Authors: Philippe Auclair
But this transformation was taking place behind the scenes, and on the evening of 19 August, after United had melted away 3–1 at Villa Park on the opening day of the season, it certainly looked as if Alex Ferguson’s gamble to build a new side around products of the club’s academy (all of whom had been part of the 1992 FA Youth Cup-winning team) had been ill-judged, and catastrophically so. No less than four of them – six if one includes substitutes John O’Kane and David Beckham, who replaced Phil Neville at half-time, and scored a late consolation goal – took part in a match that could have been billed ‘men against boys’. What no one foresaw – except Ferguson – was that the ‘boys’, placed under the tutelage of Éric Cantona, would soon eclipse the ‘men’. The former Liverpool captain-turned-pundit Alan Hansen (who won his first English league title at the age of twenty-two) later became the target of much ridicule, having famously asserted that ‘you can’t win anything with kids’ in the season’s first
Match of the Day
programme. His mistake was to speak as if he was enunciating a self-evident truth, with more than a hint of scorn towards Ferguson’s project. He had also chosen to ignore that, despite the absence of the injured Steve Bruce, a back four of Parker, Irwin, Pallister and Gary Neville, supposedly shielded by the ‘anchor’ Roy Keane, should have done more to protect Peter Schmeichel. Hansen’s opinion was shared by most observers, however, who were stunned when this defeat proved to be an aberration. There were another six Premiership games to play before the end of Cantona’s ban, and of these, United won five and drew the other, defeating English champions Blackburn 2–1 at Ewood Park on 28 August, the twenty-year-old Beckham scoring the decisive goal.
This is not to say that United had found a way to live without Éric. As September drew to a close, and Old Trafford was readied for the outcast’s return to centre stage, Ferguson’s inexperienced team exited two competitions in less than a week. On the 20th – the day the Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice Carl Otto Lenz found in favour of Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman and changed the face of football for ever – a deliberately weakened United side was blown away 3–0 by second division York City in the League Cup. At home. In truth, Ferguson cared little for this competition, far less than for the UEFA Cup, which his club had never won, and which still retained much of its prestige. But six days later, Rotor Volgograd, a strong side if not exactly Europe’s most glamorous club, held on for a 2–2 draw in Manchester – despite ’keeper Peter Schmeichel scoring the only goal of his English career from a header. United, who had brought back an encouraging 0–0 from the first leg, exited the competition on the away-goals rule.
In other circumstances, this early exit from Europe would have triggered a thorough examination of United’s dismal recent record in international competitions, but the debate was short-lived, as everything was piffle compared to the return of the ‘King’. On the morning of 28 September the media were given the very rare privilege of attending a short training session on the Old Trafford pitch, which was little more than a chance to snap Cantona wearing his no. 7 red shirt again. The fans – who had been singing Cantona songs throughout his ban – had been kept out, and it was only the presence of a few workmen busying themselves on the stadium’s new stand that gave a semblance of reality to the scene. Éric predictably refrained from making any public comment, and Alex Ferguson sounded guarded when he met the press at the conclusion of this photo opportunity. Did he feel confident? Reasonably so, he said, before adding, ‘I wouldn’t think that anyone would want to go down that road again. I don’t think he’ll want to suffer all that, himself or his family. The stigma is always going to be there in the history books.’
Judging by the press coverage, the only topic of interest for the English public was Éric Cantona. Even London’s Stock Exchange was not immune to this collective fever. On the 29th Manchester United shares rose 3p to an all-time high. It was expected that the club would announce record profits within the week (they did, to the tune of £18.8m, £8m more than in the previous tax year), which accounted in part for the optimism of the traders, but in part only: Cantona’s return would undoubtedly boost his team’s performance on and off the pitch. Merchandise bearing his likeness or his name represented a disproportionate slice of the club’s sales of memorabilia: £4m, over 20 per cent of their turnover in that sector alone, three times what Paris Saint-Germain, one of France’s leading clubs, could hope to earn from sales of replica shirts and the like over a whole season.
Keeping Éric – I daren’t say at all costs – made sense economically as well as in sporting terms, for Manchester United and for the player’s sponsor, Nike, who did everything in their power to increase the visibility of one of their most precious assets (whom they paid £200,000 a year for the use of his image). Posters appeared on advertising boards throughout the country. They showed Cantona, collar up, back to the camera, a ball in his left hand, about to step onto the pitch. The open gate couldn’t have looked more like prison bars. The tag? ‘He’s been punished for his mistakes. Now it’s someone else’s turn.’ Pierre Canton (no relation), who managed the Cantona account for Nike in France, explained: ‘His personality corresponds with that of our company, irreverent and a touch rebellious.’ Very clever too. A stark, strikingly simple TV ad featuring Éric and Newcastle centre-forward Les Ferdinand was put on heavy rotation on commercial networks. Its objectives were manifold: to promote a message of tolerance, obviously, making anti-racism ‘cool’ for the younger, hipper football supporters who were also customers of Nike; but also to re-establish Cantona as
the
towering figure in the game, the Premier League’s premier personality, and assimilating any abuse that might be directed at the disgraced footballer to an attack, not just on an individual, but on values that no one in their right mind could fail to share. It was a means of protecting Éric from the provocation it was thought he would constantly encounter in months to come. The subtext of this short film was clear: hecklers must be xenophobic, if not outright racist, and had to be shamed into silence.
There was a real fear that something would go wrong. The hostility of the crowds towards a player they loved to hate would redouble, and it could be expected that no quarter would be given to Cantona on the field of play. His opponents would rile and taunt him, the referees would be on the lookout to punish his slightest misdemeanour. Hadn’t David Elleray, the Harrow schoolmaster who would officiate in his first game back, already dismissed Roy Keane earlier in the season? It couldn’t be long before ‘another Crystal Palace’; only this time, there could be no way back. ‘It’ll be ten times worse than before,’ predicted George Best. ‘He’ll have to show to everyone, and especially himself, that he is able to face it, [ . . .] that he has grown and has become a man.’
All observers peppered their columns with grave words of warning – and all of them were proved wrong. This would be the season of redemption, for player and fans alike. The revolting chants that had been heard while Éric was serving his ban died down in the stands, and the presence of United’s chief security enforcer Ned Kelly by his side was soon felt to be an unnecessary reminder of a darker past. Defenders didn’t go out of their way to make Cantona’s life easier on the pitch; but nor did they try to exploit the supposed fragility of his character, and the next eight months passed almost without a blemish from one side or the other. This showed the respect his fellow professionals had for Cantona, a respect his exemplary conduct certainly demanded. Éric himself was deeply touched by the fairness of his opponents, and developed an even stronger bond with England and its football as a result, not that anyone could have predicted how smooth the path to reacceptance would be – except, maybe, Alex Ferguson himself. ‘He was ready to confront the crowds, the media and all the rest,’ the manager confided to Erik Bielderman many years later. ‘I had to show as much courage as he had shown himself, by supporting him. Publicly, but also within the team. Éric came back a stronger man. He came back more mature, too. He was also more wary. I’m flabbergasted by the strength with which he went through this ordeal. I discovered myself to be even closer to the man than before.’
Necessary as they were, physical fitness and mental readiness did not guarantee that Cantona could waltz in and perform as if he had never been away. Éric’s successful rehabilitation also depended on his acquiring an understanding of the tactical changes that had affected English football in his long absence, namely the adoption of three-man central defences by a number of teams in the Premiership. Today, the 3-5-2 system may seem an antiquated formation only deployed by backward-looking Eastern European and Asian teams, as the flat back four it replaced for a while is now the common denominator of all modern formations. But 3-5-2 was the height of sophistication then: it had been imported from the Continent, after all. It was believed to pose near insurmountable problems to attacking players who hadn’t come across it. When Alex Ferguson was asked whether Cantona could deal with it, he brushed the doubters aside with another affirmation of his striker’s unique talent. ‘He just takes centre-backs into an area where they don’t know whether to go or stay. He has an awareness of where he is pulling people. He drifts into midfield, drifts behind a striker, sometimes he drifts out on to the line. But when a cross comes in or something is going to happen in the box, he is not far away.’ Few shared the Scot’s confidence: the time had finally come for Éric to demonstrate that it hadn’t been misplaced.
The first of October 1995. Hawkers had set up their stalls well in advance on Matt Busby Way, loading their tables with commemorative T-shirts (‘Back with a vengeance’, among many others). A group of hardcore United fans had placed cheeky advertisements in national newspapers, which read: ‘We’ll never forget that night at Crystal Palace (when you buried that amazing volley against Wimbledon).’ Due to the work carried out on a new stand, Old Trafford could only accommodate 34,101 spectators that afternoon, but thousands more milled around the stadium, many of them clutching copies of the matchday programme, whose cover was half-filled by a portrait of a smiling Éric. Reporters had been dispatched from all over Europe to cover the event, which was not a top-of-the-table clash (United trailed Newcastle by a single point, Liverpool by two), but the homecoming of Éric Cantona. In the absence of any new material to broadcast, BBC Radio Five Live aired an hour-long interview with ‘
Dieu
’ which had been taped a year previously. ‘God was back among his disciples’, as David Lacey wrote in the
Guardian
(adding presciently that the real test would be at Chelsea, three weeks later, where he would be ‘the Devil incarnate’), and cameras were there in extraordinary numbers to record the resurrection:
one hundred and eight
television crews (I feel compelled to write out this scarcely believable figure in full) were positioned around the pitch. The public address system drowned Old Trafford with the main theme of
The Magnificent Seven.
And at 15:58 the last of the Manchester United players to exit the dressing-room made his triumphant entrance on the field: Éric Cantona, 248 days, 18 hours and 22 minutes after he had last performed for his club in a competitive game. Old Trafford was a sea of tricolours, each flag-brandishing fan a wave in an ocean. It was as if the crowd was intent on staging their own version of Bastille Day, with FA chairman Bert Millichip, one presumes, in the role of Louis XVI climbing the steps to the guillotine.
One of these spectators was the French character actress Sabine Azema, whom Éric had met on the set of
Le Bonheur est dans le pré
,
49
and who had never attended a football game before. As you approached the ground,’ she recalled, ‘it was as if you were in Lourdes, except that instead of pictures of Bernadette Soubirous [
the young shepherdess who claimed to have had visions of the Virgin
], it was pictures of Éric Cantona. The closer you got, the louder people were screaming, their fists raised. For me, the queen of the cowards, it was hell – I started to panic, to weep, and I can’t remember who won that day’. No one did: the game finished 2–2.
One of the linesmen was called Messiah, a fact that didn’t escape the wits in the press box. Cantona received a ‘9/10’ from the
Manchester Evening News
, one of many rave notices which should have been enough to make him footballer of the season, let alone of the day. ‘Éric de Triomphe’ (
Daily Mirror
), ‘Super-Can’ (
Sun
), had touched the ball 49 times, completing 31 of 43 passes. The Monday papers were full of such statistical titbits, dissecting every one of Éric’s moves to the point of absurdity. His first touch occurred on sixty-seven seconds. Andy Cole passed him the ball on the left wing. Cantona took a couple of strides, crossed, Nicky Butt surged and scored his first goal of the season. Easy. The most dynamic player in a strangely lethargic side, Cantona supplied Lee Sharpe with another sumptuous pass, but the winger missed from eight yards out. Liverpool then scored twice through Robbie Fowler (who, as his manager Roy Evans later argued with some justification, had been the ‘real man of the match’ in terms of performance), before Jamie Redknapp tugged Ryan Giggs’ jersey in the box, earning the hosts a penalty. Cantona immediately took the ball under his arm, waited for the recriminations to die down, walked to the spot, and sent David James the wrong way. He was not one to strike carefully choreographed poses after he had scored a goal. To him, it was both an individual release and a chance to share in collective joy: a choreographed celebration would have debased the act of scoring and dulled the raw emotion. But that successful penalty kick was unlike any he had taken before. He ran on towards the crowd, and pole-danced on the left stanchion of Liverpool’s goal.