Cantona (32 page)

The acrobat at work: at Clairefontaine with the French squad.

The 1992 European Championships are now remembered for the astonishing triumph of Denmark, and little else. The Danes had been drafted in at the eleventh hour (nine days before the start of the competition, to be precise) to replace the team they had finished behind in their qualifying pool. The soon-to-be ‘former Yugoslavia’,
²³
then torn apart by civil war, had been excluded by UEFA in accordance with United Nations resolution no. 757. Denmark, perennial makeweights of international competitions (one participation in the final phase of the World Cup until then), then qualified ahead of France and England in the Euro 92’s group phase before dispatching Dennis Bergkamp’s Netherlands and Jürgen Klinsmann’s Germany en route to the biggest shock witnessed in a major tournament since Uruguay beat Brazil 2–1 at the Estádio do Maracanã in 1950. The Danish squad’s preparation had been minimal, so much so that many of the players were said (wrongly, it seems) to have cut their summer holidays short to rejoin the squad in Sweden, where the championships took place. Their coach, Richard Møller Nielsen, had stayed at home: there was a new kitchen to be installed, apparently. Michael Laudrup, the undoubted star of a team in which there weren’t many – not yet, anyway – had announced his retirement shortly before UEFA informed the Danes that they had qualified by default. The rank outsiders dropped their buckets and spades and, with all the odds stacked against them, had their day in the sun. It made for a heartwarming story, which, unfortunately, the football played in the competition didn’t live up to. Denmark, with an exceptional Peter Schmeichel in goal, set out to nullify what little threat their opponents dared to pose, and succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, while their Viking-helmeted supporters popularized face-painting and drank Sweden dry. Goals were scored at the pitifully low rate of 2.13 per game, an average inferior to that of the most dismal World Cup of modern times, the Italian 1990
Mondiale
(2.21). And for the French, it was even more miserable than that.

Les Bleus
hadn’t taken part in a major tournament for six years, but made most observers’ short list of favourites. No other team had ever sailed through the qualifiers with such ease: eight games, eight victories, a record that still stands. Before England had prevailed 2–0 at Wembley in February, Platini’s men had remained undefeated for over two years. A couple of hiccups against Belgium (3–3) and Switzerland (1–2 in Lausanne) prior to the championships didn’t worry their supporters unduly, as Michel Platini had used these friendlies to try out new players and tinker with tactical formations (no less than six substitutes had been introduced against the Swiss, another European record in internationals for Platini). When, five days before the start of the tournament, France drew their last warm-up game 1–1 with the Netherlands, the satisfaction of having contained a redoubtable opponent obscured the negativity of the performance. It was almost universally thought that, once the tinkering had stopped, the true visage of France would appear.

Sadly, it was a sullen face that Platini’s team showed to the rest of Europe. This most inventive of players adopted a negative strategy that would have been anathema to his mentor Michel Hidalgo. For France’s inaugural game against Sweden, Platini ditched the 4-3-3 that had served him so well during the pre-tournament phase in favour of a lopsided system in which Cantona was required to play in a withdrawn position behind Jean-Pierre Papin, and Pascal Vahirua alone provided a measure of width. The Swedes were well worth the 1–0 lead they held at half-time, and were entitled to feel disappointed when JPP equalized from fifteen yards on the hour. Éric had been at best subdued, at worst transparent. Some wondered whether the calmer, more mature Cantona who had emerged from four tremendously successful months in England hadn’t lost some of his old bite. Judging by his next game, they might well have had a point.

The ninety minutes of that goalless draw between England and France must rank among the most tedious ever suffered by the fans of both teams. Platini asked his veteran midfielder Luis Fernandez to drop so deep that
Les Bleus
took the shape of an inverted pyramid, a grim 5-3-2 in which Cantona and Papin, with no support to speak of, watched the ball being tackled to and fro in midfield by the likes of Carlton Palmer and Didier Deschamps. Come the end of the most depressing anticlimax of the competition, Graham Taylor’s and Michel Platini’s teams found themselves with two points from two games – in other words, perilously close to the elimination their displays so far merited. And to every neutral’s satisfaction, they exited the tournament three days later, Sweden taking care of England by 2 goals to 1 and Denmark, astonishingly, seeing off France by an identical score-line. No French or English player featured in the Group 1 XI selected by the French press after three games. Cantona? Not a single goal. No assist. His only contribution of note had been in France’s equalizer against Denmark, when his cross from the right was controlled, then backheeled by Jean-Philippe Durand for the on-rushing Papin. A few hours after their defeat, a lugubrious French team boarded a private charter plane and left Sweden in silence.

What on earth could have gone so disastrously wrong? The individual qualities of the players were not in doubt. A number of them had stepped up from Marc Bourrier’s successful
Espoirs
(though not Stéphane Paille, by then marooned in Caen), Laurent Blanc among them, who now played in Serie A (with Napoli). Jean-Pierre Papin too had gone to Italy, where he counted Ruud Gullit and Franco Baresi as teammates in Milan. No less than seven of the thirteen players who had fired blanks against the English were in Bernard Tapie’s employment at all-conquering Marseille, who had just won their fourth consecutive
championnat
: Manuel Amoros, Basile Boli, Bernard Casoni, Jean-Philippe Durand, Franck Sauzée, Jocelyn Angioma and Didier Deschamps. OM, runners-up in the 1991 European Cup, which they would win two years later, now belonged to the pantheon of European club football. Other French teams such as Auxerre, PSG, Monaco and Bordeaux had recently featured in the latter stages of UEFA competitions. Never had French football been in such rude health at international level – as far as clubs were concerned. Awash with television money, they were able to attract the best talent available on the Continent and beyond, while retaining a strong French core. There was something incomprehensible, then, about the fear that had suddenly gripped the national team in Sweden. Platini was criticized for his timorous approach (with some justification) and for his eagerness to switch systems from one game to the next (a less fair charge, as tactical adaptability had been long been a strength of
Les Bleus).
Many also suspected that the dressing-room unity made much of beforehand by Cantona among others was a façade, and that deep faultlines ran within the camp, which was dominated – at least numerically – by Marseille players. Éric probably sensed them more acutely than any other, but only alluded to them much later on and then rather obliquely: he was aware that France’s failure was partly to be blamed on himself.

Some individuals he found difficult to relate to, particularly those who played for his former club Marseille. Reminiscing in 2007, he had damning words for Didier Deschamps in particular. ‘[He] is not a man,’ he said, ‘and the gravest thing is that there are guys who’ve won beside them [
a ‘them’ by which Éric made clear he meant Didier Deschamps and Marcel Desailly
] who despise them as much as I do.’ When
L’Équipe Magazine
pressed for more detail, Cantona replied, ‘I don’t hold anything against them. To each his own.’ Then: ‘Honestly, would these people save you if you were drowning?’

Éric could hold a grudge, as we know, but why would he focus his anger on someone – Deschamps – who had only arrived at OM
after
he himself had left for Nîmes? DD, or Dédé, represented everything that jarred with Cantona’s belief in the primacy of self-expression on the football field. Deschamps seldom ventured beyond the halfway line, and revelled in the functionality of his own role. It was easy, not to say convenient, to feel that he had ultimately placed the game at the service of his career. That he was an apparatchik, a civil servant looking for promotion after promotion, in short, a water-carrier (
porteur d’eau).
This expression was in common usage in French football parlance before Cantona made it his own a few years later, but it only acquired its derogatory connotation once Éric had directed it at Deschamps.
²⁴
That the holding midfielder was remarkably good at what he did, and won everything a footballer of his day and age could have won, including the Champions League, European Championships and World Cup titles that all eluded Éric, undoubtedly struck him as an injustice. But there may have been another, simpler explanation for the dislike that Cantona expressed in such forceful terms over the years. At the time of Euro 92, Deschamps was only twenty-three and keenly aware of the seniority of other squad members, Cantona among them. The problems would arise later, and would only be proposed as an explanation for the 1992 failure in hindsight, when Aimé Jacquet, who enjoyed a close relationship with his defensive midfielder, made Deschamps his captain in 1995. This was little over three months after Éric had been stripped of the armband, in the wake of the infamous Crystal Palace ‘kung-fu kick’. Jealousy there may have been at the usurper’s elevation, as well as a feeling – shared by many Cantona supporters – that Deschamps actively campaigned against Éric’s reinstatement to the national team once he’d served his ban, and deprived him of a chance to take part in the 1996 European Championships and the 1998 World Cup. DD vehemently denied that this was the case, and, in the view of what would happen in January 1996 (the time of Éric’s second ‘suicide’, as we’ll see), if he’d tried to undermine Cantona’s position within the French camp, he’d failed. When I contacted him to get his side of the story, his reply was courteous but firm: he had no wish to revisit that part of their common past. Many of the dark corners in Cantona’s career become even darker when you try to shine a light on them.

The unravelling of France’s aspirations in Sweden is only alluded to in Cantona’s autobiography. All that can be found is an eight-line paragraph which lists ‘bad luck’ and ‘inexperience’ as reasons for the desperately poor performances of Platini’s team. Neither explanation holds water.
Les Bleus
created very few chances, and were punished for their timidity; referees had officiated fairly; no injuries had disrupted the team’s preparation; and it was the same group of players who had torn through the opposition all through the qualification phase. Éric must have realized that Platini had failed to galvanize his charges when it most mattered, but couldn’t bring himself to admit that responsibility could be laid at his manager’s door. How could he condemn the ‘big brother’ who had shown so much faith in him when everyone else had abandoned any hope of a future for Cantona? The gratitude and loyalty he felt towards his saviour forbade him to side with those who, quite reasonably, believed that Platini should resign his position. And when the time came for the manager to step down later in the summer, Éric would make himself a target for ridicule with one of the most quixotic decisions of his whole career. He announced his retirement from international football at the age of twenty-six, and was fortunate that no one was prepared to take his words seriously.

Éric and Isabelle could only enjoy a few weeks’ rest away from football before the Leeds squad set off to Ireland in the penultimate week of July, a trip which passed without incident – unless some late-night high jinks can be considered ‘incidents’ in the life of a professional footballer. On one occasion, while Wilkinson slept in his Dublin hotel room, Cantona and one of his teammates broke the curfew, slid down a drainpipe in the small hours of the morning, and went in search of entertainment in the centre of the city. According to my source, their search was not unsuccessful. His integration was proceeding apace, and proving to be fun, too. Not for the first (or last time), English football in its many guises would provide Éric with a welcome break from the vicissitudes he endured serving his country.

This Irish interlude was brief, dominated by the news of David Rocastle’s arrival at Eiland Road. Many observers were baffled by Wilkinson’s willingness to pay £2m (twice Cantona’s transfer fee) for an attacking midfielder who had suffered a serious knee injury two seasons previously at Arsenal, and scored a goal only every nine games or so for the London club. ‘Rocky’ Rocastle, adored as he was by the Highbury crowd, had never established himself at international level. It was later felt that George Graham had exploited the midfielder’s selflessness, bravery and enthusiasm with a degree of callousness, and sacrificed the most naturally gifted player at his disposal to serve a vision of the game in which endeavour, organization and ruthlessness must prevail over fluency and skill. Rocastle’s reward had been a right knee reduced to pulp, and what amounted to a summary dismissal. Heartbroken at the idea of leaving the club he had played for since leaving school at the age of 16, the player never settled in Yorkshire.