Cantona (23 page)

So Cantona was called to plead for forgiveness in front of the board; that is, Bernard Tapie and his yes-men. It must have cost him a great deal, but he complied, and asked to be ‘put at the disposal of the group’ again. Goethals threw him a couple of bones. A place in the starting line-up at St Étienne on 16 March, where Éric scored his side’s only goal (1–1), and a walk-on part in a 0–0 draw versus Sochaux the following weekend. Then the carpet was whisked from under his feet one more time, and this time for good. Milan were beaten 1–0 at the Vélodrome in a farcical encounter: the stadium’s floodlights failed in the 88th minute of the game, and the
rossoneri
refused to return to the field when power had been restored. UEFA awarded Marseille a 3–0 victory as a result. Cantona was nowhere to be seen. Neither was he when Strasbourg were crushed 4–1 in the French Cup. Or Dijon pushed aside 3–0 in the same competition, or Nancy atomized 6–2 on 12 April in the league.

The cruel crowd of the Vélodrome turned against the pariah. A few months previously, they had been singing ‘Canto! Canto!’ and now . . . ‘They worshipped him,’ Olmeta told me, ‘but that’s the nature of French supporters. In France, a player is a piece of meat. People chew them up and spit them out.’ Crucially, Tapie had the local pressmen eating out of his hand. The champagne they were offered on the
Phocéa
went to their heads. There could only be one side to the Cantona story. In a nutshell: disgruntled player, successful manager, visionary chairman. There, you have it. Marseille won without Éric, Éric must be wrong.

The national dailies showed more understanding, which wasn’t difficult. Cantona, who had kept a very low profile since he had been ‘spat out’ by his club, finally opened up in mid-April to
L’Équipe.
He needed to be trusted, he said, he wanted to be treated like a man first, a footballer second, he craved respect as a human being – and he was getting none of these things. ‘I am sensitive,’ he had said while at Montpellier. ‘I need to feel warmth around me to be efficient in my job. I will not change.’ He hadn’t. He was not courting controversy, merely issuing a plea for understanding. For the first time in his life, he was losing heart, ‘like a child who’s been dreaming, and sees this dream taken away from him’, as Olmeta put it to me.

Goethals ignored him. Marseille won surprisingly easily in Moscow, where Spartak were routed 3–0 in the semi-finals of the European Cup. Éric hadn’t even been on the plane to the USSR, nor did he figure on the bench when the Soviet champions were beaten 1–0 in the return leg. OM were easing towards a third consecutive title in the
championnat
, and Tapie revelled in the plaudits he was receiving for his all-conquering team. French football, which had invented European competitions,
¹⁶
hungered for international recognition to such an extent that Tapie’s shortcomings could be airbrushed in the name of expediency. PSG folded in the Cup (2–0 to Marseille), and Cantona’s absence went unnoticed in the
Te Deum
which the media sang in near unison. Further Cup wins against Nantes and second division Rodez saw OM through to the final in June. A 1–0 victory over Auxerre ensured that the championship trophy stayed at the Vélodrome – then it was time to prepare for the coronation proper, in Europe this time. The crown was the 8-kilo silver trophy which the Spanish call
La Orejona
(‘the big-eared cup’). Bari, at the top of Italy’s boot heel, had been chosen as the venue to hold the final of the competition on 29 May, which would pit OM against rank outsiders Red Star Belgrade. Éric was invited to attend – but as a spectator only. Not unsurprisingly, he chose to remain at home, and watched a dreary game surrounded by his family. The Yugoslav side boasted a magnificently balanced midfield (the names roll off the tongue of any
connaisseur:
Jugovi
, Mihaijlovi
, Prosine
ki, Savi
evi
) and possessed in Darko Pan
ev one of the greatest strikers of his generation, but opted to channel this exceptional talent towards destroying Marseille’s football rather than expressing their own. They rode their luck to reach a penalty shoot-out in which OM’s world-renowned stars, deflated by their failure to engineer the expected triumph, would present Red Star with the trophy on a plate. This is precisely what they did that night, with arguably their most creative player 2,000 miles away, which is as close as he would ever get to lifting the ‘Big Cup’ in his entire career.

Ten days later, Marseille missed another appointment with what Tapie believed to be their destiny. Monaco prevailed 1–0 in the final game of the season, and it was Arsène Wenger, not Raymond Goethals, who left the Parc des Princes with the Coupe de France. I couldn’t determine whether Éric watched the game or not. By then, he had retreated to Joseph and Lucienne’s
cabanon
on the Côte Bleue, having added another title to his collection. He had played eighteen games in the championship, scoring eight goals along the way. Without him, OM wouldn’t have had such a bright start to the season. Without him, there mightn’t have been a medal around the neck of the teammates who said nothing when he was left to rot away for the best part of six months.

Cantona was kicked off the stage after the opening act, but had taken on one of the lead roles until then. His reluctance to associate himself with the successes of a man he despised, and despised perhaps more than any other he’d ever met, played into the hands of those who claim that he ‘failed’ at Marseille. His name has all but been erased from the club’s history; that he himself wouldn’t wish it to be different doesn’t mean that his critics’ verdict is fair.

‘Me, I don’t give a toss whether I’m playing for Marseille [or not],’ he said in 2007. ‘What I love is the game. There are people who want to win at any price, because their pleasure is not in the winning itself, but in showing off after the victory. My pleasure is in the moment. I’ve never understood that some people could be proud of winning after having cheated.’

Cantona may have been many things, not all of them laudable. But a cheat? Never.

A departure from OM was now a certainty, with Lyon and PSG two possible destinations. But neither could satisfy Éric, who had been suffocating in the goldfish bowl of Marseille. He would go where he could breathe again, as far away from the noxious environment of football as possible, but without endangering his place in the national team, the only place he felt he could play the game as it ought to be played. Unsurprisingly, he chose to listen to his heart, and made a choice that was simultaneously logical and disastrous.

Upon leaving Montpellier, Michel Mézy had taken over the ailing club of his home town, Nîmes Olympique, which had spent the previous decade in the second division. Mézy, the
Crocodiles
’ key player in their golden age – the early 1970s, when they twice took part in the UEFA Cup – proved an astute manager in his first season at the newly built Stade des Costières. The Nîmois finished the 1990–91 campaign as champions of division 2A, which gave them promotion back to the elite. Mézy had achieved this success with largely homegrown talent, but knew he needed reinforcements if Nîmes were to retain their status, and naturally turned to some of the players he had won the French Cup with when at Montpellier. Éric was the first name on his list. Once he had secured him, Mézy contacted William Ayache and Jean-Claude Lemoult, who accepted his offer, while another Marseille outcast, Philippe Vercruysse, followed Cantona to the ancient Roman city.

Nîmes clearly had no chance to challenge for major honours, but honours were not paramount in Éric’s mind at the time. He had just won a bauble that meant nothing to him. He craved fresh air, he longed for football played without compromise, and Nîmes could provide him with both. Moreover, it held other significant attractions. As Didier Fèvre put it to me, ‘Canto liked the louche appeal of that place.’ Nestled between the Mediterranean Sea and the hills of the Cévennes, this medium-sized town punched well above its weight, not least because of the efforts of its charismatic mayor (a role which, in France, combines the power of a council leader and the prestige of a lord mayor) and MP, Jean Bousquet, the owner of the Cacharel fashion house, with whom Éric felt an immediate affinity. Nîmes’ past could be felt at every corner of its stark, sun-drenched streets. The Tour Magne, the Maison Carrée, the Temple of Diana – no other French city boasted such an astonishingly well-preserved architectural heritage from the time of the Caesars. The jewel in that crown was the Arânes de Nîmes, built in the first century AD, in which aficionados gathered in their thousands to watch the
ferias
, the corridas on horseback of which Cantona was a devoted follower.
¹⁷
Bousquet had also invested considerable funds into a number of cultural initiatives, which had made Nîmes a leading centre of the contemporary arts scene in the south of France. Cantona could tick all the boxes on his wishlist.