Cantona (17 page)

Proof of that disaffection was given on 25 February, when Bordeaux were eliminated from the French Cup by second division Beauvais. Cantona had been superb throughout the game, and could not be held responsible for the score being tied at 1–1 at the end of extra time. But he was one of two Bordeaux players to miss his penalty kick. He had tried a ‘Panenka’ with a cheeky chip down the middle but the Beauvais goalkeeper Eddy Caullery stood his ground and saved the shot. Cue boos, whistles, insults. Alain Giresse confessed his helplessness: ‘He’s blamed for everything and anything. He’s an exutory. Maybe that’s how people keep themselves warm?’ Gigi left the journalists with these words: ‘Why, we can talk about it as much as we want, it won’t change a thing’.’

Cantona bore this admittedly well-paid walk to Calvary with commendable dignity and professionalism. He didn’t demur when Couécou switched him from a centre-forward position to the role of playmaker, before changing his mind again. Bordeaux slowly, painfully, climbed up the table. By mid-April, they had reached ninth position in the
championnat
, after a splendid 4–1 victory over Metz, in which Éric was given a perfect 5 out of 5 by watching reporters. When his club faltered, as it did at Monaco (2–4) exactly a month later, on 12 May, he still shone, smothering the ball on his chest before hitting it on the turn with his right foot, bringing the score to 2–3, and being chosen as his side’s best performer – 4 out of 5 this time. He cared. Few others did.

The bizarre circumstances of his move to Bordeaux meant that, on 20 May, the day the Girondins were beaten 3–2 at home by Caen (with Cantona scoring his team’s first goal), Éric won the first major title of his career . . . as a Marseille player. It meant nothing to him. As he said later, ‘I’ve never played at Marseille. Just the beginning of two seasons.’ But he was still contracted to OM, and Tapie – who, entertaining a posse of journalists on the
Phocéa
, didn’t mention Éric’s name once when he talked about the forthcoming season – wouldn’t let him go for less than FF19m. Very few French clubs could afford a sum that, taking football’s peculiar rate of inflation into account, should be multiplied by ten to be compared to 2009 prices: close to £20m, a king’s ransom, when Éric’s throne would be built for a fraction of that in Manchester. One such wealthy club was the still-formidable Bordeaux, that was sucked ever deeper in a spiral of financial scandals, but clung on to its ambitions with the energy of a drowning man.

Bez had been impressed by Éric’s professionalism and tried his luck, with the player’s assent. Cantona had been in constant touch with his
Espoirs
teammate Stéphane Paille over a number of weeks, if not months, to discuss a future the two friends saw as a shared adventure. Both of them wanted a move away from their present club, for very different reasons: Éric wished to put as much distance as he could between the Tapie regime and himself; Stéphane – the reigning French player of the year, no less – believed he had outgrown FC Sochaux-Montbéliard, even if the
Lionceaux
(the Lion Cubs) were on their way to achieve a very creditable fourth place in the championship. They were confident that, wearing the same jersey, they could rekindle the flame that had burnt so brightly under Marc Bourrier, and agreed that the Girondins could be that club. But Tapie wouldn’t hear of it. It was one thing to get rid of a hot potato for a few months, quite another to enable his arch-enemy to field, game after game, and for heaven knows how many seasons, the striking partnership which had served the French under-21s so well and which most observers hoped would serve the seniors for years to come. Bordeaux conceded defeat.

This left Paris Saint-Germain as the only other potential suitor of the pair among the heavyweights of French football. Their urbane chairman, silver-haired Francis Borelli, who, as you will remember, had already wooed Éric in 1988, used his considerable charm to try to attract the two young men to the capital. PSG, the 1985–86 champions (under Gérard Houllier), still harboured the hope of another title at the time.
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Paille and Cantona liked Borelli, and could see that his interest in them derived from a genuine appreciation of their talent, and not from a desire to cock a snook at Bernard Tapie. But the Parisian president failed to give them guarantees about the identity of the manager who would succeed the Yugoslav Tomislav Ivi
, whose contract had come to an end. Was it because he had already chosen Henri Michel, and feared that Éric would turn his nose up at the idea of working for ‘one of the most incompetent national team managers in world football’? In any case, Borelli’s advances came to nothing. Another door had been slammed shut in the faces of the two friends. Nobody could have guessed which one would suddenly open wide to welcome them: Montpellier.

Two brothers: Stéphane Paille and Éric Cantona.

‘I have this passion inside that I can’t handle. It’s like a fire inside which has to get out and which you let out. Sometimes it wants to get out and do harm. I do myself harm. It worries me when I do harm, especially to others. But I can’t be what I am without these other things to my character.’

You could almost hear a collective gasp from the French footballing community when, on Sunday 28 May 1989, it was announced that Stéphane Paille and Éric Cantona had joined Montpellier-Hérault Sport Club, Stéphane on a three-year deal, Éric on a season-long loan from OM. Both the club and the players were felt to have taken a huge gamble. Despite its size – a quarter of a million inhabitants – Montpellier didn’t have a record as a sporting town. Its old football team had only played a supporting role in the years following the Second World War, and its steady decline towards amateurism and near-oblivion had been viewed with indifference by the locals. It had regained professional status in 1978 under the colourful tutelage of Louis Nicollin, universally known as ‘Loulou’, who had assumed the chairmanship four years previously; but its team still struggled to fill the tiny, creaking Stade de la Mosson despite the club’s promotion to the elite in May 1988. If one would have had to paint a picture of the Sport Club at the time, the arrival of the two celebrated internationals would have been the first brushstroke on a blank canvas.

There was still one more game to play in the
championnat
(in which Éric would shine, providing yet another assist for Clive Allen in a 1–1 draw at Auxerre), when Paille and Cantona had lunch with Nicollin and his sports director Michel Mézy on 22 May. Just as when Cantona was farmed out to Bordeaux, the operation was concluded with bewildering speed. A mere twenty-four hours later, all parties had finalized the small print of the contracts. Paille, in particular, had made a substantial sacrifice in order to play alongside his friend: Bayern Munich had sounded him out – but were not keen on Cantona. Fired up (blinded?) by the prospect of scoring for fun with Éric, Stéphane said ‘no’ to the German giants, and agreed to wages vastly inferior to what the Bavarian club (and quite a few others) was willing to offer him. As a player, he had reached the apex of his career at the age of twenty-four, and, tragically, didn’t realize that he, the quick-witted, quick-footed matinee idol of French football, would be shot down in mid-flight as a result of following his instinct. Cantona himself saw his salary ‘divided by two’. But, as he said, ‘Some things are worth living for. You don’t take your money to Heaven when you die.’

Nicollin was so besotted with his two young recruits – whose combined age was forty-seven – that he effectively gave them licence to run his sweet shop. Didier Fèvre was, again, a privileged witness to the surreal scenes which unfolded at the chairman’s home. ‘Stéphane was the originator of the move,’ he told me, ‘on the line of: “Either you take us both, or I’m not coming, as I have other proposals.”’ Didier boarded the plane with the two players and their agent Alain Migliaccio, who were then taken to Nicollin’s house. ‘Michel Mézy was there too,’ he recalls. ‘Éric and Stéphane recruited the team! Jacquet [now manager at Montpellier] didn’t say a word, Mézy was just saying, “Yes, that guy’s pretty good, yes, yes” . . . I’ll always remember how Stéphane called Vincent Guérin – who was then at Brest – in front of Nicollin.
“Hé, Vincent, ça va
? We’re in Montpellier, would you join us?” And Guérin did.’ No wonder Nicollin called Paille a ‘very determined young man’.

Since Cantona was still on OM’s books, Tapie could have nipped Nicollin’s quixotic plan in the bud; instead of which he did his utmost to encourage ‘Loulou’, reportedly telling him, ‘Go for it!’ when the Montpellier chairman showed his hand. For once, the OM boss was acting out of friendship – a little mutual back-scratching in accordance with his own idiosyncratic moral code. The French call this ‘
renvoyer l’ascenseur
’: to send the lift back. The previous season, Nicollin had helped Tapie by giving him one of his players – midfielder Gérard Bernardet – on loan, for nothing. This was a chance for Nanard to thank Loulou, and he took it. Tapie always had had a soft spot anyway for the (much) larger-than-life Montpellier chairman, who described himself as ‘a prick’, drank like a fish, ate as if more than his life depended on it, and had an almost poetic way with language of the more robust kind.

For once, Tapie’s and Cantona’s wishes coincided. Montpellier agreed to pay the equivalent of £300,000 in compensation to OM, while Sochaux received four times that amount for Paille. For a club like Montpellier, this represented a massive investment, on top of the huge sums which had already been siphoned out of its coffers to recruit stars like 1984 Olympic gold medal winner Daniel Xuereb, Colombian
fantasista
Carlos Valderrama (the most famous hairdo in world football at the time), and, as a manager, none other than Aimé Jacquet, who, as we’ve seen, had been sacked by Bordeaux just before Éric joined Girondins.
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Nicollin wasn’t coy about his ambitions for Montpellier. ‘We’ll finish in the top three,’ he predicted at the end of June, somewhat rashly. ‘With Jacquet, I thought we could build a good little “average” team, and then this crazy Tapie called me, and told me I should take Cantona and pair him with Paille. I was in Brides-les-Bains [
French papers cheekily reported on the number of kilos the famously rotund chairman was losing every week at the spa
], I had nothing to think about except football, and, little by little, the idea made its way . . . I came back to Montpellier, talked to Michel [Mézy], to Jacquet. We didn’t know then, but our mayor and MP, M. Fréche, was happy with this idea.’ He then assured reporters: ‘Both the boys have made an excellent impression on us from the very first time we met.’ Everything was fine, then.

Loulou was not the only one to get carried away with his coup. As Stéphane Paille told me, ‘The problem was that, immediately, it became the Paille and Cantona show. One month before the season started, every piece the papers printed about Montpellier was about us! That’s why we decided we’d stop talking to the press. It was becoming detrimental to the group. There were many other wonderful players at Montpellier, who didn’t get a mention. [Brazilian international] Julio César was a fantastic defender, for example. We knew [the focus on us] would create frictions within the team.’ It most certainly did.

In late June, however, the mood was one of wild optimism, understandably so. Éric shared it: ‘I believe in this city, in this region and in this club. And I think that Montpellier is the best place to do great things. With Stéphane, there is a connection, sensations which we have in common. This goes back to the goal against England with the
Espoirs
, in London. What we felt then was really strong, and we promised ourselves to live it again as soon as the chance presented itself.’