Hughes and Paul Ince gone, Bryan Robson retired and Steve Bruce nearing 30, the time was right for Cantona to become the lynchpin of the side, and not just in a playing sense. Far-sighted as he was, the journalist was actually describing what had already happened rather than what could be hoped for. Éric was already a captain in all but name. No other senior player on United’s staff exerted the same positive influence on his younger teammates, all of whom were hungry for guidance. In December 1994, immediately after United’s 4–0 trouncing of Galatasaray in the Champions League, Alex Ferguson had made his way to the dressing-room, where he had found Cantona standing by the tactics board, explaining passages of play to an awestruck David Beckham and Gary Neville, two of the players who now stayed behind to train with Éric long after they were supposed to leave The Cliff. Cantona had always been a believer in Chateaubriand’s maxim: ‘Talent is a long apprenticeship.’ To the delight of his manager, he was now passing on this conviction, first to a small group of youngsters, then to the whole of the United squad, one of many ways in which his legacy can still be felt at Old Trafford, where the pupils of old, like Neville, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, have now turned into mentors themselves. ‘Now they all stay [behind after training] except for Steve Bruce, who needs his rest,’ Ferguson said. ‘On Fridays I have to tell them to come in.’