Cantona (7 page)

Smiles, however, were scarcer on the training ground. Roux loved skilled players, and stuck to the enterprising 4-3-3 formation which had taken his team to the top division in the country and to a French Cup final two years earlier, in 1979. But he could also be implacable with players who did not show the drive he never lacked himself. There are numerous stories of his ‘breaking’ young footballers who did not possess enough steel in their characters to withstand the toughness of Auxerre’s upbringing. Éric’s teammate Basile Boli, Guy Roux’s other ‘son’, could write in his remarkable autobiography
Black Boli
: Auxerre [was] a real factory. I’ve seen many kids whose dreams exploded like a football that’s been inflated too much. Formation is a gamble. When you win, you have a career. When you lose . . . you lose everything, really.’ Roux, who had been convinced of Éric’s talent ever since he had laid eyes on him, still waited for proof that the fifteen-year-old had the mental qualities required to put himself in contention for a place in the first-team squad. Both player and manager agree that this proof was shown late in the spring of 1982, shortly before the end of the season. Roux enjoyed pitting his reserves against the first team’s pros; nothing but pride was at stake, but it was proud men he was looking for, and a stupendous second half by the young Marseillais proved to him – and to everyone else – that, barely a year after he had left Provence, the prodigy of Les Caillols was ready to step up a level.

There was no holding back Éric Cantona, in more ways than one. On that sunny afternoon, the victim of his cheek was Lucien Denis, an experienced defender who, according to Roux, ‘went mad’. Incensed by the youngster’s dribbling, he fouled him crudely on several occasions. But if Denis was not amused, he was in a minority of one. ‘I could see he was already at the level of the pros – and he hadn’t celebrated his sixteenth birthday yet!’ Roux’s delight was shared by his apprentice. ‘Life was beautiful,’ Éric recalled in his 1993 autobiography, all the more so as his first season at Auxerre was to end with a magnificent opportunity to demonstrate his talent to a far larger audience than his club’s management team on a training pitch.

An international friendly was to be played in Lyon between the France of Tigana, Giresse and Platini and Bulgaria on 15 May 1982, providing the national manager Michel Hidalgo with a last chance to deploy
Les Bleus
before the World Cup. As was the tradition at the time, the game would be preceded by a curtain-raiser, between the under-17s of France and Switzerland on this occasion. Éric played out of his skin. Everyone now knew that Guy Roux and his scouts had unearthed a gem, who signed off his first appearance for his country with the winning goal. The
cadets
of Auxerre also won the Coupe Gambardella – the French Youth Cup – that year, putting six goals past Nancy. ‘The kids we then had at the academy were of exceptional quality,’ says Roux. ‘Usually, out of a group of fifteen, if a third of them make it, you’ll be delighted. Well, out of this lot, twelve became pros, and four were capped by France at senior level: Basile Boli, Pascal Vahirua, William Prunier
⁵
– and Cantona.’ Life was beautiful indeed.

Still, nutmegging Lucien Denis in a seven-a-side game back at l’Abbé-Deschamps hadn’t given Éric a licence to queue-jump his way into the first team. He first had to further his education in the dour and unforgiving environment of the French third division, where upstarts of his kind are choice targets for the dirty tricks of so-called ‘hard men’ – and for the jealousy of teammates not quite good enough to be called from the reserves. Éric survived both tests with some ease, thanks to his irrepressible enthusiasm, his talent and his astonishing self-confidence, creating mayhem on the field of play as well as off it. The lightly built teenager of Marseilles was also turning into a stupendous athlete, and revelling in his physical transformation. The Ivorian-born defender Basile Boli, who had been turned away from Paris Saint-Germain, had arrived at Auxerre at the start of the 1982–83 season and, though seven months younger than Éric (according to his passport), had immediately joined him in the third division team. Both had the bodies of men several years their elder, and constantly looked for occasions to find out who was the quickest, the strongest, the most resilient. To Roux’s amazement, they were way ahead of everyone else in the reserves, and in every single department. A sprinter, held back by his weight and his muscular mass, would normally hit the wall when asked to complete more than a single lap of the track; not Basile, not Éric, who were both built like boxers rather than footballers of that day and age. A dancer needs powerful arms, shoulders and thighs (not to mention a torso like a lumberjack’s) as well as exceptional balance and coordination to perform his art; Cantona’s own brand of ballet should remind us of that truth: he was gifted the ideal body to become himself.

The speed with which he had adapted to life in the reserves meant it was only a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ Guy Roux would give him his debut with the first team. Quite astonishingly, or perhaps characteristically, when asked by his amanuensis Pierre-Louis Basse to relive the occasion, Cantona would remember the date as 21 October 1984, against Nancy. He had got the opponents right – and the day wrong, by almost a year. In fact, it was on 5 November 1983 that he was at last given a chance to play alongside established internationals such as goalkeeper Joël Bats and striker Andrzej Szarmach, one of the heroes of Poland’s magnificent 1974 World Cup, where they were a whisker away from qualifying for the final (Éric had cried when Beckenbauer’s and Müllers West Germany made Cruyff’s Netherlands pay for the arrogance of their play). Auxerre waltzed past Nancy that day – and Cantona was ‘on a cloud’. ‘I knew little of Szarmach,’ he remembered, ‘but I was reassured by his simplicity, his kindness and his humility. I discovered what it meant to be a footballer of great talent, but also a man who had class.’ The Pole had done everything in his considerable power to offer a goal to the teenager, without success. Cantona’s own generosity to younger teammates, which was to have such an impact at Manchester United, was perhaps kindled on that day.

Reports published at the time didn’t dwell on his contribution, however. He had done well, well enough to last over an hour; but he was not quite ready yet, nor was he when Roux called on him again for the visit of Lens six weeks later. Lens capitulated 4–0 at l’Abbé-Deschamps, just like Nancy had done, but he would have to wait until March 1985 to join the first-teamers again. Cantona had talent in spades, no question; but it was proving rather hard to bend this precious ore the way the manager would have wished. Cantona’s temper could short-circuit without warning, never more spectacularly than on one evening of this 1983–84 season. Here is how Roux retold the incident, with the same mixture of pride and concern he must have felt all those years ago.

‘We were playing against Cournon-Le Cendre on a Saturday night. These guys were tough. They came from a mining town of the Auvergne. One of their central defenders hacks him down, nastily. Éric gets up. The referee says nothing. Cantona is hacked again, and this time reacts. The other guy didn’t finish the game. His teammates were not happy. My assistant Daniel Rolland had already gathered our kit and left the ground, but I was still there, and so was Cantona, who hadn’t left the dressing-room. All the Cournon players are around me, next to the door. I asked them: “What are you waiting for?” “We’re waiting for Cantona.” “Well, listen, in any case, the evening will finish badly for you. If you give him a hiding, I’ll call the police and you’ll end up in a cell; but he might also give you a right thrashing, and you won’t be able to complain.” “There’s ten of us!” “You’ll see!” Then Canto gets out – he sees them – he doesn’t wait. He swings his bag around, and catches one of the guys on the head – out for the count – he punches a couple of others, throws the bag, and starts kicking them – yes, already! I can see a disaster about to happen. And what can I do? I wasn’t much at the time; but, instinctively, I scream “
Halte
!” at the top of my voice. Everybody stops. “Right,” I say, “enough. If there are any injuries, we go home and treat them.” We all troop back to the dressing-room. I get the first-aid kit . . . Éric had hurt his hands. But he sat with them as if nothing had happened! He was afraid of nothing.’

Cantona was also mightily strong, as was proved when Roux took advantage of the long winter break to take his team to the crosscountry ski resort of Prémanon. Éric had by then achieved his transition to the senior level, at least in terms of sporting achievement; boarding with much older pros presented other challenges that he still wasn’t quite ready to confront. ‘But, once on the snow,’ adds Roux, ‘he was half an hour quicker than anyone else.’ The last day of their stay coincided with the French Youth Cross-Country Championships. The Auxerre staff asked the organizers to keep the tracks open and to put their medical facilities at their disposal. Roux then asked his players to take part in ‘our own little race, ten kilometres long, chocolate bars for the winner’. No prizes for guessing who pocketed the chocolate bars. Cantona ran out a clear winner, ‘by a mile’, ahead of Polish international Waldemar Matysik, whom his coach describes as ‘a very tough guy’. In fact, had Cantona taken part in the French Championships, his time would have placed him among the five quickest finishers. This is remarkable for a child of Provence who had never been on skis before.

Week in, week out, Cantona had to measure himself against the mix of promising youths, convalescent first-teamers and professional journeymen who made up the vast majority of third division teams, many of which doubled up as reserve sides for the elite clubs. Auxerre was the exception; Auxerre was about youth – all-conquering youth. Cantona and his friends took the title with some panache, his future brother-in-law Bernard Ferrer only being outscored by Éric himself, who finished the season with twenty goals to his credit, the last one ensuring AJA’s victory in the championship final. There were only 100 spectators in the Valence stadium to see what the correspondent of
L’Yonne Républicaine
described as a ‘stroke of genius’ from Cantona. The local paper was the only publication to report Auxerre’s 1–0 victory over the club that Éric might have joined had he not been asked to pay for one of their red-and-black striped shirts: OGC Nice. Cantona lost his marker, started a solitary raid from the halfway line, and scored. He also got a yellow card.

In almost any other club of Auxerre’s standing – short on resources, long on ambition, but lacking too much of the former to fulfil the latter – Éric would have undoubtedly become a focal point of the team’s attack before the 1986–87 season, when Roux finally unleashed him for good. But the
Icaunais
suffered from a surfeit of high-class forwards at the time. At nearly thirty-five years of age, Andrzej Szarmach was not quite the force he had been, but was still strong enough to warrant an automatic place in the starting line-up. Patrice Garande, Éric’s elder by six years, was enjoying the most prolific form of his career – which included a gold medal with the French team at the 1984 Olympic Games, a couple of months after having been awarded the ‘Golden Boot’ for his 21 goals in the French first division championship, one more than the Polish striker had scored. For Roux, who never cared much for reputation, Cantona came third in the pecking order, and then only just, ahead of Philippe Fargeon – who would become a French ‘A’ international – and Michel Pineda, a close friend of Éric’s who would soon enjoy some success with Espanyol in the Spanish Primera Liga. It seemed as if all the seeds Guy Roux had sown were flowering at the same time. The under-17s were crowned champions for the second year running. Daniel Rolland led the reserves of the reserves (!) to the fourth division title. Auxerre thrashed Laurent Blanc’s Montpellier-La Paillade 3–0 in the final of the 1985 Coupe Gambardella. Éric scored all three of his team’s goals that day. But even a hat-trick wasn’t quite good enough to enable him to break into a playing unit that delighted the whole of the country with its fast, intricate, inventive, counter-attacking brand of football. Roux still harboured doubts about Cantona’s ability to rein in his self-destructive impulses; hardly surprising given that Éric regularly gave him sound reasons for having such doubts.

In January 1984 the French
juniors
were invited to take part in a six-team indoor tournament in Leningrad. Éric had been made welcome in this set-up. His head coach, the late Gaby Robert, enjoyed a very close relationship with him, for Robert was a Marseillais too, a jovial, kind-hearted man who knew when to shrug his shoulders or look the other way, and when to have a heart-to-heart with the ‘unmanageable’ youngster he treated like a son. Robert, however, found himself at the centre of another potential Cold War crisis when Éric, incensed by a refereeing decision, spat in the face of the Soviet official. The official in question was a colonel in the Red Army, who sent him off on the spot in front of an aghast French delegation. Diplomats did what they had to do. Nothing came of it, somehow, and Éric flew home with his teammates; but word of his exploits had already been passed on to the Auxerre manager. Roux quietly dropped him from the first team (with whom he had played two games already, as we’ve seen), and started to work on his next move.

Éric turned eighteen in May of 1984. For all Frenchmen of his generation, reaching that age meant a call-up to the army. Then again, ‘call-up’ signified many things. For most, twelve months of tedium, loneliness and ritual humiliation in a remote provincial town or, if you were particularly unlucky, in Germany. A few weeks of drill, then the mind-numbing routine of life in the barracks – dodging ill-tempered and foul-mouthed adjutants during the day, downing Kronenbourg beer and playing table football, pinball or billiards in the evening. Students, who benefited from a suspended sentence (conscription could be postponed until they had completed their degree, up to the age of twenty-two), hoped for a posting abroad. One of my friends ended up promoting French cinema on behalf of French consular services in Ottawa, which should tell you everything about
piston
, France’s answer to the Anglo-Saxon old-boy network. Elite sportsmen dreamed of joining the
Bataillon de Joinville
, an army in shorts and tracksuits that never saw a gun, and was expected to carry the flag in international competitions instead.