Cantona (55 page)

Back in England, where Éric was keeping the lowest of profiles, the media frenzy showed no sign of abating. Psychologists were brought in to enlighten the reading public, in much the same way old generals are pulled out of retirement by the BBC when a conflict erupts in some far-flung country. No one expects them to do much beyond fulfilling a quasi-decorative function. The
Telegraph
ushered in John Syer, who had worked with Spurs for five years in the 1980s, and one Dr Dave Collins, lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, who argued that ‘Cantona may have found from previous experience that by acting aggressively he gained some advantage, which would make him more likely to do it again. If I’m Vinnie Jones, for example, and I keep seeing my name in the paper all the time, then I’m getting rewarded by fame, or maybe infamy, but at least some sort of respect which I personally find rewarding. Cantona appears more complex than Jones: we hear he is a musician, philosopher, artist and poet. So the reward he seeks is likely to be more complicated.’ What this reward could be Dr Collins did not specify. The
Mail on Sunday
dispatched a reporter to Marseilles, whose brief was to dig out clues to Éric’s wildness in his childhood. It’s fair to say that the locals enjoyed the attention of the
Mail
’s envoy. They spoke a lot, but said little. Jean Olive, the father of one Brigitte Quere, a girl who had known Éric when he was a schoolboy, contributed the revelation that ‘Éric’s father pushed him with his football and everything else. He was very strict. Even when Éric came to eat with us, he had to be back
at a certain time.
’ It is no wonder that, when piffle of that kind was devoured by millions, the father himself felt puzzled. A local television crew parked its van in front of Albert’s home in the Hautes-Alpes. After having defended Éric with splendid one-eyedness (‘Everyone knows it is unfair’), he sent the journalists away with: ‘When my son plays well, you never come here. And now, you’re running! Put away that microphone, because, with the fur around it, it looks like a rabbit’s tail, and rabbits – I – shoot them!’ The crew withdrew.

In retrospect, it is tempting to see in this extravagant pursuit of pseudo-information a defining moment in the history of the English Premier League, as it mutated from a souped-up version of the old championship into a bloated media machine depending on the production of news as well as the scoring of goals to feed its hunger for growth and money. It is now customary for broadsheet newspapers to devote pages by the dozen (and supplements) to transfer rumours, micro-incidents in the lives of Premiership stars and the like. Back in January 1995, most so-called ‘quality’ papers still distanced themselves from such trivia. Games of secondary importance sometimes went unreported; Monday editions, for example, featured perfunctory accounts of the matches that took place on the Saturday and were sometimes only mentioned
en passant
in a lead article or a review of the weekend’s action. Nobody seemed to care about the cost of a Newcastle striker’s wedding, and
Hello!
magazine (launched in 1988 in the UK, while its competitor
OK!
waited until 1996 to become a weekly) showed little inclination to pay six-figure sums to footballers willing to invite its photographers to the nuptials.

With Cantona – who never allowed publications of that kind into his own home – all this changed, one is tempted to add, overnight, on 25 January 1995. With one eye on the circulation figures and the other on many of their staff who resented the cheapening of their profession, editors driven by the fear of losing out to competitors oversaw the transition from investigative journalism to mere gossip, while Sky television engineers screwed yet more satellite dishes on the fronts of yet more English homes. Cantona himself was in no way an architect of this transformation, and part of him hated it. But he was also a significant agent for change, and if his conscience was stirred by qualms about pocketing advertisers’ fees, he knew how to silence these. His charisma, his exoticism, his excesses gave a veneer of relevance to the pursuit of the inconsequential, if not the meaningless. Offered a chance to explore the gutter press’s hunting grounds, the more respectable British papers went in with all guns blazing. If Cantona was not a ringmaster in the Premiership circus, he must at least be considered its first true star attraction.

Cantona’s main sponsor, Nike, immediately understood how the disgrace of its figurehead could be put to good use. Its famous posters (‘66 was a great year for English football. Éric was born’) were not taken down from Matt Busby Way. Its reps had noticed a surge in the sales of Cantona replica shirts, thousands of which found buyers in the week following the Selhurst Park incident. ‘Éric’s deal will not be affected,’ they announced on the 27th. You bet – on the morning after the assault, the
Daily Record
had printed on its front page a picture of a Nike (rugby!) boot, accompanied by the headline ‘LETHAL WEAPON’. How much is publicity of that kind worth? The multinational corporation had almost immediately sensed how a sizeable part of public opinion had mellowed towards Éric once the initial shock of his assault on Matthew Simmons had receded, and would later exploit the fracas in characteristically unapologetic style, with a TV advertisement in which Cantona could be heard saying, ‘I apologize for my mistakes . . . at Selhurst Park . . .’ (in case you are wondering, the punchline was: ‘I failed to score a hat-trick. I promise I’ll never do it again’). Provocatively, they went on with another advertisement, which was only shown in cinemas because of the coarseness of Éric’s language: ‘I have been punished for striking a goalkeeper, for spitting at supporters, for throwing my shirt at a referee, for calling my manager a bag of shit. I called those who judged me a bunch of idiots. I thought I might have trouble finding a sponsor.’ No, not in an age when Richard Kurt, a regular contributor to the Manchester United fanzine
The Red Issue
, could write: ‘Football needs the Cantonas as much as the Linekers – the Establishment might not admit it, but this is an entertainment industry that thrives as much on controversy and bad deeds as it does on good play and clean living. Brawls, bugs, drugs, and karate – we love ’em all. You can save your family values for the tennis club and the PC Nineties.’ The mainstream media were trailing behind their consumers, and their ferociousness contributed heavily to a shift in the public perception of Éric’s outburst, and of how it should be dealt with by the authorities.

The lunatic was turning into two of the British public’s favourite pets: the underdog, and the scapegoat. Within twenty-four hours of ‘the incident, hawkers were displaying what can only be described as ‘commemorative’ Cantona T-shirts, which had been manufactured by so-called ‘swag workers’ – small companies which specialize in the speedy production of instant memorabilia. It was they – not Manchester United fans – who were responsible for slogans such as ‘Rebel with a cause’ and ‘I’ll be back’, which they emblazoned on their rags. Others would soon follow. One of them featured Simmons’ face, (correct) address and (correct) telephone number, together with the caption ‘Wanted for treason’; and whatever one may think of the character or former exploits of Éric’s victim, his further vilification left a distinctly bitter taste in the mouth. Simmons paid a very heavy price for what he did and, especially, to whom he did it. He sold his story to the
Sun
, yes, a foolish act he soon regretted. But with no money, no home to hide in other than his mother’s flat, no pub he could have a pint in without being recognized and provoked by men very much like him, and with no girlfriend, he was by far the most severe casualty of the fracas, and was still paying for his part in it when my friend Marc Beaugé tracked him down for the French magazine
So Foot
twelve years later. ‘I was young and a bit of a cretin,’ he admitted, ‘but I had a really shitty time afterwards. I lost my job [ . . .] and ended up doing shitty jobs for five years. Cantona played again. I was as low as I could be: rotten jobs, no cash, people who looked me up and down, who knew what I’d done. Some of my mates and some members of my family never talked to me afterwards . . .’ If only Matthew Simmons had had a sponsor.

Éric, however, did. Nike cleverly adapted the mindset and methods of the swag workers to a mass market. It might not have been edifying, but it worked. In a different, but still revealing vein, the
Manchester Evening News
published a photograph of Éric showering in the nude to accompany a piece entitled ‘Why girls love to get their kicks from Cantona’, and followed it up with a brief interview with a French florist who had enjoyed Isabelle’s custom in her Deansgate shop, and could testify that Éric, whom she had met ‘many times’, was ‘a very nice guy, calm and polite’. Richard Williams lightened the tone of the media coverage in the
Independent on Sunday.
‘You didn’t have to look very long and hard at Mr Matthew Simmons of Thornton Heath to conclude that Éric Cantona’s only mistake was to stop hitting him. The more we discovered about Mr Simmons, the more Cantona’s assault looked like the instinctive expression of a flawless moral judgement.’ Talking of the same Simmons, Brian Clough was of the view that an appropriate course of action would have been for Cantona ‘to chop his balls off’. The tide was definitely turning.

Non-partisan observers of this quite extraordinary
hallali
now felt bound to express their unease at the sight of a mere footballer being spoken of as if he were a murderer. The most consistently eloquent of these, Rob Hughes, feared for the very values that had led him to confide his doubts on Cantona long before that fateful night in south London. He wrote:

As
The Times’s
football correspondent implied, the idea of a life ban appealed to some diehards within the FA. It was in the disciplinary committee’s statutory powers to impose such a sanction and, as we’ve seen, previous instances of behaviour comparable to Cantona’s had never been investigated or incurred punishment. The lack of jurisprudence therefore gave the FA judges a free hand in choosing whichever sentence they thought appropriate. Manchester United could lose their player whether they wanted to or not. Martin Edwards weighed into the game of cat-and-mouse that was developing between club and governing body: ‘If Éric was to repeat his actions of the other night, we would have no option but to dispense with his services. Éric has accepted the suspension. If he hadn’t, we would have put him on the transfer list.’ He was not being firm, merely cautious. In the absence of any statement from the player’s side, Éric’s ‘acceptance’ was as close as United could get to an act of contrition.

Given the tornado into which he had been sucked, it is not surprising that Cantona decided to bury himself in silence. The French journalists who had enjoyed remarkable access to Éric since his arrival in England suddenly found it impossible to establish any line of communication with him or his entourage, which had obviously been instructed to shoo away anyone who carried a press card. A brief incident witnessed by Erik Bielderman a week or so after the Crystal Palace game suggests that Alex Ferguson himself was having trouble gauging Éric’s state of mind at the time. The Manchester United manager was approached by a BBC television crew, and flew into a frightful rage that couldn’t be explained only by his well-known reluctance to talk to the media. Erik enjoyed (and still enjoys) a very close relationship with Ferguson, who felt he had to tell the French reporter why he had reacted so aggressively. It was all about Cantona. ‘I don’t think we can keep him,’ he said, ‘I think he’s going to go.’ This contrasted markedly with the assurances Ferguson had given in the good-humoured press conference that followed a comfortable 5–2 FA Cup win over second division Wrexham on Saturday the 28th (a game which saw the first mass demonstration of support for Éric, in the shape of a few placards appearing here and there in the Old Trafford crowd; a petition would soon follow), and which he reiterated in more detail in a
Mail on Sunday
column a day later. In it, he described Éric’s kung-fu kick as ‘diabolical’ (in
Managing My Life
, the expression he used was ‘a lamentable act of folly’), but also confirmed that he would not go back on his decision to keep Cantona within the Manchester United family. ‘I intend to keep working on him and with him,’ he said. ‘He is a joy to watch in training, but when things go wrong on the pitch and he doesn’t feel referees are protecting him, he feels a sense of injustice. I have to impress upon him that there will be players and teams who will set out to wind him up. He simply has to be prepared for it and accept it. I still believe he could have an important role at Manchester United.’ He also added: ‘I sometimes think that he is too quiet and unemotional, that maybe he bottles up things to the point where they are able to burst out disastrously in matches.’

Éric’s silence did not mean he was keeping his own counsel. His thoughts, and the thoughts of his closest advisers, such as his solicitor Jean-Jacques Bertrand, were already focused on the fights that lay ahead. He turned to the Professional Footballers’ Association chairman, Gordon Taylor, for advice, and asked his union’s boss to represent him at the forthcoming hearing, almost a month after the event. It wasn’t just an automatic choice dictated by the structure of the game in England, and the necessity to play ‘by the book’, respecting the arcane hierarchies that had been established by decades of mistrust and often vicious antagonism between the pros and their masters. Taylor felt genuine sympathy for Cantona. Thirteen years later, he told me: ‘It was a lynch mob atmosphere at the time. He’d already been heavily punished. United had done what they had to do.’ Like most footballers past or present, Taylor was scandalized that one of his peers could be thrown to the dogs
pour encourager les autres.
He could have used the words chosen by the football correspondent of the
Manchester Evening News
, David Meek, who pointed out that ‘there are mitigating factors. [ . . .] I am also a little bit surprised at the eagerness of the FA to throw the book at the player. I hope they don’t make him pay the price for all the other ills in the game. It would be wrong to make an example of Éric Cantona, just because he is an obvious, easy and soft target.’ The vindictive nature of the attacks this target had been subjected to could yet turn out to be Cantona’s strongest line of defence.