Cantona (51 page)

Consolations could be found on the domestic front, of course, though Aston Villa were unfortunate to be beaten 2–1 in early November when, in truth, they had dominated throughout the game. This didn’t prevent the Villa coach Ron Atkinson from being sacked less than a week after this cruel defeat against his old club. Cantona, playing behind Paul Scholes for the first time, had had more productive afternoons, but luckily for his side, Gary Walsh put the Catalan debacle behind him with a succession of match-saving stops. United – and Éric – remained enigmas. Uncertainty seeped through the team and the player who had made such a telling contribution to the previous season’s triumphs. It seemed at times that he and they were victims of their own arrogance, as if they didn’t really care about the outcome of a match, as if they were too good to be true to themselves. On better days, they could rediscover their swagger and appear unbeatable. They thrashed their City neighbours 5–0 on 10 November, their biggest win in a century of Manchester derbies. Éric provided three assists and a goal of quite breathtaking quality. He flicked a fine cross-field ball from Kanchelskis with the outside of his right boot and drove it past the City ’keeper with his left, all in one glorious movement. He was unable to carry that new-found form into France’s Euro qualifier in Poland, where
Les Bleus
recorded their third consecutive scoreless draw, but shone again when Crystal Palace capitulated 3–0 at Old Trafford in mid-November, a result that took United to the top of the table for the first time that season. For Cantona, a seventh goal in eleven Premiership matches; for United, an eighth victory in as many home league games, despite a number of injuries (Sharpe, Parker, Schmeichel, Keane and Giggs) which had struck them just before the game that would surely decide whether they had a future in Europe or not.

Cantona’s return to the Champions League against IFK provided columnists with an easy 1,000 words to deliver. It was all about Éric, again, in the papers as on television. Commercial networks carried a new advertisement for Eurostar, in which the most famous of cross-Channel imports dreamily delivered a line many think (wrongly) he came up with himself: ‘Does a bird who sings in a cage sing as sweetly as a bird who is free?’ But the pre-match hype fell flat, as United were destroyed by the pace of Jesper Blomquist, another player who would later be brought to Old Trafford by Alex Ferguson. The Scot’s team had spent the previous night in the hotel where he had celebrated his Aberdeen side’s remarkable victory over Real Madrid in the 1983 Cup Winners Cup final. It didn’t bring his new charges any luck. Even with Barcelona losing 2–1 away to Galatasaray, United were as good as out. Their defending had ‘disgusted’ Ferguson, who stopped short of making comments on the cards that had been shown to three of his players, one yellow each for Hughes and Cantona (for an ugly challenge on Jonas Bjorklund) and a red for Paul Ince. For all his indiscipline, however, Éric had also been his team’s most potent weapon – not that it amounted to much: his assist for Hughes’s goal came too late to alter the course of the game.

United flew back to England on flight LEI9586 in silence, and landed at 2.30 a.m. in Manchester. Chairman Martin Edwards, one of the passengers on that plane, would have to address his shareholders at the club’s AGM later that day. He had much to ponder: that defeat alone had cost his club an estimated £7m. And there was the question that Rob Hughes – without a doubt the most penetrating contemporary chronicler of Éric’s English career – dared ask in
The Times
: ‘Is it time to say
au revoir
to Cantona?’ ‘I submit that the Frenchman is at the root of Manchester United’s problems,’ he wrote, ‘as well as being the catalyst for their recent glories. There is the question of Cantona’s effect on United’s discipline, or rather their indiscipline. His manager has too often indulged the spiteful side of Cantona’s nature.’

As the great Manchester City manager Joe Mercer said in December 1972, on the occasion of one of George Best’s regular walk-outs from Old Trafford, ‘The foundation of success is the strength of the weakest players. Genius is great when it is on song. It’s more than a nuisance when it goes bad because it contaminates what is around it.’ And the rot was spreading fast, as was shown in a rancorous 0–0 draw between Arsenal and United on 26 November. Seven players were booked, Mark Hughes sent off. Not that Arsenal were models of good behaviour themselves: their tearful playmaker Paul Merson had revealed his cocaine and alcohol addictions (twelve pints a night) a few days before this game. But there seemed to be a wild undercurrent to United’s progress that couldn’t be attributed only to the brutality then prevalent in the English game. Still, they could be superb when the red mist didn’t descend on them, and deserved the luck that often came to their assistance: when Norwich, a fine footballing side, were beaten 1–0 in early December, United had achieved the remarkable feat of a ninth consecutive league victory at home, and without conceding a single goal. Questionable refereeing decisions had considerably eased their task that day, however: the visitors had a valid goal cancelled for a non-existent offside, and should have been awarded a penalty for a blatant foul by Gary Neville in the box. Cantona played with assurance and wit, scoring the decisive goal after combining with Brian McClair.

At no other time in his footballing life did Éric display more sharply the quasi-schizoid nature of his character on the pitch than during these months that led to the Crystal Palace explosion. He delivered another brilliant performance when Galatasaray were pulverized 4–0 in Manchester on 7 December. I should add that the Turkish champions were already out of the competition, and that the 1–1 draw that Barcelona and IFK agreed to in the Camp Nou made this game an irrelevance. The pressure was off, and Cantona’s critics would argue that this was why it was one of the very few occasions when Europe saw him at his best; at his worst too, when he petulantly hacked at the legs of his man-marker Bulent, who had dispossessed him quite legally. The referee put his name in the book.

This hiccuping season next saw him head for Trabzon in Turkey, where Azerbaijan were hosting France for a Euro qualifier, as the political situation in their country made the staging of the match there far too dangerous in UEFA’s eyes.
Les Bleus
won 2–0, a mere parenthesis in the chaos that was engulfing Manchester United, who lost at home for the first time since 3 March 1994. Stan Collymore inspired Nottingham Forest to a 2–1 victory that was, again, marred by a flurry of cautions, eight in all, with Ince and Stuart Pearce lucky to escape dismissal in an ugly confrontation. Cantona also scored his ninth goal of the campaign, to no avail: Blackburn now led the Premiership by two points. Éric, ‘his touch as delicate, his presence as forceful as ever’, added a tenth on Boxing Day, when Chelsea were beaten 3–2 at Stamford Bridge; but he also added another booking to his collection, for time-wasting this time. A bad-tempered 1–1 draw with Leicester followed, then a shockingly violent 2–2 in Southampton on New Year’s Eve, where an incensed Ferguson instructed his players to ‘go for their fucking throats’ at half-time, a recommendation that Cantona followed to the letter, flailing with his hands at Ken Monkou, then slapping Francis Benali (no angel he) to earn yet another caution, all this on the day Alex Ferguson had been awarded a CBE. It looked as if he had washed his hands of his players’ uncontrollable behaviour.

January 1995 followed a similar pattern. There were plenty of flowing moves, spectacular goals (Éric scored another three, bringing his tally to a barely credible fourteen in twenty-two domestic games) and controversial incidents – with Cantona in the role of the victim for once, when he was punched by a Sheffield United player in the third round of the FA Cup. United rolled on with growing authority. Lesser teams (Coventry and Sheffield United) were dispatched without fuss, contenders for the title (Newcastle and Blackburn) were dealt with with vim, verve and (sometimes mindless) aggression. Newcastle were fortunate to escape with a 1–1 draw at a torrid St James’ Park when Éric uncharacteristically missed two chances to wrap the game up in the final minutes. He was less generous with Rovers, the Premiership leaders, who succumbed to one of the most exhilarating goals of that English season. Ryan Giggs danced his way through Blackburn’s defence on the left flank, lost the ball, then, through sheer force of will, regained it inches from the corner flag, and sent a cross to the far post which caught ’keeper Tim Flowers and everyone else by surprise. Everyone, that is, except Cantona, who had timed his run from deep to perfection. Without once breaking his stride, he met the ball with a ferocious header that crashed into the roof of the net. This was not just a magnificent goal, but also a statement. The lead Blackburn still had in the Premiership – two points, with a game in hand – seemed insignificant in the face of United’s mighty performance. Give the champions a few more weeks, allow Éric to strike the same rapport with newcomer Andy Cole that he enjoyed with Ryan Giggs, and natural order would be restored. Cantona would see to it. He had always been a slow starter, a luxury car running on diesel. The more he played, the better he became. He was now tantalizingly close to his best, be it with Manchester United or with France, which he captained to an impressive 1–0 victory in the Netherlands.

No one could have guessed he would never hear ‘
La Marseillaise
’ again in a football ground – unless English fans sang it in his honour. He would bow out of international football with a record of 20 goals in 45 games that, in terms of efficiency, is proportionally superior to that of Zinédine Zidane (31 in 108). I’ll come back to the prevalent notion that Éric failed in his national team (‘in’ could be removed from that sentence, in the eyes of many). For the time being, it should be enough to recall these remarkable figures, and be reminded that all but one of these goals were scored from open play, and this when his managers often deployed him in a withdrawn position, as the lower base of an attacking triangle. Many injustices befell Éric Cantona throughout his career; few were less deserved.

On 22 January, an hour or so after Blackburn had been beaten thanks to his goal, Éric met Gary King in the players’ car park. The faithful gopher passed him the keys to the Audi; Cantona silently took the wheel and drove back to the Novotel. His solicitor Jean-Jacques Bertrand was due to fly from Paris the very next day to discuss the terms of a new three-year contract with Manchester United. Its terms would be finalized immediately after they had played an away game that shouldn’t tax them too much, as their opponents had only won one of their last ten Premiership matches. The champions had no reason to fear Crystal Palace.

Cantona songs still ring around Old Trafford in 2009. In this age when fans have shorter memories than those who filled the (much smaller) stands fifteen years ago, very few players warrant celebration of that kind so long after they’ve gone. You’ll occasionally hear ‘Rocky, Rocky, Rocky Rocastle’ at Arsenal games – but that is a mourning song for a cult hero whose life was claimed by a dreadful disease before he’d reached the age of 40. Who else? I’ve heard Peter Osgood’s name chanted at Stamford Bridge, but on one occasion only, and that was at the game that followed his death. Cantona is different. There is no tragic undertone to his songs. Singing them is another way of saying ‘We are Manchester United’, because, to the thousands who join in, Éric was and still is the spirit of the club.

Leading these songs – eight of them – is a man whose name is familiar to anyone associated with the club, its unofficial bard: Pete Boyle, keeper of the flame, poet after his own fashion, conductor of the Éric-worshipping choir. As long as Pete is around, no one will be allowed to forget that Cantona truly was the greatest Red Devil ever. I knew of him through a mutual friend, designer Jim Phelan, himself a Mancunian, who released a small number of records related to Manchester United on his Exotica label in the 1990s. Together with my musical mentor Mike Alway, he also played a prominent role in the conception of the Bend It! Series, which attempted a playful reconciliation of popular music and football long before it became fashionable to write dissertations about ‘terrace culture’. (I had a part in these too, in one instance contributing one of my very worst songs to a homage to Éric Cantona which only completists would find worth tracking down.) Pete’s own efforts – with a vocal ensemble called ‘The K Stand’ – didn’t strive for subtlety. He assembled a squad of drinking, chanting companions, and bellowed Old Trafford classics such as ‘Éric the King’ and ‘The Twelve Days of Cantona’ (lyrics: Pete Boyle) into a microphone. The result was rousing, chaotic or frightening, depending on which end of the supporting spectrum you found yourself.

I didn’t feel completely at ease when Pete and I finally met in a Manchester pub. His friends were not the sort of people I normally associated with in London wine bars. Our phone conversations and emails had been businesslike in tone, and I’d certainly made no mention in them that my own club allegiance was not to United, but to the ‘Southern ponces’ of Arsenal. I thought I knew his face, as he’d made an appearance in one of the videos United sold by the hundreds of thousands to Cantona’s fans. The man I bought a non-alcoholic round for (his mates favoured lager) had changed a great deal from the rather podgy character I’d seen in this film. He was much thinner, almost gaunt, and very, very intense. Soon, however, the awkwardness gave way to the camaraderie that football supporters share to a far greater degree than they’re given credit for in England. Pete recounted his tales, which, fine story-teller that he is, needed no embellishment.

This was the man who’d schlepped down to Croydon in a van, and slept in it on a car park, to make sure he’d be given the very first admission ticket to Éric’s appeal trial in the spring of 1995 (it is still in his possession). When Éric’s sentence was commuted from a jail term to 120 hours of community service, it was he who ran out of the courthouse to exclaim: ‘The King is free!’ He it was again who had organized the first demonstration of support for his hero outside Old Trafford once the verdict had been announced, and had been chased away by mounted police. I saw a film of it, shot by an amateur video cameraman. There were just half a dozen supporters who chanted their slogans outside the ground. Talking to one of them was like being introduced to the very core of the Cantona cult, to the most exclusive lodge of that Temple. Well over ten years after Cantona’s retirement, every weekend, Pete stood on a table in a United pub and led the beer guzzlers into another lung-bursting rendition of ‘Éric the King’ (‘a song we used to sing for Denis Law, and which the crowd picked up on when we played in Budapest’ – that would be on 15 September 1993, then).