Cantona (49 page)

The Old Trafford crowd cheered their champions on 4 May when Southampton were beaten 2–0 at Old Trafford. This was a red-letter day in more ways than one, as Arsenal won the European Cup Winners Cup at the expense of Parma that evening. Arsenal’s success had sufficiently boosted the UEFA rating of English club football to guarantee that Manchester United would enter the following season’s competition directly in the group phase – probably the only time in the history of the Gunners that they did a good turn to their bitterest rival in the north-west of England.

There remained an FA Cup final to play, whose outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion, despite United’s remarkable statistics in this 1993–94 season: 64 games played in all competitions, 126 goals scored, and only 6 defeats. But their opponents Chelsea had ‘done the double’ over them in the league. The whole of Manchester, however, had another double in mind – this one with a capital ‘D’, which only five clubs had achieved since the creation of the Football League in 1888.
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United were favourites to become the sixth team, and Cantona the first non-British footballer, to achieve a feat that many had considered impossible in the context of the modern game. Other foreigners had walked up Wembley’s thirty-nine steps to receive a FA Cup winner’s medal: the Argentinian duo of Osvaldo Ardiles (1981 and 1982) and ‘Ricky’ Villa (1981), both with Tottenham; much earlier, the Newcastle inside-forward Jorge ‘George’ Robledo Oliver (in 1951 and 1952), a Chilean international who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, as his parents had emigrated to Yorkshire when he was five years old. But none had yet finished a domestic season with the two greatest honours English football had to offer.

Six days before the final, Éric and his teammates did a last lap of honour in their own stadium. Or should it be a stroll of honour? Their opponents that day, Coventry City, had long secured their Premiership status, and Alex Ferguson could afford to give a rare outing to a few fringe players, Dion Dublin among them. The 0–0 scoreline didn’t surprise or upset anyone. Éric did his best to provide some entertainment, his bicycle kick forcing Steve Ogrizovic to produce a flying save, one of only two occasions when the crowd rose to its feet; the other was to give a standing ovation to Bryan Robson, who was wearing United’s red shirt for the 340th and last time. The Cantona clan had travelled en masse from Marseille for an extended stay, Albert (whose 54th birthday fell on Cup final day) cramming the boot of his car with memorabilia purchased at the club’s store, Léonor listening to her son re-enacting his on-field acrobatics, all of them thinking ahead to 14 May, the date of Éric’s fifth visit to Wembley,
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but the first on which the most venerable trophy in world football would be at stake. Joël, as ever, was in adoring attendance.

Cantona slept badly on the eve of the final. Nerves were not to blame, but a recurrence of the back trouble that had been a bane of his career for so long. He usually played through the pain, but the stiffness was such when he woke up that he asked for painkillers before the teams walked out on the pitch. United’s medical staff decided against an injection and provided him with three tabs of aspirin instead, which turned out to be remarkably effective on the evidence of his performance that afternoon. Mindful of his condition, he produced a display that was composed rather than flamboyant, controlling the play from a slightly more withdrawn position, finding space on the right wing at times, sustaining a high tempo through quickness of thought and breadth of vision, happy for Giggs, Hughes, Kanchelskis and the marauding Irwin to harry Chelsea’s defence.

The final was wrapped up in less than ten minutes, after an hour of play. Before that, Glenn Hoddle’s team had proved dogged and resourceful opponents, frequently threatening to pierce United’s defence with their quick interpassing. Then, in the 60th minute, Eddie Newton committed a dreadful foul on Dennis Irwin right in front of referee Mike Riley, who immediately pointed to the penalty spot. The Chelsea players had no right to feel aggrieved by the decision, but, as Cantona picked up the ball to place it there, one of them, Dennis Wise (who else?), walked up and started remonstrating with the Frenchman – or so the television viewers and commentators thought. Wise intended to disrupt Éric’s concentration, there could be no doubt about that, but the method he had chosen to do that was highly original. He asked Cantona: ‘Fancy a bet?’ to which Éric replied, ‘Yes – £100,’ before waving him off with a dismissive gesture of the hand. What with Wise’s intervention, and Riley and Cantona taking turns to replace the ball on the spot, the execution of the referee’s sentence took over a minute-and-a-half.

The last two penalties awarded on FA Cup final day at Wembley had been saved, but Dimitri Kharine could do nothing about Éric’s kick. He struck the ball almost nonchalantly with the inside of his right boot, as if he had been practising on the training ground. Barely five minutes later, the Double became a near certainty when Riley blew his whistle again, this time after Andreï Kanchelskis had come off worst in a shoulder-to-shoulder challenge in the box. Wise’s teammates remonstrated furiously, and not without justification this time, but there was no bet on that occasion (Wise settled his wager at the exit of the dressing-rooms). Éric waited for the tumult to die down, teed the ball – and sent Kharine the wrong way, placing his shot (more a pass into the goal, in fact) precisely in the same spot, to the left of the Russian ’keeper. ‘Do not play poker with that man,’ as a columnist wrote the next morning. The eerie similarity between the two penalty kicks had something almost comical about it. ‘Whatever you do,’ Éric seemed to imply, ‘we’ll beat you on our terms, and there is nothing you can do about it,’ which summed up this match perfectly. Chelsea, who showed tremendous spirit throughout, could have played until dusk without scoring, whereas every United move in the second half looked as if it would be concluded with a goal. Éric was only inches away from equalling Stan Mortensen’s record of a hat-trick at this stage of the competition, but placed his angled shot in Kharine’s side-netting instead. It didn’t matter: Hughes capitalized on a defensive mix-up to make it 3–0 in the dying seconds. Then Éric initiated the best move of the game from a Chelsea corner. His superbly timed pass reached Mark Hughes as he was racing towards the halfway line. The Welshman had spotted Paul Ince driving forward, and prolonged the course of the ball in his unimpeded path. Ince rounded the ’keeper and selflessly laid out the simplest of tap-ins for Brian McClair. The lopsided character of the 4–0 scoreline only hardened the growing conviction that the gap Manchester United had opened on their pursuers was turning into an unbridgeable chasm. Alex Ferguson, wearing a red wig, half-walking, half-dancing on the Wembley pitch, assuredly seemed to think as much at the final whistle.

Whereas all the talk prior to the final had been of Ferguson’s team emulating legendary sides like Danny Blanchflower’s Spurs of 1961, the post-match coverage of the 113th FA Cup final focused on the contribution of one player rather than on the conquest of the Double. The
Daily Mirrors
headline said it all: ‘General De Goal’. Journalists swarmed around the first man ever to score two penalties in the grand Wembley showcase. Why had he decided to shoot twice to the left of Kharine? ‘Because he twice dived to his right,’ Éric said. ‘If he had twice dived to his left, I would have twice kicked to his right!’ Had he not felt nervous? ‘If you are nervous,’ came the reply, ‘you should stop playing football. This is the moment you prepare for all your life. There is the stadium, there are 80,000 people and the ball and the chance to win a Cup final. If that makes you nervous, you should change your occupation.’

Mark Hughes was one of many voices joining in the chorus of praise. ‘He has really opened up everyone’s football awareness,’ the Welshman said. ‘We see Éric doing things, and we think, “I’ll try that.” We’re not as good at it as Éric, but he has freed us a little bit, and that’s why we now play with that little bit more flair’), but a few dissenting voices could also be heard. Simon Barnes, for example, wrote this cruel barb in
The Times:
‘Éric Cantona is a man who seems to rise to the small occasion.’ Barnes, as he often does, had a point, which many others had made and would make again, though not always with the same flair for an epigram: Éric was a flat-track bully. Alluding to the League Cup final defeat by Aston Villa a few months previously, Barnes borrowed from Oscar Wilde to say: ‘To lose one Wembley final may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like a character defect; in particular a defect in the character of Éric Cantona.’

Éric himself could not be held responsible for the adulation that was lavished on him. That he enjoyed it tremendously (and expected it, up to a point) cannot be doubted; the very extravagance of the compliments heaped upon his ‘genius’ helped him fend off a long-time companion of his – the demon of insecurity. But he could also be a sterner critic of himself than is commonly thought. ‘It’s too soon to call me a legend,’ he warned. ‘Before comparing me with George Best, Bobby Charlton or Denis Law, I prefer to be judged after two more years at Old Trafford.’ Never before had he suggested so clearly that his future was linked to the future of a particular club – and this at a time when a number of European giants were rumoured to covet him, Real Madrid and Internazionale among the most frequently mentioned suitors. In all likelihood, the Spaniards’ infatuation may have been nothing but a journalist’s fantasy, but Inter’s interest grew into something of an obsession for Massimo Moratti, whose father Angelo had turned the Milanese club into Europe’s most feared side in the mid-1960s, and who was desperate to recapture some of that faded glory. Time and again over the next three years, the young oil tycoon (who officially became the
nerazzuri’s
chairman in February 1995) would try and bring Cantona to Serie A. His courtship would not bear fruit, but, as we’ll see, it wouldn’t be for want of trying.

Twenty-five thousand fans were waiting for the Double winners back in Manchester. Each of them had probably bought or been given a copy of ‘Come On You Reds’, the first single recorded by a club side
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to top the nation’s charts. Each of them knew Éric’s prodigious statistics for the season: 25 goals in 48 games. Here’s the detail: 3 goals scored with his left foot, 19 with his right, plus 3 headers; 21 from within the box, 4 from outside; plus 15 assists. Cantona himself, ten days away from his twenty-eighth birthday, was at the peak of his powers and relishing football as he never had before. Bernard Morlino heard him say on FA Cup final night: ‘If I hadn’t been a footballer, I would have had to be Jacques Mesrine or Albert Spaggiari to experience emotions as strong as these’ (a telling reference that warrants a longer digression for the benefit of English readers, which you will find at the end of this chapter).

After taking part in Mark Hughes’s testimonial on May the 16th, the rebel went home to Boothstown, where he was finally reunited with Isabelle and their son in a modest semi-detached house worth less than £100,000, five doors away from the home of one of Ryan Giggs’ best friends. He still kept his room at the Novotel. ‘It’s boring to be in a big house,’ he said.

Cantona’s rebellion stopped on the doormat. Come June, immediately after Éric had taken part in an inconsequential friendly tournament in Japan,
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Isabelle stopped teaching at Leeds University and the collection of cardboard boxes that had cluttered the family residence in Leeds was brought to the home Éric had occupied, alone, for several months already.

Tony Smith, a Manchester United supporter and Boothstown resident, later said that ‘the whole village was buzzing with the news that he had come to live among “ordinary” people’, rather than hiding away in the exclusivity of the stockbroker belt. But it was not such a shock; he had lived modestly in Leeds, and had stayed in a Worsley motel before bringing his family across the Pennines. The locals quickly became accustomed to seeing Cantona driving through the neighbourhood. ‘I had the opportunity to speak to Éric Cantona outside my house during his most traumatic period,’ Smith recalled, referring to the aftermath of the Crystal Palace fracas,

The names of Mesrine and Spaggiari carry a deep, sombre resonance for the French. Both were notorious gangsters of the 1970s, who became heroes in some sections of society for their daring assaults on symbols of the bourgeois establishment (France’s answer to the Kray twins, if you will, but with more panache and, in Mesrine’s case, far more violence). To them, or so they claimed, crime was also an act of rebellion, a moral and political statement which somehow drew the offender beyond the accepted boundaries of good and evil. Spaggiari had some justification to make such claims. He pulled off one of the most astonishing heists ever, the robbery of FF50m from the Société Générale in Nice in 1976, daubing the slogan
sans armes, ni haine, ni violence’
(‘with no weapons, hatred or violence’) on a safe. Mesrine, who, in the best-selling autobiography he wrote in prison (
L’Instinct de mort –
‘The Death Instinct’), boasted to have committed no less than thirty-nine murders, made for a more dubious modern-day Robin Hood. After an implausible escape from an interrogation chamber, Spaggiari spent the last twelve years of his life on the run before dying of throat cancer in Italy. Mesrine, a thug of considerable charm who, chomping a cigar, offered champagne to the police officer who caught him in his hideout, died in a hail of bullets in 1979, hand grenades and automatic weapons at his feet. It’s tempting to think that Cantona’s reference to these famous criminals was in keeping with the conventions of French society – I remember Spaggiari’s and Mesrine’s names being mentioned with some admiration around my family’s dinner table at the time of their exploits – but, beyond identifying himself with the adventurer-refusenik, it also revealed a political nihilism that has been a constant temptation for individualists in France for over a century.