Cantona (67 page)

True to that season’s pattern, Éric, having hit his stride, soon enough lost it. There was a superb volley in the 4–0 deconstruction of Nottingham Forest on Boxing Day, which shook the bar and offered Solskjær a chance he didn’t miss, and a successful penalty kick against Leeds, following a double one-two with United’s other telepathist, Ryan Giggs. But whereas Keane, still recovering from injury, was in and out of the side, Cantona was in and out of form, looking a spent force one day, a match-winner the next. Part of the problem was his obvious lack of complicity with Andy Cole, to whom he could hardly bring himself to pass the ball. The flicks and backheels did not find the intended player as often as before. United ‘stumbled to second top’ in the league, to quote Alex Ferguson, and, going for an unprecedented fourth straight appearance in the FA Cup final, struggled to get past a Tottenham side missing six first-team players in the third round of that competition. The emergence of David Beckham counterbalanced Éric’s inconsistency to a degree, but United’s satisfactory position in the Premiership – only two points behind leaders Liverpool, after registering those three consecutive league defeats in the autumn – owed more to the feebleness of their challengers than to the quality of their own football. Newcastle, seductive but so fragile, hadn’t got over the trauma of the previous season’s sickening endgame, Blackburn were fading after the briefest of blossomings, and Arsenal were still in the process of being reinvented by Arsène Wenger. The rest? Mere fodder: Coventry (2–0), Wimbledon (2–1), Southampton (2–1, a double-chinned and unshaven Éric scoring the scrappy winner to end a scrappy game), three victories, nine points that made one feel like adding a verse to Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’.

Cantona’s influence on the team was dwindling. The yellow cards he had accrued meant he missed two of that season’s pivotal games through suspension, a 2–1 win at Highbury and a 1–1 draw at Stamford Bridge. In both cases, what was noticed was that his absence was hardly noticeable; as was his presence when Wimbledon took United out of the FA Cup in a fourth round replay, on 1 February. This was the only defeat Éric ever suffered in this competition (an extraordinary statistic, as he had played his first FA Cup tie three years and a month previously), but, judging by his expression at the final whistle, he might as well have lost a friendly. He must have cared – he couldn’t help but care – but it didn’t show.

In truth, Éric was already thinking of another future, of an existence beyond football. The international breaks had given him a chance to travel to Paris regularly over the past few months. He had become a familiar figure in the capital’s theatres, not just as a mere spectator, but also as a producer, in partnership with one of France’s finest stage and screen actors, Niels Arestrup, who had collaborated with arthouse directors such as Alain Resnais, Chantai Ackerman and István Szabó. Cantona was no neophyte in that regard. As early as 1989, he had helped launch the career of comedian Patrick Bosso, a fellow Marseillais who had actually played four years as a sweeper in OM’s under-18 team. Assisted by his brother Joël, whose role and influence were growing as Éric’s disenchantment with football deepened, he increased his involvement in Arestrup’s company, Caargo, both financially and emotionally. Their first common project had been a revival of Edward Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
at the Théâtre de la Gaîté Montparnasse in November 1996, which received excellent notices and did decent business at the box office. Éric then threw himself into the production of
Derrière les collines
, a play written by Jean-Louis Bourdon which had been passed on to the fledgling producer by the owner of a brasserie in the Opéra quarter, where Cantona happily mingled with a bohemian clientele of actors, writers and critics. ‘We never talked about football,’ Bourdon told me. ‘We talked about art. He was
formidable
, passionate, eager to listen to others, and so kind.’ The two men first met over dinner, where the playwright was delighted to welcome an unexpected guest at their table: the boxing legend Jake La Motta, Martin Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’ in person. Compare such charmed evenings with the privileged but humdrum life of a professional footballer: no wonder Éric often gave the impression he would rather be elsewhere when the time had come to don a jersey.

Cantona’s
ennui
was nothing new: it had been his companion ever since he had signed his first contract with Auxerre. ‘It is better to live with your passions on the margins [of the football milieu] than to let yourself be eaten alive by this system,’ he said, long after he left it for good. French photographer Isabelle Waternaux – whose Géricault-like study of Cantona appears on this book’s dustjacket – told me how her subject had confessed he’d ‘had enough of this circus’ more than two years before his retirement. Sitting at the bar of the Novotel, a baseball cap screwed on his head in a vain and almost touching attempt to hide his identity, Éric told her how much he had come to despise the British press, how everything that was happening off the pitch encouraged him, if that’s the word, to think of another life for himself, away from what had made him a celebrity. ‘I have nothing to prove, and I have no duty to show who I am to the people whom I find interesting,’ he said, enigmatically, in the first interview he gave – to
Libération –
after his decision to leave England and football. ‘To the others – I have nothing to say.’

Nothing to prove? Now that the 1998 World Cup would be played without him, there remained one aim to reach: victory in Europe, and that prospect alone was enough to make him find resources within himself that many believed were now exhausted. Éric Cantona had not given up – not yet.

Manchester United’s opponents in their Champions League quarter-final were FC Porto, the first leg to be played at Old Trafford on 5 March. For Ferguson, this was the opportunity to exact revenge for the controversial defeat his Aberdeen side had suffered at their hands in the 1984 Cup Winners Cup, when allegations (which remain unsubstantiated) that the officials had been bribed surfaced shortly before the game. The ‘Dragons’ would be no pushovers, as their recent record in Europe’s top competition showed. Bobby Robson had led them to the semi-finals in 1993–94, further than United themselves had gone for twenty-nine years, and they had also reached the quarters of the Cup Winners Cup a season later. But Alex Ferguson’s team swept past the Portuguese champions that night: the 4–0 scoreline gave a fair reflection of the hosts’ dominance. This was one of the very few matches Éric played in Europe which could rank with his best performances in the league or the FA Cup. The consensus in the press box was that Porto had been torn to shreds by prospective European champions. The pounding rain hardly affected the fluidity of United’s passing. Cantonas goal, United’s second, was not a classic – a long punt upfield by Schmeichel, flicked on by Solskjær, bundled by Aloisio, thumped by Éric past a flailing Hilario – the same Hilario who made a few cameo appearances for Chelsea a decade later. On the hour, it was Cantona again who kindled United’s fire, addressing a slide-rule pass along the touchline to Andy Cole, who found Giggs, who scored. United’s last goal was also Éric’s creation. He cushioned a hopeful ball by Ronnie Johnsen, and found the exact millisecond at which he could release the ball into the path of Andy Cole, who finished off the move deftly with his left foot. ‘One of the best performances of my time,’ enthused Ferguson afterwards, ‘a hell of a performance.’ The following day the value of United’s stock rose £10m to £430m.

As could be expected, the glorious winners fell back to earth when they had to resume their quest for the championship title. Sunderland picked up the pieces of a team suffering from a collective hangover and won 2–1. Éric barely looked interested.

United’s play was the reflection of his own, and vice versa, exhilarating in fits and bursts (as when Éric found Cole in a packed penalty box with an exquisite pass for the first goal of a 2–0 victory over Sheffield Wednesday), otherwise ponderous, flat, uninspired. It’s true that they could afford to relax in the comfort of the Premiership, as no other team showed the talent or the drive required from would-be champions. Energy could be saved for the all-important European semi-final to come, after a demoralized Porto could only achieve a goalless draw in the second leg of a tie that had already been won in Manchester.

Éric’s form in the games preceding the clash with Borussia Dortmund (who had seen off his old club Auxerre in the previous round) showed some improvement: even when Derby surprisingly won 3–2 at Old Trafford, he scored his second goal in two matches, following a nonchalant volley in a 2–0 win over a desperately poor Everton. Confidence was high in Manchester, so high that Peter Schmeichel made the quite ridiculous assertion that the current United team would beat the European champions of 1968 by 10 goals to nil. It didn’t bring him luck: he suffered an injury just before kick-off in Dortmund on 9 April, and had to leave his place in goal to Raymond van der Gouw. Alex Ferguson hadn’t been as reckless in his pre-match predictions, but had nonetheless brushed away suggestions that Cantona could struggle if the German champions man-marked him, as was expected, an apprehension that was shared by Gary Pallister. In the defender’s view, it was primarily the tighter man-marking practised by Continental teams that explained why Éric never really expressed himself fully in European competitions, rather than some flaw in his character. But Ferguson disagreed. ‘I don’t think Éric will be too worried about it,’ he said. The manager’s remarkable confidence was shared by most observers, with some justification. Dortmund, a fine side which had won two Bundelsiga titles on the trot, would be deprived of no fewer than seven of their regular first-teamers in the first leg, including the internationals Stéphane Chapuisat, Karl-Heinz Riedle and Jürgen Kohler, all of them injured, as well as their inspirational skipper Matthias Sammer, the future 1997
Ballon d’Or
, who was suspended.

Luck certainly didn’t smile on United in the awe-inspiring Westfalenstadion, packed with 48,500 vociferous supporters. René Tretschok’s late winner (scored a quarter of an hour from time) was deflected by Gary Pallister’s foot – after Nicky Butt, David Beckham and Cantona had all spurned good chances to score a crucial away goal. Éric had been sent clear by Butt, but from 15 yards, and with only Stefan Klos to beat, put his attempt high and wide. Then Butt (served by Cantona) hit a powerful shot which cannoned off the post. Finally, the Frenchman provided Beckham with an excellent ball on the hour, but the midfielder’s strike was too weak: Martin Kree had time to rush behind the beaten Klos and clear the ball off the line. United’s already wretched night took a turn for the worse when Roy Keane picked up yet another yellow card, which triggered an automatic ban for the return match, much to Cantona’s annoyance.

The role Éric played in his team’s best three chances might suggest that he had been one of their best performers on the night, but this was not Keane’s judgement. The Irishman later told Eamon Dunphy that he felt Éric had been one of ‘the one or two of our players’ who had been ‘backing off’ on this occasion. He went further: ‘Éric will never rank alongside the truly great European players. This is the stage that really counts. Maybe Éric’s not capable of it. Never will be.’ Alex Ferguson was kinder to his protégé, but only marginally so. Cantona had been ‘so low-key and marginal in Dortmund’, he recollected later, ‘that I was left searching for a reason. I questioned myself about whether there had been an alteration in my method of dealing with him.’ Reflecting on their defeat, Ferguson wondered if he ‘had been talking to him less than [he] should’. He had sensed that Cantona needed more space, more freedom to find out how he could best lead the team. The captaincy he had inherited after Steve Bruce had retired at the end of the previous season was not a natural role for him. While admitting that there might have been ‘a mental block’ in Éric’s persona when it came to so-called ‘big European nights’, a puzzled Ferguson argued that ‘there were such occasions when Éric played marvellously for us’. But which ones could he be thinking of?

I read the reports and watched the videos, trying to find these elusive moments of personal triumph, and could only come up with two: a late equalizer against Galatasaray and the trouncing of Porto in Manchester, when a couple of early goals had rocked the Portuguese side and precipitated a state of euphoria in the whole United side. Compare this with the record of another French superstar in whom many see a ‘choker’ on the European stage, Thierry Henry. Cantona never scored a winning goal at the Bernabéu, a double at San Siro or a hat-trick at the Stadio Olimpico. Henry did, and when it mattered. Éric himself has never won an international trophy with club or country, unless the 1988 European under-21 title is taken into account – and you may remember a ban had prevented him from playing in the second leg of the final. That a player blessed with such strength of character and such talent could prove an almost complete failure in European competitions is a mystery for which I can only offer a few clues – but no definite explanation. One such clue is that Éric had felt – and for quite a long time – that his club wasn’t prepared to spend the money needed to purchase the proven matchwinners who could help him lift United to success in Europe. These promises failed to materialize, adding to Éric’s disillusionment with a club that he believed was now prioritizing its image as a marketing commodity.

Retirement wasn’t uppermost in his mind just yet, however. Three meetings had been held with United chairman Martin Edwards since the beginning of March, and both parties appeared to favour a new extension to Cantona’s present contract, which had over a year to run. There was no reason to believe that the tap-in he scored against Blackburn (3–2) on 12 April, three days after the Dortmund heartbreaker, would be his last goal for Manchester United – or for anyone else, which it was. He was at the apex of his fame, I’d almost say his popularity, as he’d overcome the consequences of his moment of madness at Crystal Palace with great dignity. The adulation he received in his adopted city showed no sign of abating. Thirteen thousand people visited the City of Manchester Art Gallery in the last two weeks of April, to gaze on
The Art of the Game
, a 10ft by 8ft painting by local artist Michael Browne.
⁵⁶
The composition was based on Piero Delia Francesca’s
Resurrection of Christ
and Andrea Mantegna’s
Julius Caesar on his Triumphal Chariot
, in which Cantona’s likeness had been substituted for the Lamb’s, to the outrage of a few and the amusement of many. To the person on the street it will be tongue in cheek,’ the artist said. ‘I don’t believe people will take it seriously as an insult. It reflects street humour – the kind of humour the fans have.’