Cantona (62 page)

Some of the comments Cantona made to justify his willingness to go along with almost anything strike me as utter – well, utter bullshit, to be frank. I have tried to find words more suited to the gravitas of a biographer, but failed. Here’s one of those comments. ‘Yeah, I acted that moment [at Crystal Palace],’ he said (the bullshit detector is already quavering). ‘It was a drama and I was an actor. I do things seriously, without taking myself seriously’ (it’s now vibrating dangerously). ‘I think Nike found that side of my character and used it very well. Even when I kicked the fan it is because I don’t take myself seriously’ (evacuation orders are issued). ‘I didn’t think because of who I was I had a responsibility not to do it. No, I was just a footballer and a man. I don’t care about being some sort of superior person. I just wanted to do whatever I wanted to do. If I want to kick a fan, I do it’ (the place is now empty). ‘I am not a role model. I am not a superior teacher telling you how to behave. I think the more you see, the more life is a circus.’ Who is the clown?

He also hammed it up as a ringmaster in a Terry Gilliam superproduction that featured jailed’ footballers aboard a prison ship, and not without showing a certain talent for comedy. But he wasn’t merely playing a game. Three years ago, a charity game was organized with the help of Guy Roux between French and German sides, for which Éric was drafted at the last minute. He kindly consented to play, and all went well until he realized he had been given boots from the ‘wrong’ manufacturer – at which point he panicked. Rebellion has its limits.

Nike’s exploitation of Éric’s status as an institutional rebel flattered his ego, fed his perception of himself as a messenger (I daren’t say an angel) of freedom. The ‘message’ might have been a universal one
(joga bonito,
play the beautiful game as it should be played, if one forgets about the sickly sentimentalization of Brazilian football that underpins the marketing exercise), but there was no doubt as to who would deliver it: Éric Cantona. When, in 1996, a celebrated ‘Nike stars v The Devil’ ‘super-ad’ was shot at the Coliseum in Rome, it was Éric who dispatched the demon goalkeeper with a perfectly timed ‘
Au revoir’.
To me, if there is a shadow hanging over Éric’s personality, which must lead to uneasy questions about the sincerity of his sincerity, it has to be his self-serving compliance with the agenda set for him by his commercial partners, and his reactions when he felt his interests were threatened by outsiders in this regard, as the independent publisher Ringpull Press found to its cost in 1995.

This minuscule company had come up with the idea of collecting Cantona’s best sallies in a volume titled
La Philosophie de Cantona,
gathering the material from a number of public sources, including the English-language version of Éric’s autobiography. The publishers of that book, Headline, had not given their consent, however. Nor had Manchester United, and the owners of Ringpull Press had no choice but to stop the distribution of
La Philosophie,
remove the passages which amounted to a breach of copyright, and add the club’s logo to the book’s cover. The revised edition went into production, with a print run of 30,000 copies. It is at that moment that Éric’s lawyers were instructed to act. His agents objected to the picture of their client used on the dust jacket: a beret and a goatee beard had been added to Cantona’s face. Ringpull had to take its book off the shelves, and the company collapsed.

The relief of scoring.

‘I should have been born English. When I hear “God Save the Queen” it can make me cry, much more than when I hear
“La Marseillaise”.
I feel close to the rebelliousness and vigour of the youth here. Perhaps time will separate us, but nobody can deny that here, behind the windows of Manchester, there is an insane love of football, of celebration and of music.’

Éric Cantona committed suicide in January 1996 in a Manchester hotel room. But none of the three people present – Éric, Aimé Jacquet and Henri Émile – remembers precisely when the trigger was pulled. Émile’s only recollection is that some time towards the end of that month, a few days before France beat Portugal 3–2 in a friendly, he and the manager of
Les Bleus
made a rare joint visit to England. As Manchester United played (and won 1–0, Éric scoring the winner) at West Ham on the 22nd, and the French were in action forty-eight hours later in Paris, the meeting must have taken place just before the game at Upton Park. But it is impossible to be more precise than that. Jacquet had a proposal for Éric, who hadn’t played for France since he captained the side to a 1–0 defeat of the Netherlands on 18 January 1995, one week before the events at Crystal Palace. The fortunes of the national team had improved significantly in Cantona’s absence. Three of the four Euro qualifiers that had been played before his suspension had ended in goalless draws.
⁵¹
Since then, France had taken wing with four wins in six games, including a crucial 3–1 away victory in Romania, scoring twenty goals and conceding only two along the way. Jacquet, however, was distraught at the idea of not taking Éric along to the 1996 European Championships in which his team had now earned a place. In Émile’s words, leaving Cantona out ‘would be to inflict hurt on the man who’d been the first to join the adventure’. But others had stepped into the breach since then. Jacquet couldn’t ignore the idea that France was close to finding a new, intriguing balance, thanks to the emerging genius of Zinédine Zidane and to the understanding the Bordeaux playmaker had developed with PSG’s Youri Djorkaeff.

Both were consistent goalscorers, but neither operated within the conventional parameters of centre-forward play. They drifted, looked for space and angles of attack which were strikingly modern (in that they did away with the idea of a focal point, a
point de fixation
in the forward line, years before teams like Spalletti’s AS Roma and Ferguson’s post-Van Nistelrooy’s United showed that penetration and success didn’t depend on the presence of an old-style predator). The lack of a ‘natural-born killer’ in French football at that time forced Jacquet’s hand to an extent. Jean-Pierre Papin (then 31 years old, and playing the last of his two seasons at Bayern Munich) would have been a shoo-in had it not been for recurrent knee injuries that rendered him largely ineffectual. No obvious replacement was available, although quite a few were tried – and found wanting. The names of Patrice Loko, Nicolas Ouédec and Mikaël Madar (one of France least successful exports to England, where he spent a forgettable season with Everton in 1997–98) were unlikely to strike fear in France’s opponents. Stéphane Guivarc’h’s colossal work-rate will always come second to the strange fact that as the designated lone striker of the French team, he didn’t score a single goal in their victorious 1998 World Cup campaign.

Jacquet, quite reasonably, worried that making space for Cantona would slow down his team’s impetus; he couldn’t upset his system to accommodate a particular player. Éric, until his moment of folly, had been deployed as an attacking midfielder in a fluid version of the manager’s favoured 4-4-2, in which the two centre-forwards frequently sought out space on the flanks, creating a ‘free zone’ in the middle of the pitch. Cantona could glide there naturally, as if sucked in by their lateral movement. But France lacked strikers of proven international class, and had evolved towards a 4-3-2-1 formation which revolved around the combined skills of Djorkaeff and Zidane and their talent for improvisation. The front player they moved behind would hustle the opposition’s central defenders, a kind of advanced ‘water-carrier’ who was expected to disrupt the back line and create holes for others to exploit. This tactical formation could look frustratingly negative when the two
fantasistas
were not on song; when they were (which was most of the time) the music they made together was ravishing, and extremely effective. Jacquet had no desire and no reason to disrupt that harmony. He had never closed the door on Cantona (or Ginola, for that matter, who was captivating crowds in England with Newcastle). Earlier that month, he’d told journalists that ‘they [were] players of international calibre’ whom he couldn’t ‘cut out’. ‘All will depend on their output between now and the tournament,’ he explained. Some thought Jacquet was paying lip-service to public opinion and nothing more, as Cantona’s estrangement from the national squad had developed into a matter of national debate in France. Éric’s exploits (and rehabilitation) with Manchester United hadn’t gone unnoticed, to say the least, up to the point that they fed yet more rumour-mongering when news of his exclusion from the national squad was broken in May 1996. What Cantona’s supporters didn’t know was that it was Éric himself who refused the hand Jacquet held out to him.

‘Neither Aimé nor myself thought that what happened at Crystal Palace would signify the end for Éric as a French national team player,’ Émile told me. ‘The events meant that he took himself out of the team because of his ban. And the team was winning without him. Still, Aimé had an idea. When Éric came back after his eight-month suspension, we had qualified for Euro 96. As a manager, should Aimé question what had been positive and ensured qualification? Should he yield to the pressure of the media which lobbied for Éric to return in the role he’d played before, as skipper, playmaker and orchestrator from midfield? Or should he do something which meant evolving from the set-up we’d put in place?’ After a great deal of soul-searching, Jacquet decided to gamble: he would ask Cantona to return to the fold. And on that evening in Manchester, he did.

The coach’s decision was not solely motivated by Éric’s superb performances in the Premier League. Euro 96 would take place in England; what’s more, should they qualify for the latter stages of the tournament, France were likely to play at Old Trafford.
⁵²
With Cantona on the field, the French could count on the support of the largely Mancunian crowd, as foreign fans were not expected to travel in large numbers to a country still seen as a hotbed of hooliganism. Jacquet explained to Cantona that France would carry on playing as they had done in the previous months, adding that they needed a centre-forward. He then put the question to Éric.

‘Do you want to be that player?’

‘Éric said no, straight away,’ Émile recalls. But Cantona, who seemed ‘strangely distant’, didn’t offer any explanation for his refusal. Shaken but undeterred, Jacquet told him that he would ‘draw the consequences he [needed] from this’, but that under no circumstances could he envisage having Éric Cantona as a mere substitute. However, should Zidane or Djorkaeff be unavailable for one reason or another, could he count on him? Éric made no reply. Jacquet put the question to him again and, at the third time of asking, an answer finally fell from Cantona’s lips. ‘You can count on me,’ he said, ‘but you’ll have to call me beforehand, so that we can talk it over.’

Now in his 75th year, Émile still spends a great deal of time with Cantona through his involvement with the French beach-soccer team, which Éric took to the world title as a manager in May 2005. He has tried to get to the heart of Cantona’s incomprehensible
froideur
that night on a number of occasions, but his repeated enquiries get short shrift every time. ‘Éric says he can’t remember much of what happened then,’ he told me disbelievingly. ‘If he’d agreed to be in the team, he’d have been in the starting eleven, and we could have been European champions – as we lost on penalties in the semi-finals.’ He could also have carried on to the 1998 World Cup, been part of the unit that beat Brazil 3–0 in an unforgettable final, and silenced all the detractors who single out the absence of any international honour at senior level in his collection of trophies to deny him footballing greatness. But he said no. He turned his back on the greatest chance he’d been given in his whole career, as if it were meant to be that way. But it wasn’t. He chose not to have a last opportunity to fail. Why? It couldn’t be because the position didn’t appeal to him any more: he had occupied it for Manchester United regularly, as he had done at Auxerre and Marseille, and would do so again in his last season in England. Had the ‘fear of losing’ that he claimed was his greatest motivation to play finally overwhelmed him? Was he scared to be found wanting as he had been in 1992?

Not once has he mentioned the reasons behind his decision to walk away from France in the numerous interviews he’s given since then. Only a very small number of people have been aware – until now – that it could and probably should have been Éric Cantona and not Patrice Loko or Stéphane Guivarc’h who led France’s attack not just at Euro 1996, but at the 1998
Mondiale
too. Cantona himself did little to silence those who muttered that Jacquet had been obeying ‘orders from above’ to leave him by the wayside. Later that year, he took advantage of a guest appearance on a popular French TV programme to criticize the omission of his and Jean-Pierre Papin’s names from the Euro 96 squad. ‘I’m still available,’ he insisted. ‘[The French football authorities] would be very happy if I said I wasn’t.’ The ‘Cantonians’ (Bernard Morlino among them) went further: many of them still argue that their hero was shunned because he was under contract with Nike, not Adidas, the French team’s official sponsor. This is utter nonsense. In fairness, Cantona himself toned down his criticism over time. In 2007 he said that he ‘understood Jacquet’s decision [to leave him out]’, adding this telling caveat,
‘in a wider context’.
‘My eight-month ban had allowed a new generation to claim their place,’ he told
L’Équipe Magazine
, ‘and they were winning. It was normal that they should stay.’ But Cantona didn’t stop at this magnanimous comment. He added: ‘I think I could’ve played. Sincerely, I could have played just as much as Stéphane Guivarc’h did, couldn’t I? I feel like I’m belittling myself when I say that. To quote Charles Bukowski, “Truth is evidence that no one tells.”’