Cantona (45 page)

No one saw it coming. The front page of
L’Équipe
bore a single word: ‘INQUALIFIABLE’, which meant: ‘unable to qualify’, but also ‘impossible to describe’ and ‘disgraceful’. Any sub-editor would have been proud of this witty example of self-inflicted
Schadenfreude.
The shame was that a picture of Éric Cantona had been chosen to illustrate France’s footballing Waterloo – and that
France Football
followed suit a few days later. He most certainly didn’t deserve to be made a symbol of failure. Cantona had put France in front with his sixth goal of the qualifiers. With 32 minutes on the clock, fed by Papin, he volleyed from six yards to open the scoring, and 48,402 spectators were booking a trip to America. They still had their tickets in their hands when Emil Kostadinov equalized five minutes later from a poorly defended corner. France controlled the game, and a draw was good enough. But with twenty-three seconds to go, from a free kick which had been awarded to the French (!) within touching distance of the Bulgarian right corner flag, David Ginola opted to send a wild, deep cross to what the French call ‘the third post’ which sailed over Cantona – the only French player present in the opposition box at the time – landed on the other wing and was quickly, beautifully worked upfield. Three passes later, the same Kostadinov found himself running towards Bernard Lama’s goal in a tight angle, and, despite Laurent Blanc’s desperate lunge, arrowed a magnificent strike under the bar, so emphatic that it almost screamed: ‘WE’RE IN THE WORLD CUP!’ to the silenced ground. The power of the shot was such that Bernard Lama didn’t stand a chance. France were out. Houllier, chin down, hands in pockets, walked a few desultory steps on the touchline, where his assistant Aimé Jacquet held his head in his hands. It couldn’t be. But it was.

The French manager tore Ginola to pieces in his post-match press conference. ‘He sent an Exocet missile through the heart of French football,’ he said. ‘He committed a crime against the team, I repeat: a crime against the team.’ Houllier, a very emotional man, was factually correct, of course. Had the PSG winger not given away possession in the dying moments of the game, France would have qualified and Bulgaria would never have reached the semi-finals of USA 94. But what Houllier didn’t mention was the statuesque reaction of the French midfield and defence to the Bulgarian counter-attack. Didier Deschamps, Reynald Pedros and Emmanuel Petit had switched off, jogging when they should have been running for their lives, and watched the ball go from the other end of the park to the back of their own net in nineteen seconds. Neither did the soon-to-be former national coach explain why it was Pedros (5’ 8”) rather than, say, Sauzée (6’ 2”) or even Cantona (6’ 2”) who had been put on the goal-line for the corner kick that led to Kostadinov’s headed equalizer. Everyone knew who would be the first loser in this game of ifs and buts. Houllier fell on his sword, and was replaced by Jacquet.

Gerard’s anger had not abated when we relived this catastrophic moment fifteen years later. ‘It was a pleasure to have Cantona in your team,’ he told me. ‘He was a gem, a loyal man, a player who gave everything. But Ginola? . . . I’ll never say anything good about Ginola.’ He broke his bread like ‘Tiger’ O’Reilly broke a match when asked how he rated Don Bradman. ‘As a cricketer? The best. As a man? Not worth
that,’
the leg-spinner had said, snapping the stick in his powerful fingers. What Houllier could never forgive was not so much a temporary moment of madness than what had preceded it: Ginola had publicly questioned the soundness of his coach’s decision to give preference to Papin and Cantona rather than to him in his starting eleven – and intimated that Papin and Cantona could do as they wished in the French set-up, that they had forced their manager’s hand. Against Israel, it was he, Ginola, who had provided the assist for Sauzée’s opening goal, and who scored a superb second; but Houllier kept him on the bench until the 69th minute against Bulgaria, when the score was still level at 1–1. He certainly wished he had kept him there.

The next morning, as France awoke in a state of shock, an unshaven Cantona, wearing a dazzling white suit, was the last to board the Air France shuttle that took passengers of the earliest Paris-Manchester flight to their plane. By pure chance, my
France Football
colleague Jean-Michel Brochen – then at
L’Équipe –
found himself sitting just behind Cantona on the Airbus. His mission was to extract a pearl or two from the clammed-up star of the humiliated national team. Jean-Michel, who had first met Cantona on the night he shaved his head in Brest, six years earlier, knew that the safest policy was to resist the temptation to tap on Éric’s shoulder. As the plane landed, footballer and journalist exchanged a polite greeting, nothing more (‘No, I don’t talk [to the press],’ were Éric’s parting words), and went their separate ways – except that their destination was the same: Éric’s home from home, the Worsley Novotel, where the French-speaking staff (who adored Cantona) were used to welcoming a variety of pressmen who had come from the other side of the Channel. What followed over the next few days was hardly spectacular, but quite comical all the same, and highlighted a certain streak of innocence in Éric’s character which I believe is worth mentioning here.

Every morning, Jean-Michel, accompanied by another French journalist, Geoffroy Garitier of
Le Journal du Dimanche
, walked down to the breakfast room where, every morning, Éric Cantona could be found sitting down to a bowl of cereal. And every morning, the same exchange: ‘Good morning’ – ‘Good morning’ – ‘Éric, could we have a chat with you?’ – ‘No. I don’t talk.’ Then, every morning, the two reporters would drive to The Cliff, the ramshackle group of buildings and primitive pitches which couldn’t really be described as a ‘training complex’. Security was lax, consisting of a handful of ageing stewards who had probably brewed tea for Duncan Edwards, and didn’t mind strangers wandering around the car park. How things have changed. For four days, every day, Jean-Michel and Geoffroy placed slips of paper under the windscreen-wiper of Cantona’s Audi (‘Éric – can we have a chat later?’), adding their room number more in hope than in expectation. The next morning at breakfast time, Éric would appear in the hotel’s restaurant, make his way to the journalists’ table, shake their hands, say the customary
‘Ça va?
’, and when they inevitably asked: ‘Can we talk to you later?’, just as inevitably reply:

‘No. I don’t talk.’

This game of cat-and-mouse lasted for the full duration of Jean-Michel’s stay; beyond that, in fact. A year later, he was at The Cliff again. Éric had kept his room at the Worsley, but was also renting a house which had been occupied by Mark Hughes before him. More slips of paper placed on the windscreen, blank following blank, a routine which had become hilarious to the journalist himself. Nevertheless, one day, he wandered into the training ground’s main building, where a kind soul directed him to Alex Ferguson’s office. The manager, a Francophile, as we’ve seen, happened to cross his path on the stairs and asked him whether he would like to have a chat. How times have changed. Jean-Michel was deep in conversation with Ferguson (‘I’d pay to watch Cantona play’ was one of the manager’s most vivid quotes) when a rap was heard on the door. It was a sheepish Éric who had come to apologize for arriving late for training (not for the first time, it seems). He had spent the night at his Leeds home and been caught in an almighty traffic jam on his way from Yorkshire. Ferguson gently chided him, and recommended an alternative route. Jean-Michel popped the usual question (‘Éric – can we have a chat later?’), and, as you’ve guessed already, got the usual answer.

‘No. I don’t talk.’

Comical? Certainly. There never was any animosity in Cantona’s stubborn refusal to speak, just an almost childish – quite endearing, in fact – will not to give in to defeat. The night of that game against Bulgaria had been ‘the worst in my life’, he had said – and meant it. Disciplinary problems had prevented him from helping France to qualify for the 1990
Mondiale.
Euro 92 had seen a collective collapse for which no one could remember a precedent. The 1994 World Cup, which he had been so close to, had turned away like a woman offering her lips, then slamming her bedroom door shut with no explanation.

But Cantona was also a brave man. Some of his unfortunate (or guilty) teammates had thrown in the towel. Laurent Blanc, Jean-Pierre Papin and Franck Sauzée, destroyed by the failure of
Les Bleus
, announced their international retirement with immediate effect. Fortunately for France, only Sauzée stuck to his word in the end. Papin rejoined the national team in March 1994, Blanc two months later, while Ginola carried on as if nothing had happened, despite Éric siding with his sacked coach in forthright terms. ‘Who is Ginola?’ he asked. ‘He played five times for France, and lost on three occasions. I’m angry with him because he’s manipulated people, because he talked bullshit to journalists so that their readers would believe him. [ . . .] If he talks to the press rather than to us, it’s because he hasn’t got any balls. Fuck it, if I was choosing the team, we’d play with twelve strikers!’ When his interviewer, Jean Issartel of
France Football
, expressed some surprise at Cantona’s choice of words, Éric made sure that his message to the PSG would-be model was as unequivocal as possible: ‘He’s got the technical ability. But there’s the head. You must write this down. When you let yourself be influenced like that, you’re an ass. The head doesn’t follow. He’s got every quality except this one. He’s too weak.’

Cantona himself could not be accused of weakness. Pilloried as he had been, he applied himself to the task of salvaging as much as possible. Henri Émile, by then a trusted member of France’s coaching staff, was a privileged witness to this act of rebellion, for an act of rebellion it was, but a selfless one, for which Éric never got the credit he deserved. ‘Aimé Jacquet took the lead on what was supposed to be a temporary basis,’ Émile told me.

There was more to France’s astonishing defeat against Israel than was made public at the time. Embarrassing rumours had been circulating for a while in and around Clairefontaine, the superb estate which had become the national team’s headquarters five years previously. They were substantiated, but remained whispers within the upper circle of the sporting press, and, to the best of my knowledge, appear in print for the first time here. Houllier’s squad had its fair share of flamboyant characters, for whom it had become customary to slip out of the training camp under cover of night, and meet up in Chez Adam, a VIP club situated near the Champs-Elysées, whose owner was one of France’s most successful producers of pornographic videos. Footballers formed a substantial share of Chez Adam’s clientele, and it had become a tradition of sorts to organize after-match parties there – which the players called
‘dégagements
’, quite an amusing term, as it turns out, since it can be translated both as ‘letting off steam’ and ‘a goalkeeper’s clearance’. These
dégagements
normally took place after the games, and the unwritten code of misconduct seems to have been broken on that occasion. Some of
Les Bleus
were said to have acted as if Israel had already been beaten, and visited Chez Adam on not one, but several consecutive nights before the match was played. They didn’t expect to be turned away at the door. Admission criteria were at the same time vague and strict, but helping a footballer to stick to an energy-saving lifestyle was not one of them. You needn’t be famous to get in, but had to know the right people, or be accompanied by one of them. Discretion was guaranteed. The girls with whom most (but not all) of the players ended up were not interested in gathering material for kiss-and-tell stories that could be sold to newspapers – French privacy laws saw to that. What’s more, journalists too were regular visitors to the club’s dimly lit salons and suites, and were unlikely to risk their own marriages or careers to find themselves on the wrong end of a libel action.

By pure chance, I talked to a couple of former patrons of Chez Adam as I was completing this book. I was having breakfast with a Marseilles restaurateur I’d been told could put me in touch with a couple of Éric’s friends. His eyes lit up at the mention of the ‘good times’ he’d had in their company. Numerous stories followed, all of them unprintable. ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ he said. ‘There was no violence, nobody was forced to do anything against their will, and certainly not the girls. If you talk about Chez Adam, be sure of this: there was no harm done to anyone. It was young, healthy, successful people enjoying life, laughing, drinking, joking and, yes, OK, sometimes taking one of the girls upstairs . . . but what was fascinating was that you saw these guys [the players] in situations where they had lowered all of their defences. X
—
was a grumpy old sod. Y
—
was just fantastic fun . . .’