Cantona (21 page)

Yet when Tapie insisted that Cantona return to the Vélodrome for the start of the 1990–91 season, Éric complied without fuss. Another of my
France Football
colleagues, Laurent Moisset, caught up with him in mid-June, in the Pyrenees ski resort of Font-Romeu, where it was and is customary for the French national squad to gather for off-season physical conditioning. Cantona sounded thrilled at the prospect of rejoining ‘the best club in France, the only one that corresponds to my ambitions’. It helped that since his forced errands to Bordeaux and Montpellier, OM had recruited a number of southern-born players who shared Éric’s Mediterranean roots – and his passion for hunting: Bernard Casoni, freshly arrived from neighbouring Toulon; Bernard Pardo, who had just disembarked from Bordeaux; and the superbly gifted but mercurial ’keeper Pascal Olmeta, formerly with ill-fated Matra Racing, whom he had met with the
Espoirs
and who had been a friend for a number of years already. Olmeta, who hailed from Corsica, invited Éric to his native island on several occasions – which may be why Cantona is sometimes referred to as a Corsican himself.

The newly formed gang brought in another pure Marseillais, Éric DiMeco, to purchase a share in a large shooting syndicate in the Var
département.
‘It was true sport,’ Pardo remembered, ‘because Éric, purist as he is, refused to shoot game that had been
“lâché” –
that is, semi-tame, and freed from cages on the eve of the party.’ (‘I hunt for the beauty of the hunt,’ Éric would say in his very first interview in England. ‘I don’t like killing for the sake of it. I kill only when there is beauty in it, otherwise it’s butchery. Hunting, like painting, is an art.’)

‘On the opening day of the shooting season,’ Pardo continued, ‘[Éric] arrived on a Harley-Davidson, with a gun slung over one shoulder. The old guys from the area thought they were hallucinating.’

The crowd at the Vélodrome was not as nonplussed as the ‘old guys’ of the Var had been, but the very sight of Cantona in an OM shirt was, in many ways, even more surprising. Many Marseillais thought they had seen the last of Éric as one of their own almost two years previously, on 17 December 1988, when he hadn’t done much in a 2–0 victory over St Étienne. Only a few days before the season started – on 21 July – the talk in the bars around the Vieux-Port was of OM dispatching Cantona to AS Cannes on yet another loan. The rumours had no other basis than Tapie’s close relationship with that club’s chairman, Michel Moillot – and the
Phocéens
refusal to believe that Éric and Nanard had agreed on a truce. But come the first day of the new campaign, Cantona lined up with his teammates on the pitch of the Vélodrome.

Was it the desire to finally prove himself in the city of his birth, the presence of like-minded friends, or simply the maturing of an exceptional talent? Cantona started the season in dazzling fashion. ‘Who doesn’t make mistakes?’ he said. ‘It happened to me, as it’s happened to everyone. But I learnt my lesson, and I never make the same mistake twice.’ And, for a while, it seemed as if a new player had, indeed, come back from Montpellier; a new man, too. ‘I feel a desire to settle down somewhere,’ Éric told Moisset. ‘For good, and for a long time. Let’s say I’ve had enough of packing my case every season.’ So had Isabelle, who now had a child to look after and had tired of having to stuff the young family’s possessions into cardboard boxes every six months or so.

Inspired by a splendid Cantona, Marseille opened the defence of their title with three consecutive victories: Nice were beaten 1–0, Metz vanquished 2–0 away from home, Caen edged 2–1 in a hard-fought game in which the team’s eventual success was overshadowed by the Vélodrome’s reaction to Éric’s display. After he had scored the second of his two goals, both of them created by another future outcast of the Goethals regime, Dragan Stojkovi
, a small section of the crowd started chanting his name. The whole arena soon joined in. A beaming Cantona shared his joy with the press afterwards. ‘A game like this does a lot of good,’ he said, ‘especially now. I was happy to give pleasure to the crowd, I wanted to give them pleasure.’ How could he explain this transformation? ‘I find my place more easily in this team. It’s good to feel the ball closer to you, to have a closer relationship with it . . . It’s a bit like with women.’

Those who shared his life on the training ground spoke of a hardworking, dedicated professional with no airs and graces about him, and of their delight to see that, in Bernard Pardo’s words, ‘people realize that he’s a man like any other, while remining a special player’. He had to be to earn a spot in Gili’s starting eleven, given the richness of OM’s attacking options at the time. The ‘golden boot’ Jean-Pierre Papin could be assured of his place as the leader of the strike force. The Ghanaian Abedi Pelé provided an explosive option on either flank, while Chris Waddle was reminding OM supporters (who nicknamed him ‘Magic’) of the great Roger Magnusson’s gift for evading defenders at will. Philippe Vercruysse, the most naturally talented of a batch of ‘new Platinis’ who emerged in the late 1980s, vied for the role of
regista
with the newly arrived Stojkovi
. Cantona’s sparkling form, however, made him a fulcrum of the side, one of Gili’s ‘untouchables’, together with Papin and Waddle.

The credit for this all too brief blossoming is universally, and wrongly, given to Franz Beckenbauer, who had left his position at the head of the German national team shortly after the
Mannschaft
had won their third World Cup in July. The Kaiser had joined the staff of Adidas (then owned by Tapie) almost immediately after celebrating victory in the
Mondiale
, and it seemed only a matter of time before his rather obscure role in that company led to an appointment at the helm of Marseille, despite the chairman’s assurances to the contrary. But Gili, the ‘dead man walking’, remained in charge for two months, and it is with him and for him that Éric produced his best-ever spell at a French club, and almost convinced the fickle OM supporters that they had wronged the man who talked of them as ‘brothers’. The statistics bear this out. Cantona played nine games for Gili, seven for Beckenbauer, scoring five goals for the unglamorous Frenchman, three for the impossibly debonair Bavarian. But, not for the last time, fiction would be accepted as truth, and Gili’s faith in the player who had thrown his shirt at him that night in Sedan would be forgotten to make place for a more dramatic story: how one of the greatest defenders the world has ever seen formed an unlikely alliance with the ‘bad boy’ of French football and nearly rescued him, only to be torpedoed by the scheming of their powerful paymaster. That both of them were victims of Tapie’s inconsistency, lack of nerve or impatience (all three descriptions are equally valid) cannot be denied. But luck, or the lack of it, played a far greater part in Éric’s undeserved ostracism than is commonly admitted, and the prospect of playing for a legend of the game had little or no impact on the quality of his performances.

Up until 25 August (by which time OM led the league championship, ahead of Brest and Arsène Wenger’s Monaco), when he missed a 1–1 draw at Nantes because of a slight injury, Cantona had played every single minute of every single game Marseille had been involved in. Nothing could stop him, not even the fires which ravaged the
garrigue
around Aubagne and Cassis towards the end of the month, and forced his family to be evacuated. Gili’s day of reckoning was approaching with depressing predictability (Tapie now described Beckenbauer as his ‘assistant’), but his squad held firm, and remained unbeaten. Lille were defeated 2–0, a scoreline repeated in the next league match, against Bordeaux, in which Papin scored the goals but Éric stole the show with an incredible shot from fully 50 yards, which rebounded off Joseph-Antoine Bell’s crossbar – an even better version of the lob which he attempted in a later Chelsea-Manchester United FA Cup game, and which prompted BBC commentator John Motson to ask: ‘Who needs Pelé?’ In Marseilles, the question might well have been: ‘Who needs Beckenbauer?’ Three points (wins were worth two points then) now separated OM from their closest rivals, FC Brest.

Cantona’s league campaign was interrupted by a trip to Iceland with the national side at the beginning of September, which is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, France made heavy weather of winning their first game of the Euro 1992 qualifying campaign 2–1 (Éric scored the decisive goal with a header from a corner kick). Second, with a quarter of an hour to play, Platini decided to protect
Les Bleus
two-goal advantage and replaced Cantona with his old warhorse, defensive midfielder Luis Fernandez. Gérard Houllier witnessed what followed the substitution. ‘Éric went to the dressing-room, seething with rage,’ he told me. ‘Michel [Platini] goes there too. And we hear this almighty noise coming from below . . . White as a sheet, Michel comes back and tells me: “Gérard, I’ll never, ever take him off the pitch again!”’ True to his word, he never did.

While Éric was away on international duty, Beckenbauer was officially promoted to the rank of OM’s technical director on 6 September. Still, the squad, the supporters (and many journalists) couldn’t bring themselves to believe that Gili’s tenure could be cut short when his team were playing with such spirit, verve and authority. PSG were the next visitors to fall at the Vélodrome (2–1), Cantona finding the target again. He celebrated the win by joining Olmeta and Pardo at dawn for a shooting trip in the Provençal hinterland, the three friends seemingly oblivious to the manoeuvring taking place in their chairman’s office. Gili himself knew the writing was on the wall, though, and when his players brought back another success from Toulouse (2–0, on 14 September), he described it with a heavy heart as ‘my last victory’ to the media. That was not quite true: he survived long enough to see Marseille crush Dinamo Tirana 5–1 in the European Cup five days later, Éric finding the target for the seventh time since August. But within twenty-four hours, Gili’s departure was confirmed in a club statement.

Beckenbauer inherited one of the strongest squads in Europe, a still united dressing-room, and a group of players at the top of their form. But Tapie had underestimated the extent to which Gili’s death by a thousand cuts could affect the morale of the championship leaders. On the day the Kaiser first sat in the OM dugout, Cannes stunned the Vélodrome by inflicting a 1–0 defeat on the title-holders, their first of the 1990–91 season in any competition. Predictably enough, this was viewed as just retribution for the manner in which the club’s previous coach had been ousted. But as so often in a situation of crisis – as he had done at Auxerre when their European aspirations were in danger, at Montpellier when his closest friend left him alone on the deck of a sinking ship, and as he would do time and again for Manchester United – Éric found new resources of willpower, and took it on himself to change the course of events. Chris Waddle is one of many to insist on the cordiality of Cantona’s relationship with Beckenbauer. ‘Cantona enjoyed training with him,’ he told
L’Équipe Magazine
in 2007, ‘and Beckenbauer was a big fan of his. We played Éric and JPP upfront, with me behind them or on the right-hand side and someone on the left. Beckenbauer liked him to get in the box a lot. He used him more as an English centre-forward, to get him to try and come in at the far post, to use his head and his height.’

The performance level of many Marseille players had suffered from the messy goings-on in the upper reaches of the club, but not Cantona’s. After a fine display in a 3–1 victory at Monaco – one of OM’s most dangerous rivals in the
championnat –
Éric played a stupendous game against St Étienne at the Vélodrome, adding two goals to his tally, which made him the fifth most efficient marksman in the league at the beginning of October. His new coach could not praise him enough: ‘for me, Cantona-Papin is even better than Völler-Klinsmann, because they’re a partnership that can better adapt to circumstances’ – a partnership that shone again when France disposed of Czechoslovakia 2–1 in a Euro 92 qualifier in mid-October. Platini’s France hadn’t been beaten in nearly two years, and owed this record in large part to Éric’s sustained excellence.