Football – Bloody Hell! (27 page)
Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
Darren’s Hamstring
M
al Donaghy left United just as Ferguson’s fulfilment approached. The club might have won only the League Cup – in the FA Cup, they were beaten on penalties by Southampton in a fourth-round replay at Old Trafford, while their attempt to keep the European Cup-Winners’ Cup was ended in the second round by Atlético Madrid, for whom Paulo Futre scored twice in a 3-0 first-leg triumph – but the League campaign convinced most observers that Ferguson was getting there.
al Donaghy left United just as Ferguson’s fulfilment approached. The club might have won only the League Cup – in the FA Cup, they were beaten on penalties by Southampton in a fourth-round replay at Old Trafford, while their attempt to keep the European Cup-Winners’ Cup was ended in the second round by Atlético Madrid, for whom Paulo Futre scored twice in a 3-0 first-leg triumph – but the League campaign convinced most observers that Ferguson was getting there.
Indeed, two Fergusons seemed to be getting there. Young Darren was coming along quite nicely: in the reserves, mainly, though he had taken part in that end-of-season match against Tottenham. It was his ninth League appearance. He was never going to be a top player, mainly because of a lack of pace. ‘Darren was like his dad in that way,’ said a sage of the Scottish game. ‘He had reasonable technique, too. But he wasn’t as brave or aggressive as his dad.’ And none the worse for that, maybe. ‘His dad was aggressive to the point of being dirty.’
His dad also picked the Manchester United team at the start of the fateful 1992/3 season. Alex Ferguson was never one to be embarrassed about selecting a family member. He had proved that by picking his eldest son, Mark, for Aberdeen reserves and he demonstrated it again by employing his own brother, Martin, as United’s globetrotting scout. Darren’s twin, Jason, had a season in the United youth ranks and it can safely be said that, had Cathy ever displayed a gift for the game or inclination to pursue a career in it, her husband would not have let the age-old prejudice against female participants thwart her, or him.
But Cathy had had enough to do in bringing up those three sons. Mark did his parents proud. At the European University in Paris he obtained an MBA and became fluent in French. He then worked as an investment-fund manager for Schroder’s and Goldman Sachs, with whom he became a European champion in the same year as his father: in 1999 he was voted top European Fund Manager in the annual Reuters survey. Later he helped to found a firm whose chairman was Al Gore, the former United States Vice-President.
The twins chose football but, while Darren played the game, Jason inhabited its fringes. He went into television production with Sky and began so promisingly that he was tipped as the eventual successor to the head of sport, Vic Wakeling. In the event that distinction went in 2009 to Barney Francis, son of the journalist and broadcaster Tony Francis, a distinguished biographer of Brian Clough. Meanwhile, Jason Ferguson had been frying other fish. He had forsaken television to become a football agent – at least until unwelcome publicity caused United to sever their connections with the Elite Sports Agency, which he helped to run, in 2004. However, Jason continued to represent his father.
Darren, meanwhile, was coming to the end of a playing career that had peaked early. He had begun the 1992/3 season as he ended the one before – in the first team. And what an exciting time it promised to be. He was twenty and (though it may have owed much to his father’s falling out with Neil Webb towards the end of the previous season) in the side, deputising for Bryan Robson, no less. But it was hardly like for like.
United struggled to rediscover the momentum that had so nearly brought them the title. Lee Sharpe returned from injury and the team was reshuffled. Darren, having pulled a hamstring in a Scotland Under-21 match, never played again that season. In fact his days as a regular were over because the club, thanks to Cantona, made a growth spurt. By starting fifteen matches, however, Darren had done enough to earn a Premier League championship medal, even though United’s form in those fifteen matches had been of anything but championship consistency.
An analysis of their results shows quite starkly what had happened. United had achieved defensive solidity the previous season. To ascribe it merely to Schmeichel’s vociferous but splendidly defiant relationship with Bruce and Pallister, to state that Ferguson had reinvented his Aberdeen triangle of Leighton, McLeish and Miller, would be an over simplification and an injustice to the work of other team members, but the fact is that in 1991/2, Schmeichel’s first season, the average number of goals conceded in a match fell from 1.19 in the previous League campaign to 0.79. It was to fall a little more in 1992/3. But the big difference was at the front. Here United had been getting worse. Their goal output had fallen sharply. Ferguson had not found his catalyst (his Peter Weir, as students of Aberdeen might have put it). And here luck came to the rescue of Ferguson’s judgement.
Ah, Cantona . . .
N
ot for the first time, nor for the last, Ferguson had been casting his net wide in the transfer market, seeking a centre-forward hither and thither, trying one day for Alan Shearer, who preferred to leave Southampton for Kenny Dalglish’s new adventure at Blackburn, and the next, it seemed, for the ill-fated David Hirst of Sheffield Wednesday, whom Trevor Francis refused to sell. Eventually, after inquiring about various others, he had settled for Dion Dublin from modest Cambridge United, whose resourceful manager, John Beck, had sent a video by which Ferguson, with remarkable candour, confessed to have been swayed.
ot for the first time, nor for the last, Ferguson had been casting his net wide in the transfer market, seeking a centre-forward hither and thither, trying one day for Alan Shearer, who preferred to leave Southampton for Kenny Dalglish’s new adventure at Blackburn, and the next, it seemed, for the ill-fated David Hirst of Sheffield Wednesday, whom Trevor Francis refused to sell. Eventually, after inquiring about various others, he had settled for Dion Dublin from modest Cambridge United, whose resourceful manager, John Beck, had sent a video by which Ferguson, with remarkable candour, confessed to have been swayed.
Sad to say, Dublin broke a leg on only his sixth League appearance for United, in the midst of the run of wins that hoisted them to third. They had slipped back down the table, and been swiftly knocked out of the Uefa Cup by Torpedo Moscow on penalties, and been removed from the League Cup by Sheffield Wednesday, when Martin Edwards took the telephone call that was arguably the most important of Ferguson’s career.
It was a Wednesday in November and Ferguson was in his chairman’s office, discussing the possibility of landing Peter Beardsley (a very different player from Dublin) from Everton. The phone rang and on the other end was Bill Fotherby, the Leeds director in charge of transfer deals, asking about Denis Irwin. After Fotherby had been rebuffed, Edwards continued to talk to him until Ferguson, apparently seized by an idea, handed over a scribbled note: ‘Ask him about Eric Cantona’. Edwards complied and Fotherby, aware that Howard Wilkinson had clashed with the Frenchman on several occasions, said business might be possible. He added that he would speak to Wilkinson and call back within an hour.
In the thirty minutes before this momentous call came, Edwards asked Ferguson about Cantona’s reputation for tempestuousness, which had been fostered by reports of fights with team-mates as well as angry gestures to fans and, only eleven months earlier, insults delivered to the faces of the French Football Federation officials who had disciplined him, after which he had announced his retirement from the game at the age of twenty-five. Ferguson replied that Gérard Houllier, the French national team manager at the time, had recently tipped him off about Cantona, stressing that he was a far easier professional to handle than those reports might suggest – and a talent worth making allowances for.
Houllier’s word was good enough for Ferguson. And Ferguson’s educated instinct was enough for Edwards. The deal was on and Edwards, having been asked by Fotherby for £1.3 million, worked hard to seal it for just over £1 million. Had Fotherby suspected what would ensue, he would have demanded a world record fee. Had Edwards and Ferguson known, they would have paid it. Without bothering to negotiate.
Cantona was to make United champions that very season. He was to help them claim four titles in five seasons, two of which featured the League and FA Cup Double. So accustomed did they become to success that it was hard to credit that, when Cantona arrived, they had won only seven of seventeen League matches and lost interest in two cups.
His first League appearance was as a substitute in a derby against Manchester City, a 2-1 win at Old Trafford, and, although he neither scored nor shone, the effect he was to have on the team can be enumerated. In those seventeen matches pre-Cantona, they had scored eighteen goals. The remaining twenty-five brought forty-nine goals. At a stroke he had doubled United’s scoring rate. The last barrier to their return to greatness under Ferguson had been removed. Or, if we are to relate the metaphor to Cantona, kicked away.
Eric was always a bit of a character. A bit like Ferguson in that he refused to let a decent background calm him down. He was born and brought up on the hillside outskirts of Marseilles and enjoyed, as Ferguson had done in Govan, an upbringing that was modest but comfortable in the context of its time (Zinedine Zidane, who grew up later in the city’s Castellane district, had it much tougher). Cantona’s turbulence, like Ferguson’s, came from within.
He loved football but had to win. Whatever the game. Once, according to a fine biography by Philippe Auclair, the
enfant terrible
lost at table tennis and reacted by jumping on the table so forcefully that it broke (an anecdote that might persuade the Crystal Palace supporter at whom Cantona was infamously to launch himself studs first many years later to reflect that he was lucky to escape with a fright).
enfant terrible
lost at table tennis and reacted by jumping on the table so forcefully that it broke (an anecdote that might persuade the Crystal Palace supporter at whom Cantona was infamously to launch himself studs first many years later to reflect that he was lucky to escape with a fright).
Cantona watched Olympique Marseille and, upon seeing them play Ajax, made an idol of Johan Cruyff. At fifteen he was called to Auxerre by that club’s great coach, Guy Roux – one of the few who could be compared with Ferguson in terms of one-club longevity and attention to the development of youth – but made his life no easier while progressing to the France Under-21s, who won the European Championship, and then the full national team, for which he scored on his first appearance, against West Germany.
Even in England, which was still relatively parochial, he was noted as one of the most potent young footballers in Europe. And those who had scrutinised him knew he had a physique that could cope with the rigours of the English game. As Auclair brilliantly put it: ‘He was gifted the ideal body to become himself.’
The arrogance with which he carried it was no lie either. Transferred to Marseille, he ripped off his shirt and kicked the ball into the crowd after being substituted – in a friendly. That earned a month’s ban. He was even banned from the national team for a year for calling the manager, Henri Michel, a ‘shitbag’ on television. He was loaned to Bordeaux and Montpellier and then Nîmes, for whom he was playing when he threw the ball at the referee. Summoned once more by the FFF, he was handed another one-month ban which, after he had walked up to each member of the disciplinary committee in turn and called him an idiot, was doubled, prompting his retirement from football.
To describe Cantona as complex would be fair. Not many of football’s stormier figures have nursed passions for classical as well as rock music, for painting in both the passive and active senses and for poetry. Nor is it mainstream in football to take career guidance from one’s psychoanalyst when an agent is on hand. But it was he, the analyst, who advised Cantona to forsake another sojourn at Marseille and try England when his suspension expired.
His international career had been thriving when he cut it short. Invited back into the fold by Michel’s successor, Michel Platini, he formed a marvellous partnership with Jean-Pierre Papin. France went nineteen matches unbeaten, scoring forty-four goals, of which Papin got fourteen and Cantona eleven. It was after Cantona had scored twice in a victory over Iceland that was France’s eighth in a row that he went to the FFF and blew up. By the time the French played next – at Wembley, where they lost 2-0 to Graham Taylor’s England – he was a Leeds United player.
Platini had attempted to place him with Liverpool, only to have Graeme Souness decline the offer, and also asked Houllier, at that stage his assistant, to try his own contacts in England. Houllier rang the agent Dennis Roach, who arranged for Cantona to have a trial with Trevor Francis at Sheffield Wednesday. After a week Francis was not sure. He asked Cantona to stay for a further week and the response was predictable.
Wilkinson, at Leeds, got wind of Cantona’s disenchantment and Houllier recalled: ‘I was abroad but my secretary rang to say there was a Mr Wilkinson who appeared desperate to speak to me and had called several times. I took the number and Howard told me he thought there was an opening for him to sign Eric – what did I think? “Take him with your eyes closed,” I said.’
Leeds paid Marseille £1 million. How significant a contributor Cantona was to their ensuing title triumph is hard to define, but, after a hat-trick in a 4-3 victory over Liverpool in the Charity Shield (later Community Shield) match, he scored six goals in the first twelve Premier League matches of the 1992/3 season and was firmly established in Elland Road’s heart when Wilkinson concluded that the disciplinary baggage that came with him was too burdensome.
In the opening round of the Champions League, a bizarre error by the Stuttgart manager, Christoph Daum, who had allowed an ineligible substitute to figure against Leeds, dictated a play-off in Barcelona, where Wilkinson withdrew Cantona in favour of Carl Shutt and the substitute scored the winner. Next came Rangers in Glasgow. Again Cantona was taken off. ‘And Eric went straight to the dressing room,’ said Houllier. ‘In France you can sometimes do that, but in England, or Britain, even if it’s bitterly cold, a player is expected to join the others on the bench.
‘Anyway, Howard invited me to the second leg. I went to the hotel where the team were staying and Howard took me to his room, where there was a TV and a recorder. He showed me the bit of the Glasgow match that came after the substitution and asked, “Where is Eric?” I said I assumed he was in the dressing room. Howard said he should have been on the bench.’
So they went to the match, at which Houllier found himself sitting near Ferguson. He knew Ferguson. They had met in Mexico during the 1986 World Cup. Houllier, who had guided Paris St-Germain to their first French title for half a century, was staying in the same hotel as Ferguson’s Scotland party before the match against West Germany in Querétaro and they had encountered each other a few times since. Now they shook hands and settled down at Elland Road.
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