Cantona (5 page)

‘Once,’ Monsieur Oliver told me, ‘after he hadn’t done, well, what he should have done during the week, I didn’t put him in the team that was to play Nice – the biggest game for us. I put him on the bench. With ten minutes to go, the score was nil-nil, and I sent him on. Of course, he scored the winner with a tremendous header. He asked me after the game: “Monsieur Oliver, why didn’t I play from the beginning tonight?” I just looked him in the eye and replied: “You know as well as I do, Éric.” “I understand,” he said. And that was the end of it.’

Not everyone could untie the knot of Cantona’s conflicting impulses as adeptly as his coach. He grew up in one of the largest cities in France, yet felt himself drawn to the countryside. He loved the parties his grandparents improvised on the beach, revelled in their gregariousness, sang with the Gipsies, and then dived into the ocean, alone with his fantasies. Most adolescents experience this duality of character, halfway between the secret garden of home and the jungle that lies outside, but few have as great a talent as Éric, and the confidence that flows from it. Only within the cocoon of his family could he truly be himself. Even then, his shyness would sometimes get the better of him. He would retreat to his room, just as he did at La Grande Bastide, without warning or explanation. Christophe Galtier, who was as close to him as an outsider could be at the time, remembered Éric leaving the communal table in the middle of supper to listen to music (The Doors were a favourite of his then and still are, as was Mozart, who had ‘been a great friend for many years’; ‘In Mozart,’ he said, ‘there’s art) or he’d go to the cinema on his own. ‘He had to be by himself’, Galtier said. ‘He never said why, and we didn’t ask.’ This need to withdraw from the company of others, this capacity to isolate himself when surrounded by a crowd, would remain with him all through his life. My friend Jean-Marie Lanoé, who had been assigned the task of following Cantona for our magazine
France Football
, at Auxerre, Marseille, Montpellier and the under-21 national team (at a time when ‘following’, for a journalist, meant sharing rather more than five minutes in the car park of a stadium), has never forgotten how, on the evening of a 2–2 draw against England at Highbury in 1988, the two of them ended in a deserted London nightclub. With no one but a journalist to talk to, Cantona got up and walked to the dance floor and ‘started to move alone, rapt, unaware or uncaring, for what seemed like hours. The oddest thing is that others would have seemed ridiculous in this situation, whereas Cantona was simply Cantona.’ Célestin Oliver insisted on the ‘maturity’ of the teenager he looked after so sympathetically. Whether the teenager matured much further is not that clear. His models, after all, had been part of his life from the very beginning.

Joseph, his Sardinian grandfather, embodied loyalty – even more than Albert, in Oliver’s perception. Pedro, the free-spirited Catalan who had as little time for the surplice as for the army uniform, personified something different from rebelliousness for its own sake. Defying authority was a matter of honour, as experience had written in his flesh what instinct had whispered to him before: authority’s main purpose was to crush the individual, to extinguish the dream within ourselves. If Pedro had stood up to Franco, Éric might as well tell anyone else what he really thought of them. In one of the most telling passages of his autobiography (one of the few paragraphs in which I feel that his voice rings true),
³
he remembers how, in the summer of 1978 – immediately before becoming a boarder at Mazargues – Les Caillols, having already won the Coupe de Provence, were on the verge of completing the double; all they had to do was beat Vivaux-Marronniers in the final of that competition. The match didn’t go according to plan, however. With five minutes to go, Vivaux-Marronniers went 1–0 up, and deservedly so. ‘We’re playing added time,’ Cantona recounted in a tone that reminds me of the mythical Finn MacCool’s superhuman exploits, as told by Flann O’Brien. ‘It is the moment I choose to spring from the back and run towards goal, having dribbled past a good half-dozen opponents, as in a dream. I am alone, a few metres from goal, and if I score, maybe we’ll be champions tonight.’

But Les Caillols would not add the 1978 championship of Provence to the list of their trophies. The referee blows his whistle. Éric’s bootlaces have come undone, and the regulations are clear: a footballer’s laces
must be tied.
‘The game is over. Tears flow in the dressing-room.’ That day, Cantona had ‘discovered stupidity or injustice, whatever you wish to call it’. The tale’s most revealing trait must be that neither the child nor the grown man could tell the difference between the two. There was, of course, nothing ‘unjust’ about the referee’s decision. Call him a bigot, a cretin, any name under the sun, but ‘unjust’? No. ‘Unfair’, yes, as when a child complains of something ‘unfair’ when he’s not given what he thinks he deserves. Had the goal been scored, and validated, the victim of the ‘injustice’ would have been Vivaux-Marronniers, not Les Caillols. But I doubt that anyone could persuade Cantona that his perception of right and wrong in what is, after all, one of the most regulated areas of human activity – team sports – was and remains deeply flawed. To him, when the official signalled a foul, it was as if he had killed a butterfly for no other reason than it was a butterfly, regardless of its beauty and harmlessness. To him it was a crime. Justice is an instinct, not a rulebook. No rules should circumvent invention. Those who have the ability to imagine beyond the rules have a right, maybe a duty, to break them, and damn the consequences.

For those who were satellites around the family sun, it was more a matter of ‘managing the unmanageable, sometimes in impossible circumstances’, as one of them told me, of finding accommodation with a fascinating, endearing and ‘emotive’ young man who could charm and exasperate those who cherished him most within a matter of seconds. His English teacher at La Grande Bastide, Evelyne Lyon, adored Éric, yet felt compelled to warn him that he ‘had better watch out, because talent was not enough, and if he didn’t change his character, he would have problems later on’. He was ‘someone you always had to keep an eye on’, she said. But this she did with as much gentleness as she could muster, even when her pupil ran riot outside her own classroom. Oliver chuckles at the recollection of Cantona dashing through the corridors after a training session, ‘shouting in English, “
I am the king! I am the king!
”’ Célestin Oliver could see the surprise on my face. Others would call him that later, wouldn’t they? ‘I think it had to do with Muhammed Ali,’ he says, with another smile. How he loved his boy.

Cantona was thriving at La Grande Bastide, but word of his achievements on the field hadn’t spread – yet – beyond Marseilles and Provence. OM had had a look at him, but, according to Oliver, their management had decided that Cantona was ‘too slow’ and passed on the chance to add the fourteen-year-old centre-forward’s name to their books. Jean-Marie and Joël, who also entertained dreams of becoming professionals,
⁴
were similarly unsuccessful. Such a rejection cast a threatening shadow over Éric’s future career; if a child of Les Caillols couldn’t make it in his home-town club, who could he turn to? Thankfully, and not for the last time, luck lent a helping hand.

The French FA had divided the country into districts whose borders mirrored the country’s
départements
and regions. These constituted the foundations of a pyramid, at the top of which sat national teams for each age group; a system of filters, if you will, a distillery of talent, one which would prove remarkably efficient at identifying and supporting emerging players. The chronic lack of success of
Les Bleus
in major tournaments, their inability to build on the exploits of the 1958 national squad, had prompted inspired administrators like George Boulogne and Fernand Sastre to undertake a complete reorganization of the detection system. Judging by the paucity of their results in European competitions, clubs couldn’t be trusted to identify and develop promising footballers – the Federation would have to take care of that. To that end, regular tournaments or ‘test-matches’ were held at every level, in Provence as elsewhere.

Cantona may have failed to attract the attention of OM, but at fourteen-and-a-half was still good enough to be considered for selection in this context. The then technical adviser for the Marseilles region, Henri Émile, had been in touch with Célestin Oliver, who had warmly recommended Cantona for inclusion in a ‘Mediterranean squad’, a group of thirty-five players who were then separated into two teams, the ‘possibles’ and the ‘probables’. To his amusement, Émile, who would become one of the most pivotal figures in Cantona’s career, can’t remember which of these two teams the boy was assigned to. ‘Éric himself has a very vivid memory of the occasion, which we often talk about when we’re travelling together,’ Émile told me at the French FA’s Clairefontaine headquarters, ‘but was he a “possible”, or a “probable”? He doesn’t know. He had no idea what these terms meant!’ It hardly mattered, as Cantona produced a magnificent display that afternoon in the spring of 1981. What mattered was that the match had been watched by a couple of scouts from Auxerre, an up-and-coming club from northern Burgundy which had risen quickly through the divisions under the tutelage of the wiliest of managers, Guy Roux. They had made the trip to the ground in order to monitor another player, whose identity has been forgotten by everyone. But they had seen Éric, and that was enough.

No one was keener than Roux to poach the best young talent available; his club had only acquired full professional status a couple of years earlier and its ground, the Stade de l’Abbé-Deschamps (named after the Catholic priest who had founded the Association de la jeunesse auxerroise, or AJ Auxerre or AJA), was minuscule by first-division standards. Roux had to scrape for every penny, which, it should be said, agreed with the parsimonious nature he had inherited from his peasant roots. Twenty-seven years later, as we sat down to a distinctly non-frugal lunch in one of Chablis’s restaurants (after a lengthy visit to one of the area’s most renowned cellars), Roux recalled how his chief scout’s report – his name was Jean-Pierre Duport – had been glowing enough to convince him that Cantona’s trail should be followed by the club’s second-in-command, assistant manager Daniel Rolland, in whom Roux had total confidence.

So it was that Rolland repeatedly drove down the
autoroute du soleil
to judge for himself. ‘Everybody could see he was “above” the others,’ says Roux – but no one as clearly as the astute coach from Burgundy, who, feigning innocence, called Oliver to ask him what he really thought of ‘this lad . . . Éric Cantona, yes?’ There was some risk attached to uprooting an adolescent from sunny Marseilles to one of the sleepiest towns in the sleepiest of regions. As Henri Émile says, ‘You never know how far a player can go at this age. You can feel a potential. But there are things you cannot control. Psychological things – as when a player thinks he’s “made it”, too soon. They can stall. You can see a great player’s potential but you don’t have certainties. Competition alone reveals whether the player masters all the criteria of the highest level.’ But – and it is a crucial but – the way that the OM reject had seized his one opportunity to shine showed that there was steel in his character as well as skill in his boots. The importance of the occasion had not fazed him. Still, Émile cannot help thinking of a ‘what if’: ‘Éric’s told me on several occasions that, if he hadn’t been picked in this team to start with, he might not have had the same career. Maybe he could have slipped through the net . . . which just goes to show!’

Roux still had some work to do to land his catch. Cantona’s performance for the Provençal scratch team had not escaped OGC Nice – a club with a reputation and a collection of honours that Auxerre could only look up to. This was the club for which Roger Jouve, another product of Les Caillols, was still playing three seasons earlier, and whose colours had been worn by another of Cantona’s early heroes, the Bosnian striker Jean Katalinski. Oliver himself kept telling his pupil that he should ‘go for it’ and rush down the coast to join Nice for good. By contrast, Auxerre was neither the most obvious nor the easiest choice for a stripling footballer who had not yet reached his fifteenth birthday. The medieval town, built like a low ribbon of stone along the slow waters of the Yonne, had a discreet charm, but few attractions for a teenager who had grown up in the warmth of the Mediterranean. There, in the north-eastern corner of Burgundy, autumns turned sharply to harsh Continental winters, almost as soon as the vineyards had been unburdened of their last bunch of grapes. Fog was common, snow too, often at unseasonal times. Going back to Marseilles would entail long hours on the train or in the family car – the high-speed TGV link between Paris and Marseilles was only completed in 2001. Nice, with ten times the population of Auxerre, had a casino, fine restaurants, nightclubs, beaches, palm trees and girls in monokinis by the seaside. Auxerre, on the other hand, had a few choice
charcuteries
, splendid white wines and a clutch of cafes which closed early when they deigned to open at all (Sundays are a very quiet affair in this town).

When it came to football, Nice, again, had dwarfed Auxerre for almost its entire history. Both clubs had been born roughly at the same time – AJA in 1905, OGC Nice three years later – but there the similarities ended. Whereas Nice’s
Les Aiglons
had won four French championships, two French Cups, and twice reached the quarter-finals of the European Cup, Auxerre owed its small measure of fame to its dramatic rise from the amateur ranks to the final of the 1979 French Cup, thanks to the genius of one man – Guy Roux. Glamorous Nice should have held all the cards in the duel for the acquisition of the exciting but yet unproven Cantona; but it played its hand badly. Perhaps the
Niçois
, who must have been aware of Auxerre’s manoeuvring, believed that the prestige attached to their red-and-black jersey, coupled with the interest they showed in the teenager, would suffice to overwhelm him. AJA was small fry after all. But Nice totally misjudged the young man’s temperament and hardly bothered to find out what could possibly prevent him from becoming one of their dozens of apprentices. Cantona finally made the trip to Nice as planned, but came back to his family laden with disappointment. He had decided to turn his back on OGCN for what seemed like the flimsiest of reasons – which he daren’t confess to his father at the time. He had asked if he could be given a jersey and pennant of
Les Aiglons
; quite ridiculously, the club insisted he should pay for them. He paid, but didn’t forget how little his prospective employers appeared to care for him.