Cantona (70 page)

15
  Eydelie (whom Walsall followers may remember, as he briefly wore their club’s colours in 1998) spoke to
L’Équipe Magazine
in January 2006, and later wrote a best-selling ‘confession’ (
Je ne joue plus –
I’m not playing anymore) in which the doping allegations (and numerous others) were reprised with a wealth of detail, including a full account of how, according to Eydelie, all OM players had to stand in line to receive an injection before the 1993 European Cup final, won 1–0 against AC Milan. Bernard Tapie strenuously denied the allegations, and immediately instigated a court action, which concluded that Eydelie’s assertions could not be considered libellous. Tapie lost his appeal against the verdict in February 2008. Other doping allegations were also made in December 2003 by former Marseille player Tony Cascarino in his regular
Times
column, in which he also wrote that chairman Bernard Tapie ‘made it clear my place in the team depended on me partaking’.

16
  Both the European Champion Clubs’ Cup and the European Championship of Nations were born out of initiatives spearheaded by
L’Équipe, France Football
and the French FA, in 1955 and 1958 respectively.

17
  Éric’s love of tauromachy inspired a series of photographs, which he exhibited in Marseilles in October 2008.

18
  The actual fee was £999,999, as Forest boss Brian Clough didn’t want the £1m tag to go his recruit’s head, or so he said. When various taxes had been added to this sum, however, Francis had cost Forest over £1.1m.

19
  Cantona played alongside Graham Hyde, Nigel Worthington, Chris Bart-Williams and Gordon Watson against an American touring team, Baltimore East. He scored a hat-trick.

20
  The club had found him a discreet, somewhat ramshackle house in this leafy but unremarkable suburb, where West Indian and Pakistani immigrants lived side-by-side with dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshire natives. The very ordinariness of his surroundings pleased Éric, who had no taste for the trappings of footballing success, and the friendliness of his neighbours helped to forge a genuine bond between the exile and his adopted city. In fact, Roundhay remained the Cantonas’ base in north-east England long after Éric had been sold to Manchester United.

21
  This was an adaptation of an earlier (and much less famous) chant, originally created in honour of Manchester United’s Irish defender Paul McGrath. For Mancunian supporters, singing it for Éric was a re-appropriation, not a theft.

22
  A local dance music outfit, Ooh La La, used a sample of Éric’s ‘love’ speech on a single which achieved moderate success in the Leeds area.

23
  This was the Yugoslavia of Prosine
ki, Savi
evi
, Pan
ev, Boban and Stojkovi
, potentially one of the greatest sides to have emerged from beyond the Iron Curtain, which many felt would have gained European supremacy just as Red Star Belgrade had done at club level a year previously.

24
  I’ve since wondered whether Éric was familiar with his hero Diego Maradonas famous quote deriding Real Madrid’s obsession with star players: ‘You need someone to carry the water to the well.’ One sees what he meant by that, but only just.

25
  Michel Platini left his position on 2 July, the day FIFA announced that France had been awarded the privilege of hosting the 1998 World Cup. Houllier, until then Platini’s assistant, officially succeeded him a week later.

26
  Of the 20 goals Éric scored for France (in 45 games), only one was scored from the penalty spot or from a direct free kick.

27
  ‘He’s French, he’s flash/He’s shagging Leslie Ash/Cantona’ was an especially popular chant with Manchester United fans seated in the Stretford End. The Leeds fanzine
Square Ball
published a photo-montage of Éric in the shower, wearing bra and suspenders, and linking the whole thing to the Leslie Ash rumours: ‘Mrs Chapman [ . . .] noticed that her underwear drawer had been tampered with and found several ladders in her fishnet stockings. Suspicious, Lee placed a hidden camera in the Chapman bathroom and was astonished when confronted by the photograph shown here. This proved too much for the Eiland Road players who approached manager Howard Wilkinson demanding Cantona’s immediate removal.’ A cartoon published in the same fanzine (called ‘The Temptation of Cantona’ and attributed to one Fra Filippo Magsonioni) depicts the crucifixion of ‘Leeds Pride’ with ‘Judas’ Cantona being led off, with his thirty pieces of silver, by Alex ‘Beelzebub’ Ferguson to ‘Sodom and Manchester’. ‘Pontius’ Wilkinson is shown having his hands washed, a kneeling disciple beside him saying: ‘Forgive him Lord for he knows not what he does.’ What ‘Beelzebub’ Ferguson tells Cantona had something prophetic in it: ‘Behold – I shall make thee master of all thou surveys.’

28
  That same afternoon, Ferguson contacted his assistant Brian Kidd and asked him if he’d like to see Cantona play for United. Kidd said yes. When told that this would be the case – and for little over £1m – Kidd gasped: ‘For that money? Has he lost a leg or something?’

29
  Ferguson’s perception of Cantona’s ‘unmanageable’ character would evolve over the years Éric spent at Manchester United. Comparing him with another player, Sir Alex told my friend Marc Beaugé: ‘You could reach Éric, because there was a common thread of humanity you always felt you shared, whereas X— was beyond it, beyond everything.’

30
  This interpreter had very little to do. When asked if he’d submitted a transfer request to Leeds, Éric replied,
‘Non,’
and that was more or less that.

31
  One of Cantona’s closest friends in Manchester, Claude Boli, remarked in a much later interview that Éric ‘was particularly successful against the clubs which United supporters despise the most: Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Leeds United, which led fans to say: “He’s close to us, he understands us, he knows it’s far more important to win at Anfield than in the European Cup; [more important to win] against Liverpool than against Barcelona, that’s very English! He’s the man we needed.” Claude Boli PhD (in history and sociology) was the brother of Éric’s former Auxerre teammate Basile Boli and had come to Lancashire to write a sociology thesis about football which later formed the basis of his book
Manchester United, L’Invention d’un club (Deux Siècles de Métamorphoses)
, to which Cantona contributed a foreword. Another excerpt from this interview, given to
France Football’s
Xavier Rivoire in 2003, is worth quoting: ‘From the very first day [with Manchester United], Éric told himself, “I’m going to learn; I can succeed here, but I’ve got to take my time, to adapt, and people will have to adapt to me.” Éric was very humble. He wasn’t there to change United’s style, but to bring something extra. The rapport between him and Alex Ferguson meant that they gave each other time to succeed.’

32
  Leeds had been knocked out of the Champions League before the group phase, Manchester United had been thrown out of the UEFA Cup by Torpedo Moscow in the second round, Sheffield Wednesday in the third (by Kaiserslautern), Liverpool falling against another Muscovite team, Spartak, in their second tie of the Cup Winners Cup.

33
  The European Commission had that regulation scrapped in 1996, following the celebrated ‘Bosman ruling’ (‘
arrêt
Bosman’) of the European Court of Justice (15 December 1995), which redefined a player’s right of movement within the European Union.

34
  Pete Boyle, the unofficial ‘bard of Manchester United’ (and Cantona’s most passionate fan), reminded me that his most famous creation, ‘Éric the King’ (which is still sung at Old Trafford), was based on an earlier chant, ‘Denis the King’. Both borrow their tune from The Scaffold’s ‘Lily the Pink’, a huge hit in the winter of 1968–69.

35
  The UEFA dispensed with Mr Roethlisberger altogether in 1997, striking him with a life ban when it was established he had approached Grasshoppers Zurich in 1996 to ‘sell’ them the referee of a forthcoming European game against Auxerre. The referee in question, Vadim Zhuk, happened to be a friend of his, and the price would be Sw.F100,000. The ban was upheld on appeal. Mr Roethlisberger’s performance on the night Cantona was sent off had been the subject of a number of rumours immediately after the game.

36
  Alex Ferguson had initially decided to rest Cantona for that tie, but changed his mind when he saw the look on his player’s face when the news was broken to him. ‘If I left him out,’ the manager said, ‘I would probably never see him again.’ Some were fooled by the jocular tone of Ferguson’s remark. Éric, typically, responded by scoring his 15th goal of the season.

37
  This incident marked the beginning of the long feud between Sir Alex Ferguson and the BBC, which eventually led to his boycotting the public broadcaster.

38
  Éric’s brother Joël – a frequent visitor to Old Trafford – had made his debut for Stockport County a day earlier. According to an eyewitness, he featured for fifteen ‘not very good minutes’ in a home defeat by Bournemouth. The younger Cantona, who’d also played without much success for Marseille, Rennes, Antwerp, Angers and Ujpest, had already been rejected by Peterborough, and rumours were rife at the time that Éric had offered to pay Joël’s wages in order to conclude the deal. In any case, within a few months, Cantona junior was back plying his trade in the Hungarian championship.