Cantona (36 page)

On the catwalk for Paco Rabanne.

‘Cantona simply does not fit in well in English soccer in my view. Leeds produced by far the best team performance of this season by any club last Saturday at home to Arsenal – and Cantona was not in the side. It’s no coincidence. I don’t think Cantona has really produced for Leeds.’
Johnny Giles

‘I really can’t understand what all the fuss is about. We have three million unemployed people in this country, and there is all this upset about a Frenchman going to Manchester. People are saying what a blow it is to Leeds, but it would be a much bigger blow if either Gary Speed or David Batty wanted to leave the club.
’ Billy Bremner

‘I think Cantona’s transfer is sound business. He is a good player, but I still have doubts about him. He has not played all that well in the last few weeks. He cannot have settled down all that well if he has been in to ask for a transfer, as is widely suggested. You do not get that sort of thing happening if you are a genuine good clubman and especially after he had been so well received by United supporters.’
Norman ‘Bite Yer Legs’ Hunter

Two weeks had passed since the release of Ooh La La’s single ‘Why I Love You, I Don’t Why, But I Love You’ when
Post
readers picked up their copy of the paper on Friday 27 November. The headline was bad enough: ‘Ooh-er! United idol becomes a red devil – CANTONA FANS FURY’. But the photograph that illustrated the story was even worse: Alex Ferguson shaking hands with the idol of the Leeds Kop. Leeds fans had not so much received a slap in the face as a kick to their tenderest region.

The chemistry experiment that Howard Wilkinson had attempted with that strange new element, Éric Cantona, had ended in an explosion. Given that rumours of the deterioration in their relationship had been filtering out of the dressing-room for over a month, this shouldn’t have come as the shock it undoubtedly was for thousands of Leeds supporters. Tears were shed, however, and anger flowed in the messages that swamped the dedicated phone line the
Post
had set up as soon as the player’s departure had been confirmed. Of the 1,337 fans who rang the paper that day, 1,065 opposed the sale of Cantona to the club they hated more than any other. Were they listening to their heads or to their hearts? To both. And they provided another example of one of English football’s more captivating truths: the verdict of supporters may sometimes lack eloquence, but is often sounder than the opinions of professional pundits, particularly when the experts have been professional footballers themselves. The above-quoted Giles, Bremner and Hunter were joined by Emlyn Hughes (‘a flashy foreigner’), Eddie Gray (‘a fair deal’) and Jimmy Greaves (‘Cantona is not the man for [Manchester] United’) in their appraisal of Leeds’ decision to offload Cantona for a pittance. A rare instance of foresight was provided by the
Daily Express
(‘Leeds has handed the title to Manchester United on a plate’), while the
Daily Mirror
sub-editors had fun with ‘Oo-aargh Cantona’. What the old warhorses of Revie-era Leeds and dinosaurs like Hughes failed to understand was that, following the birth of the Premier League and the emergence of Sky Television, the game they had played with distinction (if not always without malice or cynicism) had already changed beyond recognition. Their distrust of anything foreign would soon belong to another era, even if, approaching the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade, some of their successors still cannot bring themselves to admit it. Leeds fans knew better than anyone what an impact Cantona’s daring and sense of adventure had had on their own faith in the club; they had responded to his flamboyance with such fervour that not just Éric, but all around him, had been lifted to a higher plane of performance – a two-fold catalysis, if you will.

The strength of feeling within the Leeds fan-base startled Howard Wilkinson. Season-ticket holders threatened to boycott Eiland Road. Ray Fell, the chairman of the Leeds supporters club, said: ‘I am amazed and stunned. I am certain the reaction of most fans will be one of bewilderment.’ One of these bewildered fans, Vivienne Olbison, told a local reporter: ‘I think it’s absolutely disgusting. Éric is the best player there’s been at Leeds for ages. To sell him makes no sense at all – particularly to Manchester United!’ Wilkinson’s critics had a field day in the climate of fury which surrounded the announcement of Cantona’s sale. He had just parted with his most skilful player, and who had he brought in? David Rocastle and Mel Sterland: an Arsenal reject and a thirty-something right-back who couldn’t command a place at Rangers.

The manager first tried to justify himself by explaining why, in his view, ‘a deal was struck which was in the best interests of all concerned’. The move would, ‘perhaps, give Éric a better chance of first-team football than he would have had at Leeds United’. Leeds remained an ambitious club, a club ‘with aspirations to establish itself as one of the top names in the game’. Its manager must therefore rotate his squad, and players who couldn’t live with the disappointment of finding themselves on the bench had no place in his project. He used his column in the
Post
to hammer home his argument. ‘The long-term interests of our club have to be served at all times,’ he wrote, ‘and on this occasion this is the case. What happened yesterday [
Thursday the 26th – the deal had in fact been struck twenty-four hours earlier
] produced a situation which left everyone sitting round a table feeling satisfied. Alex Ferguson got a player and Éric Cantona has got a transfer which on the face of it offers him a greater opportunity of first-team football than which he had here.’ Such equanimity wouldn’t last.

Leeds chairman Leslie Silver unequivocally supported Wilkinson. ‘Éric was upset that he had not been used as often as he would have liked this season,’ he said, ‘so it was sensible for him to go. He made a major contribution last season but was not entirely happy this time and was keen to move on. Éric thought he would be an automatic choice this season. But the manager picks the team and reserves the right to select the players he wants. Éric was a cult hero for the fans but the team is judged on results and Éric was not even on the bench when we beat Arsenal last Saturday.’ The chairman made no further comment when Chelsea beat Leeds 1–0 two days later, however; nor did he say a word after Nottingham Forest humbled them 4–1 at Eiland Road in the following league match.

Wilkinson, his common sense perhaps affected by the hostility of the fans, advanced another reason for letting Manchester United get hold of Cantona for a paltry £1.2m – only £200,000 more than Nîmes had been paid for handing over the striker’s registration in May, and half of what Arsenal had received for David Rocastle. Leeds, he said, ‘were skint’, as ‘they had come up a very long way in a very short time’. The second assertion was a statement of fact; the first was rather confusing, as Leeds’ turnover had reached a record £8.5m at the conclusion of the 1991–92 season, and the club’s operating profit stood at a very healthy £500,000. The terraces soon proposed their own (totally fabricated) explanation of Éric’s dramatic exit: Cantona had been having an affair with Lee Chapman’s wife, actress Leslie Ash,
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causing discord in a previously united dressing-room. The unfounded allegations caused far more pain and upheaval than they purported to report, as, despite Wilkinson’s not entirely innocent suggestion that his players found it increasingly difficult to relate to Cantona, Éric’s popularity within the squad had not been dented by the breakdown of his relationship with the manager.

Cantona wasn’t and couldn’t be everyone’s best friend, but even players whose outlook on life differed markedly from his – Gordon Strachan, for example – stressed that ‘nobody had anything against him personally’ and that ‘he wasn’t a problem to get on with’, despite the reservations he and others might have had over his contribution to the team’s performances, particularly in the previous couple of months. Strachan felt that Éric ‘found it hard to understand how Chappy [Lee Chapman] played and Chappy found it difficult to understand him’, and believed that the Frenchman could have done more to ingratiate himself to his fellow players. For the captain of Leeds, Cantona had retreated into his shell instead, and his play had suffered accordingly, particularly in Europe. Strachan balanced his criticism with an avowal that Éric had been frustrated by his side’s inability to embrace a more flowing style, in which his vision would have been put to better use. With more time, he said, ‘we might have been able to bring in some better players to play with him’ – but ‘he had just made up his mind he wanted to leave; there was no way he wanted to stay’.

Had he stayed, what might have been? Sixteen years on, Gary McAllister still harbours regrets shared by every Leeds fan I have spoken to. ‘Don’t forget that Leeds is a one-club town,’ he told me. ‘The title should’ve been a massive catalyst for the club. We could’ve moved on, especially now we’d beaten our biggest rival to the championship. If we’d got the right players, it might have been the start of something big.’ But the ‘right players’ didn’t come. Instead, ‘the money that Howard Wilkinson got to spend was used to recruit footballers who couldn’t necessarily command a place in the team, and there’s no doubt that Éric felt frustration because of that.’ Judging by McAllister’s tone, Éric was not alone in feeling that frustration. ‘After a few months, we were more or less back to the team that was playing at the same stage of the season before! And we found it very difficult to replicate what we’d done. We were a good team – but we were not a great team. A great team wins year after year, and we failed.’

Let’s hear one last voice, that of Gary Speed, for whom Éric’s playing style was ‘off the cuff and [ . . .] a bit of a luxury’, words that show plainly enough that he couldn’t be suspected of bias towards his moody teammate. But the Welsh midfielder refused to blame Cantona for the unravelling of their club’s expectations. ‘We were that kind of side where everybody had to be working as hard as one another to be successful,’ he said. ‘The year after [winning the title] when Éric was in the team and things weren’t going well, we weren’t good enough to accommodate him and Man United were.’

‘We failed’. ‘We weren’t good enough’. Not good enough to keep the man who would engineer Manchester United’s renaissance. But it would be under the guidance of a manager who had found a key Howard Wilkinson had looked for without believing it really existed.

Accusations and counter-accusations kept flowing over a number of months, years even, and would be rekindled by the publication in Britain of Cantona’s autobiography in 1994. By then, adulation had long turned into hatred at Eiland Road. Some supporters – a tiny minority – retained their affection for the hero who, to them, had only been guilty of putting his proud manager in the shade. But within a few weeks of Éric’s startlingly successful introduction to the Manchester United line-up, the initial wave of grief that had engulfed a whole city was but a distant memory. The pitifully small amount of money Leeds had received for Cantona – which could and maybe should have served as an illustration of Wilkinson’s managerial shortcomings – was taken as proof that the decision to get rid of the ‘mercurial Frenchman’ had been forced on the coach by the player’s behaviour, ill discipline and flouting of club rules (charges that Wilkinson repeatedly brought against Éric with little outside encouragement). Cantona saw this as a Machiavellian trick played on public opinion by his former manager. Wilkinson wanted him out, whatever the cost might be, and selling him on the cheap was a way of saying, ‘But what else could I do?’ and thus draw some credit from a catastrophic decision.

Questions were bound to be raised about Wilkinson’s competence as Manchester United’s star rose spectacularly in the wake of this oddest of transfers, while Leeds got sucked into the quagmire of a struggle against relegation. The manager naturally sought to defend himself, sometimes fairly, sometimes less so, as we’ll soon see. But before rejoining Éric in Manchester, I cannot resist adding another quote of Wilkinson’s. Having alluded to unspecified events (‘[Cantonas] life off the pitch was sometimes colourful and required assistance’), he added: ‘Once you cut away all the myth and all the dressing-up and all the manufactured stories, he was fairly straightforward.’ Once you cut away all the myth, and . . . Not an easy thing to do.

Let’s go back (or sixteen years forward) to Le Murat in Neuilly, where Gérard Houllier hasn’t quite finished his Dover sole – or his surprising account of how Alex Ferguson secured the best transfer deal in Manchester United’s history. Leeds United had already been sounded out (at least indirectly, though at what level isn’t absolutely clear), but no formal proposal had yet been made. Let’s accept that. What about the famous phone call, then?

‘I remember very clearly,’ Houllier tells me. But it is another phone call he has in mind, one he had made himself once Éric’s adviser Jean-Jacques Amorfini had advised him of the irretrievable breakdown between his client and Howard Wilkinson, not the astonishing conversation which took place in Martin Edwards’ office (of which more presently). Alex had a carphone, to which calls to his office were redirected,’ Houllier says. ‘I apprised Alex of the circumstances, and he told me: “I’ll have him” – meaning Cantona, of course. “It’ll cost you about a million pounds,” I said. “No problem – and they want a full-back, Dennis Irwin. What do you think of Cantona yourself?” I replied – using the same words I had used with Wilkinson, “Close your eyes, and take him. The only thing you’ve got to be careful of is [man-] management. He’s a good guy, who loves his work, and needs to be trusted, and not messed about.”’