Cantona (37 page)

I feel utterly confused at this point. If we accept that Ferguson had had his eye on Cantona for a while (and that, I believe, is more than likely, especially since Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister had raved about him to their manager after United’s 2–0 victory over Leeds in early September), who said what to whom on that day – 25 November – and in what order?

The story of how the deal was closed has become part of Manchester United’s folklore, one of Alex Ferguson’s best, which he’s always told with the glee of a canny horsetrader pinching the next Grand National winner from his biggest rival’s stable, and for a bag of oats at that. The role of the then general manager of Leeds, Bill Fotherby, is sometimes played by Howard Wilkinson (this was the case at the press conference that accompanied the unveiling of Éric Cantona as a Manchester United player), or vice versa. But Alex Ferguson remained true to his thread: Cantona was signed almost by chance, on a hunch, an afterthought.

This is how the story goes. Desperate for a striker – United had failed to score in four of their last five games – Ferguson was sitting in his chairman Martin Edwards’ office, remarking what a shame it was that Manchester United had missed out on Cantona when he was available. Right on cue, the phone rang. It was Bill Fotherby, enquiring about the availability of Dennis Irwin, Manchester United’s Irish left-back who had started his career at Leeds. Edwards’s straightforward ‘no’ didn’t end the conversation; he seized this opportunity to tease Fotherby about some of his players, including Lee Chapman, a proven goalscorer he must have known Leeds wouldn’t get rid of. Then, on Ferguson’s prompting, Edwards moved on to Cantona, whose name the manager had scribbled on a piece of paper. The rift between Wilkinson and his Frenchman was common knowledge at the time, even if its real causes were a matter for guesswork. Edwards showed some surprise when Fotherby confirmed that some serious turbulence had hit the precarious relationship between coach and player. Edwards made it clear that he wanted a quick deal, and there the conversation ended – but not for long. A few minutes later, the phone rang again: the deal was on. Fotherby had consulted with Wilkinson, who had given his blessing to the transfer. By that time, Ferguson had left his chairman’s office and was given the news on his carphone. Mischievously, Edwards asked his manager to try and guess how much they would be paying for the catalyst of Leeds’ success the season before. ‘Like a TV quiz,’ Ferguson would say, several years later. Of course, he didn’t get the exact figure. Who could have? At £1.2m, Cantona was a steal.
²⁸
So much so that doubt could justifiably creep into the manager’s mind.

Had he been too hasty? Would this prove to be another of these signings he had been caned for before in the press? He had looked for the missing piece in United’s jigsaw puzzle for a while, and believed he had found it on several occasions, only to be proved wrong every time.

It was at this point that he talked with Erik Bielderman, to seek advice from perhaps the only journalist he would trust in such circumstances. Erik remembers what he told Ferguson on that day. His words echoed those of Gérard Houllier’s: ‘Éric can only work with a coach who’ll be a substitute for a father, who will stand by him in public as he would stand by his son, regardless of what he does; in private, he’ll be able to chastise him if he thinks he must, and the “son” will respond.’ Cantona, by nature so quick to confuse displays of authority with bullying, later explained this side of his character thus: ‘In fact, I’ve always had problems with people who can’t take decisions. I want to be given directions, but I want to know where I’m going. I have to be persuaded that a certain path is the right one. Otherwise, problems start.’
²⁹

No one can doubt that the exchange related in Ferguson’s 1999 autobiography (
Managing My Life
) really took place. I finally got a chance to put a couple of teasing questions to Sir Alex about this episode late in the winter of 2008–09, which he answered with the candour that is part of his character, and which he’s rarely given credit for. Yes, Houllier had alerted him of Cantona’s availability on a couple of occasions (this much I never doubted); moreover, he had been told about Éric’s problems at Sheffield Wednesday – but he’d been ‘caught on the hop’, and Howard Wilkinson had been quicker to react, perhaps because of the close relationship he enjoyed with Trevor Francis and his advisers. Had Ferguson been able to pounce then, in January 1992 (as he would have wanted to), Éric Cantona would have become a Manchester United player several months before he did. When the opportunity presented itself, not to correct what can hardly be described as a mistake, but to exploit the circumstances, Sir Alex seized it with impeccable timing. The phone call, the slip of paper passed on to Martin Edwards, all this was true. What no one knew was that Cantona had been a target for Manchester United for a while already. In my opinion, Houllier’s, Roach’s and Bielderman’s accounts actually add to the tale rather than detract from it, and show a Ferguson who was not only able to trust his instinct, but also had the clear-mindedness to seek advice and, more importantly, take heed of it.

Manchester United could easily afford Cantona, but whether Ferguson could afford a failure was less obvious. His once fragile grip on the manager’s position had been strengthened by wins in the 1990 FA Cup and the 1991 European Cup Winners Cup, but the feebleness of United’s title challenge in the last few weeks of the previous season had led some to wonder whether, given the means at his disposal, Alex Ferguson really had it in him to deliver the championship craved by the club’s followers since their 1967 triumph. That albatross had hung heavily around the neck of Manchester United managers since then, and his team’s mediocre start to the 1992–93 campaign made it heavier still.

The fee involved in Éric’s transfer represented a negligible outlay for a club which had already broken the £1m barrier on eight previous instances since Ferguson had taken over in 1986. Moreover, of the players involved in those deals, only one – Dion Dublin (purchased for £1m from second division Cambridge United in August 1992) – had cost less than the French international. Ferguson had been willing to part with far more money to lure Alan Shearer away from Southampton during the summer, until Blackburn Rovers broke the English transfer record to bring him to Ewood Park instead. The name of Peter Beardsley (then at Everton) had also been frequently mentioned and, a few days before Éric’s arrival was officially announced, Ferguson had failed in his second attempt to buy the superbly gifted (but troubled) Sheffield Wednesday centre-forward David Hirst. The Yorkshire club had rejected an offer believed to be well in excess of £3m, another figure that highlights the derisory nature of the amount Leeds were prepared to accept in exchange for their most gifted footballer – the man of the match of a sumptuous Charity Shield which had been played little over three months previously. In that context, the reassurance Ferguson sought maybe had as much to do with the questions he was asking about himself as about his new recruit. It would be excessive to speak of a ‘last roll of the dice’, but how long could he hold on to the keys of power if this latest gamble didn’t pay off?

Regardless of Ferguson’s long-standing interest in, if not active pursuit of his recruit, events had unfolded at tremendous speed: the deal had been struck just four days after Cantona’s exclusion from the Leeds squad for their game at Arsenal. Forty-eight hours later, on the morning of 27 November, Éric passed his medical and was treated to the traditional stadium visit by his new manager. Cantona wandered on to the pitch on which he had played half an hour of football with Leeds twelve weeks previously. As he approached the halfway line, Ferguson stopped him and, with a sweeping gesture to the stands, asked: ‘I wonder if you’re good enough to play in this ground . . .’ to which Éric replied: ‘I wonder if Manchester is good enough for me!’ As it is no secret that players with an inflated sense of their own worth rarely last long at Old Trafford, it might surprise some that Alex Ferguson rather enjoyed this show of bravado. But the Scot could distinguish pride from cockiness, and was looking for a protagonist big enough for the ‘Theatre of Dreams’. Any Manchester United fan can name footballers of undoubted talent who failed to live up to their billing at their club. An incontrovertible sense of self-belief is crucial for those who wish to survive and flourish in an environment where myth has tended to be out of step with actual achievement. Cantona’s reply, for all its mock arrogance, at least manifested a genuine desire to succeed, and a refusal to be intimidated.

The two men then made their way to the press room, where Éric was to be formally introduced to the British media as a Manchester United player. Alex Ferguson opened the proceedings in his idiosyncratic French:
‘Mon plaisir à présenter Éric Cantona
’ – bringing a faint smile to Éric’s lips. Like most great managers, Ferguson has used and continues to use the press to relay a message to the only audience he really cares for: his players; on this occasion, he was addressing the Frenchman who was sitting by his side, interpreter in tow.
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‘Éric is the goalscorer we have been looking for,’ he said. ‘He is a very exciting footballer, the type Manchester United fans love. He is one of the best entertainers in the country.’ Ferguson couldn’t resist a small dig at Éric’s former club: ‘I do believe he was instrumental in Leeds winning the championship last season. He has flair, he has class, and we have now provided him with the biggest of stages upon which to perform.’

From the outset, Ferguson was implementing the policy from which he would never deviate throughout Cantona’s stay in Manchester: talk Éric up, reassure him, shore up his fragile confidence at every possible opportunity. Houllier and Bielderman had advised him to become a surrogate father to Cantona. It is a tribute to Ferguson’s considerable gifts as a psychologist that he immediately felt that no other course of action was open to him. He later wrote: ‘I had resolved when he [Éric] arrived that I would ignore all past attempts to present him as an
enfant terrible
, I would judge him on what he was like in his dealings with me, making my aim to communicate with him regularly and to try and understand him. He was not, I soon discovered, the overwhelmingly confident person many perceived him to be. He needed nourishing.’ Éric’s first day at Old Trafford provided Ferguson with a chance to do just that, in public, and set a pattern that would transform the player – and, ultimately, the club.

It helped that both men took an instant shine to each other. Cantona would not hesitate to talk about a case of ‘love at first sight’, and confided to his friend Bernard Morlino: ‘Ferguson fills us with a joy of living. Either you enter the
tourbillon
[whirlwind], or you’re thrown outside the hurricane.’ Note the violent undertones to Cantona’s metaphor; note, too, how little room is left for reason in this appraisal – what matters is the ‘joy of living’. The young footballer of Auxerre had said: ‘Maybe, on the day I caressed a ball for the first time, the sun was shining, people were happy, and it made me feel like playing football. All my life, I’ll try to capture that moment again.’ The twenty-six-year-old wanted to believe that the time to do so had come at last.

Howard Wilkinson had lost his way when attempting to read the confused map of Éric’s character. All he could see was a tangle of roads whose destination was unclear. He might have understood that the firebrand he had brought to Leeds needed to be cajoled into abeyance; but he was unable to bring himself to define a space that Cantona and Cantona alone could occupy in his team, as this jarred with both his instinct and all he’d learnt in his own tough ascent from lower-league pro to champion of England. It would have gone against what had made him a successful manager – his organizational skills, his ability to instil discipline in a group, his rigorous (some would say rigid) approach to the game of football. Football, an art form? Not bloody likely! A battle, yes.

Ferguson was cut from a different cloth. To him, discipline was a means to an end, not an inflexible imperative of man-management. He knew how to instil fear in a player’s eyes, but he also had an intuitive grasp of other people’s insecurities and how best to exploit them; kindness and understanding, which came naturally to him, were other weapons in his arsenal. I have only spent a few hours in Ferguson’s company, but, like so many before me, I was struck by his easy charm and his genuine ability to listen to the interlocutor of the moment. What time he had given me felt like a gift, presented without affectation; though it’s also true that I was kept on my toes by a sense of imminent danger. I most certainly didn’t want to cross that man, and realized it wouldn’t be very difficult to do so.

Ferguson knew how all but a very few professionals are inhabited by a sometimes overwhelming sense of anguish, how much doubt preys on them, and how what differentiates the great from the good can also be the capacity to conquer a deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy, rather than an unshakeable self-belief in one’s ability. So, how best to deal with Cantona? Ferguson’s secret was of the utmost simplicity: tea. As he told Gérard Houllier, ‘Every day, I had a cup of tea with him. Every day.’ We now know how Éric responded to that, as he had responded to Guy Roux’s grumpily affectionate guidance, and to Marc Bourrier’s gentler, but still father-like rule. Ferguson also realized – again, from the very beginning, which is why the point must be made at this stage in the story – that he would have to allow his recruit far more leeway in the day-to-day life of the club. At first, some of the other players found it difficult to believe, and accept, that such a notorious hellraiser could be forgiven lapses in United’s code of conduct which would have earned them a severe reprimand and, in some cases, more serious punishment. Éric showed admirable dedication on the training ground, often staying behind with a couple of youth-team players to practise his scales when others had long since closed the piano lid. But he also turned up late on a few occasions, without incurring the wrath of his coach, who equally tolerated various infringements to the club’s dress code by the Frenchman. Lee Sharpe has told how he was the subject of a verbal lashing by his manager when turning up at a civic function dressed in a snazzy silk suit, whereas Cantona, wearing T-shirt and trainers, had waltzed in without so much as a peep from Ferguson.