Cantona (34 page)

Houllier himself had some explaining to do. Éric’s ‘retirement’ had been taken with a large pinch of salt in France. His newfound popularity there was based on his success in England, naturally, but also on the general public’s appreciation of Cantona’s public gesture of loyalty towards Platini. Its very awkwardness highlighted its sincerity; in short, France was at last warming to the rebel, which put the new national manager in a delicate situation, as Houllier himself held his ‘difficult’ player in great esteem. ‘Éric is mentally tired,’ he said, which was the truth. As Cantona explained, ‘Things are different [in England]. I play in a different team, in a different context. With the French team, I am someone else. At Leeds, I am English in my soul, whereas when I am in France, my memories take over. I’ve talked it over with Gérard [
note the use of Houllier’s first name – no such affection was ever shown for ‘Monsieur Wilkinson’
]. It would be easy to play badly [for France]. No, I’m really not sure I can give 100 per cent of myself for my country [in the circumstances].’ France’s loss should be Leeds’ gain, at least in theory. And for a while it was.

Cantona excelled against Liverpool (2–2, on 29 August), drawing three superb saves from a young David James, and bettered that display with a brace of goals at Oldham (2–2 again) three days later, Leeds’ sixth league game in eighteen days. The sustained quality of his performances made a return to the bench unthinkable to anyone: anyone, that is, but Howard Wilkinson, who could see his side sliding towards mid-table, but couldn’t quite fathom why this was, still less how to remedy it. Leeds were then soundly beaten at Old Trafford (0–2, on 6 September), and Aston Villa held them 1–1 at home a week later. Éric was still playing, coming off the bench to have a superb game in Manchester – a bicycle kick nearly brought him one of the finest goals of his entire career – but the very fact he stood out perversely worked against him in his manager’s mind. The togetherness of his squad was questioned in the media, who made unflattering comparisons between the ‘commando spirit’ shown during the previous season with the uncertainties of the present one. The point wasn’t lost on Wilkinson, whose hesitant acceptance of Cantona’s idiosyncrasies hardened into distrust of the striker who had scored nine goals in as many games since that glorious afternoon at Wembley.

The camel’s back started to break for good on 16 September, when Leeds surrendered 3–0 in Stuttgart. This wasn’t the triumphant return to the European Cup a whole city had been hoping for, seventeen years after their club’s undeserved loss to another German club – Bayern Munich – in that competition’s final. The circumstances of the rift which ensued between player and manager epitomized their incapacity to communicate. Éric first told Wilkinson that a hamstring injury would prevent him from taking any further part in that game, before assuring his bench that he had recovered. He still felt some discomfort, but, as his team’s top goalscorer, was willing to play through the pain, as his departure from the pitch would not only weaken Leeds’s attacking options, but also provide encouragement to their opponents.

Unfortunately, one of his trademark cross-field passes was intercepted; Stuttgart counter-attacked and scored their opening goal. Two more followed without answer. Leeds’ prospects were grim: no English side had ever recovered from a three-goal deficit in Europe. For Wilkinson, Cantona had committed the cardinal sin of making his team pay for an individual error of judgement. Éric himself believed he had acted in the best interests of his club. The truth lay somewhere in between, but neither man had it in him to accept it. It didn’t help that Cantona’s injury prevented him from taking part in Leeds’s next two games, a colourless draw at Southampton (1–1) and an anodyne 4–1 victory over lower-division Scunthorpe in the League Cup. The adulation that the fans lavished on Éric didn’t assuage his coach’s discontent; in fact, it played to Wilkinson’s increasing wariness of his striker. For the manager’s allies, the supporters were deluded; they were forgetting that the title they had craved for nearly two decades had been won by harnessing ‘traditional’ British virtues (doggedness, stamina, aggression and so on), not thanks to the exotic tricks and flicks of a Continental import. But Wilkinson was also aware that, should he decide not to call on Cantona, he would incur the wrath of an uncomprehending crowd – another irritant for the proud Yorkshireman.

In fairness, Wilkinson’s head was still ruling his heart at this stage, and Éric rejoined the squad as soon as he had regained fitness, to help Leeds gain their first victory in six games, against Everton on 26 September (2–0). Four days later, it was Stuttgart’s turn to visit Eiland Road, in a game that was billed as ‘Mission Impossible’ by the national press. This pessimism was shared by the Leeds fans: only 20,457 of them passed the turnstiles, far less than the stadium could contain; there couldn’t be a starker indication of their disenchantment with the team they had feted in May. But the doom-mongers missed an unforgettable night. If the 5–0 win over Spurs had marked Cantona’s most accomplished display for Leeds, this 4–1 triumph over the German champions rivalled – and not just for the intensity of the drama – the greatest displays of the Revie era. No fire burnt more brightly than Gary McAllister’s at the heart of this collective incandescence. Within 15 minutes of kick-off, the Scottish midfielder had produced three fizzing strikes at goal. Stuttgart held on as best they could until two minutes later, when Cantona and Strachan combined to set up Gary Speed, whose sweet left-foot volley found the target. They couldn’t do it, could they? But just as belief started to swell the crowd’s hearts, Andreas Buck equalized in the 34th minute. The away-goals rule meant that Leeds would have to score four more to qualify, and over a third of the game had already been played. But Strachan and his teammates carried on battering the Stuttgart defence, and were rewarded with a penalty shortly before half-time. Gary McAllister stepped up to the spot and made it 2–1. A host of chances had come and gone for Leeds when they doubled their advantage in the 66th minute; Strachan, again, lofted the ball towards Éric, whose looping shot could only be deflected into the net by defender Gunther Schafer. Ten minutes before the final whistle, Lee Chapman, who had led the line with even more vigour and purpose than usual, surged at the near post and beat the German ’keeper with a header. One more goal and Leeds, incredibly, would be through.

But Stuttgart, overpowered as they had been for so long, regrouped and were not breached again. And as the curtain fell on one of the greatest games ever played by an English side in Europe, the Germans collapsed in a heap on the Eiland Road turf. Buck’s goal had sent them to the next round. A defiant Gordon Strachan told a
Post
journalist: ‘You can talk all you like about Italian and Spanish football, but there is no better spectacle than a British team, going at it as we did against Stuttgart.’ The bittersweet chord of gallant failure strikes the British heart more poignantly than any other, of course, but Strachan wasn’t fooling anyone with his noble speech. Wilkinson was truer to the emotions felt by his players when he said: ‘Most of them would wake up feeling that their stomach was eight feet deep and that they had a pain somewhere near the bottom of it.’

Leeds were out – or so they thought until the following morning, when the phone rang in the
Post
’s office. A German voice asked to be put through to someone on the sports desk of the paper. Their football correspondent Don Warters picked up the phone and very nearly dropped it when he heard what the caller, a journalist himself, had to say. Fans of a rival German club had watched the game on television and spotted that Stuttgart’s coach, Christoph Daum, had fielded four ‘foreign’ players in total, rather than the three then allowed by UEFA regulations. VfB could be thrown out of the tournament! This astonishing development was relayed to the club, which immediately contacted the organization’s headquarters.

UEFA hummed and hawed. They knew, as everyone did, that Daum’s mistake was not part of a sinister plan to rob Leeds of victory. His oversight could easily be explained by the chaotic nature of the game. Nonetheless, Stuttgart had derived an unfair advantage from their infringement of the rules; whether inadvertently or not should have been beside the point. But the wise men of European football decided against excluding the German club from the competition, and awarded Leeds a 3–0 win instead (the customary punishment for teams forfeiting a game). As Wilkinson’s team had been beaten by the same margin in the first leg, it would be necessary to play a third match, which UEFA wished to stage in a neutral venue: Barcelona’s Camp Nou. Leeds fans didn’t quite know whether they should feel relieved or hard done by. But by the time the decider took place on 9 October, they were too worried to bother.

Wilkinson’s exhausted team had sunk 4–2 at Ipswich four days after that splendid hurrah at Eiland Road, adding substance to the fear that his squad was too thin, and too old, to be seriously involved in more than one competition. The champions had yet to register a single victory away from home when the leaves had long turned in Roundhay Park. Drained as much by emotion as by physical exertion, Cantona saw his form dip for the first time since he had joined Leeds United. Never had he played so many games on the trot, even allowing for his injury. A return to France’s national team also beckoned. More importantly, he found it more difficult by the day to decipher Howard Wilkinson’s attitude towards him on a personal level. He still enjoyed his manager’s trust when it came to representing Leeds’ colours on the field, but could not gauge how firmly rooted this trust was from their exchanges off it.

A friend recently told me about a line he had found in an unpublished diary of novelist B. S. Johnson: ‘It’s not so much that I am thin-skinned; I have no skin at all.’ The writer’s confession could easily pass as a comment on Cantona the footballer-artist. And, as ever, Éric’s uncertainties translated into a (probably unconscious) weakening of his commitment to the club, imperceptible at first, and a degradation of his play which grew clearer as the weeks went by. There were rumours of late arrivals (and even no-shows) at training sessions, and of less than fulsome comments made by Wilkinson in private about his star player. I have been unable to ascertain whether the gossip had a basis in fact or was nothing more than extrapolation made in hindsight, once the squabble had degenerated into open conflict. Judging by Éric’s performance in Barcelona, however, Wilkinson’s frustration had more objective roots than the ill-matching words and deeds of two men.

Leeds overcame Stuttgart 2–1 in their winner-takes-all decider but, for once, Éric had been a mere passenger on someone else’s train. It fell to the unsung journeyman Carl Shutt to deliver the blow that ensured the Yorkshire club’s passage into the next round. The eerie atmosphere in which the game was played might have accounted – at least in part – for Cantona’s ineffectual showing. Only 7,400 spectators were dotted around the gigantic arena. Cantona ‘lost himself in the empty space’, to paraphrase what he had said earlier that year. Celebrations were strangely muted back in England, as if too much energy had been exhausted in the useless victory earned nine days previously, and while all Leeds supporters can recall with tellling precision what happened on 30 September, what followed on 9 October has all but faded from their collective memory.

In an ironic reversal of the situation Éric had found himself in after Euro 92,
Les Bleus
brought him the solace he needed. The deepening sense of malaise that permeated his club evaporated once he slipped on the blue jersey for the first time since Denmark had kicked France out of the European championships on 17 June. Houllier’s team waltzed past Austria 2–0 thanks to strikes by Papin and Cantona, a scoreline that would have been more emphatic had not four French goals been disallowed, and JPP not missed a penalty.
²⁶
France had ended a dismal nine-game winless sequence in emphatic fashion.

Éric brought back some of his revived form to England, where he made a solid contribution to a rare Leeds victory (3–1 against Sheffield United) in mid-October. But this result failed to spark the reaction Wilkinson had been hoping for. Cantona would never find himself in a winning Leeds side again and, within a month, would sit beside Alex Ferguson in Manchester United’s press conference room. The next round of the European Cup would act as the detonator of a full-blown crisis that could only be resolved by a parting of ways, as no unhappy marriage can end otherwise in football.

Leeds’ opponents in the second round of the European Cup were Rangers. The Scottish champions were a far more formidable force then than today, as they would prove by remaining unbeaten in the competition and missing qualification for that year’s final by a single point (Marseille pipped them to the post in the tournament’s second phase). Whoever prevailed in this two-legged encounter would earn a coveted spot in the so-called ‘group phase’, a mini-league in which the eight survivors slugged it out in pools of four teams each. A club’s mere presence in one of these two pools guaranteed millions of pounds of income in gate receipts and sales of broadcasting rights.

Wilkinson knew by then that winning the inaugural Premier League title was an unattainable ambition. But provided his team could ensure safety in the first tier of English football, the huge revenue derived from Europe’s top club competition could give him the means to rebuild his squad for a fresh assault on the championship a year hence. Leeds first had to win what every single newspaper in the country, north and south of the border, dubbed ‘The Battle of Britain’. Rarely was the use of a clichéd headline more strikingly vindicated than on this occasion.

The tone of the clash was given by the decision to bar away fans from both legs of the tie. Anglo-Scottish confrontations had been marred by crowd violence since the 1960s, and the regular outbreaks of hooliganism that accompanied fixtures of that type had contributed to the abandonment of the British Home Championship at the end of the 1983–84 season. The Heysel tragedy and the subsequent ban inflicted on England’s clubs had prevented sides from the two countries from facing each other since 1985. Judging by the sheer brutality of what ensued, the ban had been no bad thing.