Authors: Philippe Auclair
More immediately, a Manchester United side deprived of its main attacking threat was far less likely to catch up with Blackburn Rovers, who still led the league. The stock exchange delivered its verdict (£3m was wiped off the club’s value the day after the incident, when the shares dropped 5p to £1.26), and the bookmakers agreed with it. They lengthened the odds for Ferguson’s team to retain its title from 7/2 to 9/2, joint favourites. Thirty-six hours after Cantona had been sent off, Graham Sharpe, a spokesman for William Hill, announced that not a single bet of £10 or more had been placed on United to win the FA Cup or the Premiership since the incident. In the light of the FA’s first statement (‘charges of improper conduct and of bringing the game into disrepute will inevitably and swiftly follow’), it was obvious that a lengthy ban was to be expected. But how long would it be?
Manchester United hoped that, by acting quickly, they would be able to defuse the situation enough for the FA to resist the temptation of making an example of Cantona. The man in charge at Lancaster Gate, chief executive Graham Kelly, had led them to believe this could be the case when he faced the media on 26 January. ‘What happened was a stain on the game,’ he said. ‘If any offence is proved [
sic
], the player concerned is bound to face a severe punishment. The FA does not have the power to impose immediate suspension, but we have been in contact with Manchester United throughout the day and are confident that they will be responding in a proper manner.’ He carried on in that vein for a while, until his words felt less important than his willingness to repeat them ad nauseam. There was real menace behind the conciliatory tone of his message to the club. ‘I gave a clear indication at the start of the day that we expected Manchester United to come out strongly and unequivocally. We understand they are going to do that. We are confident that Manchester United will meet their responsibilities, not just to their own club, but to the widest interests of the game.’ Éric had by now been charged by the Football Association, and was given fourteen days to respond. What’s more, after two fans had made formal allegations of assault, he was also the subject of an investigation by Scotland Yard. The situation was already out of United’s control. A crash-landing couldn’t be avoided. All that could be hoped was that Éric would be a survivor when he could be pulled out of the wreck.
The day passed with innumerable telephone conversations between Alex Ferguson, Martin Edwards and other members of United’s board. It was agreed to hold an emergency meeting in a luxury Cheshire hotel that night, at which Alex Ferguson was joined by all of the club’s top brass. Éric’s offence was serious enough to warrant an annulment of his contract, and some of the men present at Alderley Edge had initially felt that no other response could be envisaged, Alex Ferguson among them. One should keep in mind that football was a less forgiving environment then than it is now, when convicted thugs like Joey Barton are offered an unlimited number of ‘last chances’, despite breaking the game’s rules and the law of the land in far more disgraceful a fashion than Éric did. Soon, however, a consensus was reached in Cantona’s case. Financial considerations of the kind Docherty referred to may have played their part, although it was far too early in the scandal to guess that the club would, indeed, make millions out of its player’s plight and subsequent ‘redemption’. Manchester United would not please its rivals by sacking Éric in order to claim moral supremacy.
The in-house trial of Éric Cantona became an exercise in damage limitation. United had to second-guess the FA’s intentions, and come up with a punishment that would be severe enough to earn the governing body’s respect in order to emerge from this unholy mess with the club’s reputation enhanced. Private encouragement was received from Lancaster Gate: should the club act in suitably decisive fashion, the FA would sanction its decision, and the matter would be laid to rest with as little fuss as possible. That, at least, is what United understood. Éric himself was completely unaware of what was happening 150 miles away, and behaved as if nothing had happened. While Isabelle and Raphaël were locked in their semi-detached Boothstown home, besieged by newspapermen and photographers, only opening the door to accept a bunch of flowers sent by an anonymous fan, he walked out through a explosion of flashbulbs, wearing an improbable jumper adorned with, among other things, skulls and bones, got into his Audi without a word, and made his way to United’s training ground. A few hours later, disbelieving shop assistants at the club’s megastore saw him buying a replica of his own shirt – complete with his name on the back – for his son. ‘He walked around as if he didn’t have a care in the world,’ one bewildered bystander said. This was, of course, a Cantona-esque way of showing the world that he, the son of Albert
et
Éléonore, was above all this nonsense. This display of calculated coolness under fire nearly landed him in serious trouble in the evening when, taking a stroll in Manchester city centre, upon leaving the bar of the Cornerhouse arts centre in the company of an unidentified friend, he came across six young men in suits, who started abusing him verbally in the street, quite violently, for several minutes. Cantona didn’t flinch, shrugged his shoulders, and walked back to the same bar, where he had a few more drinks, signing autographs for other customers with his usual good grace. ‘Whatever you may think, I can keep my nerve when I want to’, was the not-too-subtle message he had set out to communicate to others. Privately, though, he was fully aware of the gravity of his situation, and his nonchalant behaviour may well have been a means of reassuring himself that life, somehow, would carry on as before. It couldn’t, of course.
His fate was made public the next morning, when the media assembled to listen to Martin Edwards (Cantona himself received official confirmation of his punishment from a bailiff). The disgraced footballer would play no further part in United’s season. He would miss a minimum of sixteen games, and a maximum of twenty, should his team reach the FA Cup final, and the club had fined him two weeks’ wages (£10,800, not £20,000 as reported at the time). Edwards justified the club’s decisions in the high-minded language that is to be expected in such circumstances: ‘The game is bigger than Manchester United, and Manchester United is bigger than Éric Cantona. [ . . .] We have proved here that the reputation of Manchester United is above trophies.’ There was, however, a thinly disguised promise to Éric in his chairman’s message: ‘At some stage, we might wish to include him in [practice] matches to maintain his fitness and sanity, [but] that should not happen for a few weeks.’
United were playing a risky game. On one hand, they had fulfilled their promise to the FA, and hit their biggest star as hard as they had said they would: there was no precedent to a punishment of such magnitude in the recent history of the game. It was also hoped that the speed and harshness with which Cantona had been dealt by his club could persuade the criminal justice system to show leniency in its dealings with the player, and maybe even avoid an appearance in court. On the other, by suggesting that Cantona would be allowed to carry on training with his teammates, and even take part in games of an unspecified nature, the United board, wilfully or not, was forcing the FA’s hand, opening the door for its disciplinary commission to extend the ban to
all
matches. Should they do so, Cantona’s resentment might switch from his employers to the governing body, a neat reversal of responsibility in United’s view.
One can see the logic behind this carefully worked-out strategy. Once a decision had been reached to keep Cantona on United’s books (a decision that 82 per cent of the club’s fans agreed with, according to a poll commissioned by the
Manchester Evening News
), placating the notoriously volatile individual was no less a priority than satisfying the public’s opinion and the FA’s thirst for ‘justice’. By his own account, Éric was a particularly difficult man to live with when deprived of football, be it through suspension or injury. This is how he described his state of mind when forced to sit out two months of a season after the ball-throwing incident that ended his career at Nîmes:
My body and my head were so completely accustomed to that physical exercise which comes from training and football effort. I was deprived of that motivation and that thirst which make you surpass yourself. I was deprived of the need to work and of that energy you take with you to the stadium. I missed everything, the smells and the atmosphere of the dressing-room, the feeling of belonging to a group, of winning together. I had need for air, for space . . . and I needed the ball.
Whether he played or not, Éric still needed to be managed. Should United fail to care for him and, more importantly, to convince him that they
did
care, for the man as well as for the footballer, others would step in. Rumours already circulated of a departure from England to Barcelona, where Romário had just left to return to Brazil. More seriously, everyone in football knew that Internazionale were circling in the water, waiting for the player to be thrown overboard in time for them to pounce when the Italian transfer market reopened in a few weeks’ time. Barring separate action from an international body, an FA ban would only be enforceable in England, and Cantona would be free to play for the
interisti
as soon as a deal was reached. Martin Edwards later confirmed that, hours before the game at Selhurst Park, two emissaries of the
nerazzuri
(a young Massimo Moratti, shortly to become the Milanese club’s chairman, a position he still holds today, and his advisor Paolo Taveggia) had met him to discuss Cantona’s transfer to San Siro. They later watched the game from the relative comfort of the Selhurst Park directors’ box, sitting next Edwards and Éric’s solicitor Jean-Jacques Bertrand. ‘We had a cup of coffee and a nice little chat,’ the United chairman said, ‘but it was only out of pure courtesy. I told them that none of the players they were interested in were for sale.’ The players in question were Paul Ince – who would indeed join Inter six months later – and Cantona, then valued at £5m. Éric knew of Moratti’s interest, and was keener to listen to his proposals than he cared to admit once his future at Old Trafford had been secured. As several members of his close entourage assured me, United’s repeated failures in Europe had led Cantona to wonder what could have been if, six-and-a-half years earlier, he had instructed his agents to open negotiations with AC Milan instead of signing for Marseille. Inter could not pretend to be a force on a par with Silvio Berlusconi’s team, but it had huge resources at its disposal, and clearly thought of Cantona as a potential catalyst for the club’s transformation. To United, Éric’s violent outburst was a near catastrophe; to Inter, it was more of an opportunity, and Alex Ferguson knew it. But the United manager also knew that, should he support Éric unconditionally, the surrogate son could never find in himself the strength (or, in his eyes, the weakness) to betray the surrogate father. Cantona had by then transferred so much love on to his elder that ignoring the hand offered to him and running away, to Italy or elsewhere, would have turned Éric into a defenceless child again, alone in a terrifying wilderness.
Hour after hour, it seemed, fresh blows rained in. Éric had unquestionably been a magnificent servant of the French national team for the past two-and-a-half seasons. He had swallowed the huge disappointment of a pitiful Euro 92 better than most, and, after an initial period of rejection, following Michel Platini’s resignation from his managerial post, had developed a close relationship with France’s new coach Gérard Houllier. The supposed ‘big player of small games, and small player of big ones’ had put his head on the block when others played the frightened tortoise and withdrew into their shells. In his quiet, unfussy way, he had proved to be a fine captain of the national side. It is often forgotten how important a role he played in the renaissance of
Les Bleus
after the door to the 1994 World Cup had been slammed shut in their faces by Bulgaria. It’s true that Cantona may not have been the spark that jump-started Aimé Jacquet’s world champions-to-be of 1998. But when others jumped ship, he stood firm. He provided the all-important link between two generations of players, and if he could not be held responsible for the failure of the first, neither should he be airbrushed out of the success of the next. His selfless attitude, the quality of his performances and his
esprit de corps
had earned him many friends within the ‘family’ of French football, but almost exclusively among fellow players and the technical staff.
It was a different matter in the upper echelons of the administration – the
‘idiots’
for whom he had nothing but scorn. The suits he had been lambasting for years in his interviews were given a perfect excuse to exact revenge upon him after the Selhurst Park explosion, which got almost as much coverage in France as it did on the other side of the Channel. FIFA, though cheered on by Cantona’s blood-thirstiest critics, showed no immediate inclination to issue their own ban, indicating they would only consider one at the express request of the English FA. The panjandrums of the French Federation could have taken a firm stance without dumping the national team’s skipper in the dustbin the way they did. It appears they wavered at first, but not for long. Their chairman, Claude Simonnet, said: ‘Éric Cantona was captain yesterday, but I can’t say if he will be tomorrow.’ Almost in the same breath, he added: ‘I am stunned at such behaviour, which is against all sporting ethics. The seriousness of the situation forces me to consider this attitude as incompatible with what is expected of a captain of the national team’s colours.’ There was no talk of a disciplinary hearing. Éric was tried, convicted and sentenced
in absentia.
He was stripped of the captaincy. Cantona’s partisans could almost hear the sound of Capitaine Dreyfus’s sword being broken in the courtyard of a barracks. And if the decision itself wouldn’t come as a surprise to the culprit, the manner in which it had been reached and made public caused him a great deal of pain. That same day – 27 January – he had called the chairman of the French League, Noel Le Graët,
45
one of the few administrators he held in some regard, to convey the bitterness he felt at being ‘hounded and lynched by the press’. The rest of the world should forgive him, he said. Le Graët might have been sympathetic to Cantona, but what could he do? Éric’s future had been decided by men whose legitimacy he had torn to shreds in language of the most unequivocal kind. This was pay-back time.