Cantona (41 page)

The gunslinger fired blanks, though. The game petered out to a goalless draw, the result the police (and the management of both clubs) had hoped for. Éric contributed little himself, save a dribble past two defenders followed by a shot which goalkeeper John Lukic easily parried with his legs. He was also shown a yellow card – a ‘soft’ caution, which punished a nudge off the ball on John Newsome. The wall of hate of the Kop rose a bit higher for a few seconds, and that was that. He could now turn his mind back to football, which had been a mere sideshow in Eiland Road’s theatre of hate. This meant rejoining the French national team, which was due to play Israel in Tel-Aviv in a World Cup qualifier nine days later.

Éric’s call-up couldn’t have come at a better time. He badly needed some fresh air after breathing the poisonous atmosphere of Eiland Road. His absence was undoubtedly detrimental to United, who were surprisingly dumped out of the FA Cup by Sheffield United while he readied himself to celebrate his thirtieth cap. Euro 92 was by now but a bad memory, pushed further back in his mind by the very real hope of achieving qualification for the 1994 World Cup. A relaxed Cantona found time to mix with journalists in the familiar environment of Clairefontaine. At peace with himself, he also expressed himself fully on the field of play. Gérard Houllier deployed an enterprising 4-3-3 formation in which Éric, positioned slightly deeper than usual, supported striker Jean-Pierre Papin with Patrice Loko and David Ginola occupying the flanks. This was a role not dissimilar to the one he had been given by Alex Ferguson at United: he had the freedom to roam wherever his instinct took him, and scored a superbly judged opening goal, sliding in at the far post to volley home Didier Deschamps’ long, raking pass. The only blot on a near-perfect copybook was a caution that would prevent him from taking part in France’s next game, a trickier trip to Austria in March (
Les Bleus
would indeed struggle in Vienna without Cantona’s vision, and only just prevailed thanks to a strike by Papin).

It’s true that some indiscipline was creeping back into his game. Back in England, another booking (his third in three matches for club and country) in a 2–1 win over Southampton triggered an automatic two-match suspension, which forced him to sit out two crucial away games in March, of which United won the first – against Liverpool – and lost the supposedly easier second against a sprightly Oldham. This was Cantona’s first ban in English football. Hardly anyone noticed it, though: the challenges that had been punished were clumsy or petulant rather than malicious, and by the time United had whipped Middlesbrough 3–0 on 27 February, the talk was of another stupendous performance of which my friend Michael Henderson, a journalist with the
Guardian
at the time, was an admiring witness and an inspired laudator. ‘Cantona will never look natural in English football,’ he wrote. ‘Craftsmen rarely do. There is something of the poet in his disdain for the clutter around him, and he is selfless enough to furnish others with many of his best lines.’

I reminded Michael of the aptness of his remarks many years later. This ‘unnaturalness’ has often been mistaken for an inability to adapt, I told him, and he had been one of the only Englishmen I had met who understood that so early in Éric’s United career. ‘Did I write that?’ Michael chuckled. ‘That was quite good.’ Yes it was, and so was what followed. ‘No ball is too difficult either to stun or to lay off,’ he continued, ‘so he is an ideal conduit for others to play through, seeing the possibilities earlier than they do and having the facility to achieve these aims.’ That day, had it not been for the excellence of Stephen Pears (a Manchester United reject) in the Boro goal, Éric would have finished with the third hat-trick of his English career. He had to be content with a solitary goal instead, United’s third, his last contribution to his team’s pursuit of the title before his ban was activated.

When he returned to action, on 14 March, two clubs shared the lead in the league table: United – and Aston Villa, whose next game was to be played at Old Trafford, to the delight of the satellite broadcasters. Andreï Kanchelskis made way for Éric, whose majestic performance drew comparisons with the way Dennis Viollet used to orchestrate United’s attacks when Matt Busby was at the helm. Ron Atkinson’s team exuded confidence to start with and took the lead through Steve Staunton, before Cantona headed a Dennis Irwin cross towards Hughes, who obliged with an equalizer; 1–1 it stayed despite Cantona’s displaying tremendous stamina and imagination, only to be stifled by an inspired Mark Bosnich in the Villa goal. Perhaps as a consequence of their superiority going unrewarded on that occasion, a subdued United couldn’t shake off their collective torpor when a strangely passionless Manchester derby finished with an identical scoreline. Éric, as profligate as any of his teammates in the first half, redeemed himself with a fine equalizing header towards the end of the game, but United’s run had been checked, and a third consecutive draw – 0–0 at Arsenal, where David Seaman did well to deny Cantona when he swivelled and shot at goal in a single movement – brought fears of a repeat of the previous season, when Leeds had been able to exploit United’s nervousness in the final furlong. Fortunately for Alex Ferguson, Norwich did his team a good turn by beating Villa 1–0 on the same day. United hadn’t won in four matches but were still very much in contention, trailing the Norfolk side by a single point with a game in hand – and their next game would take place at Carrow Road, where a victory would see them leapfrog the leaders once again.

The radio was on in the coach taking United to the stadium, and brought them news of Villa’s win at Nottingham Forest shortly before their own kick-off. ‘We had no choice but to win in Norwich,’ Éric explained later, ‘otherwise we’d be four points behind. That was the turning point. We played a perfect game. We played perfect football.’ This could have been a royal ‘we’, as Cantona, ‘so marvellously cool in control, so rapid of eye’, to quote one of many mesmerized reporters, engineered United’s resurgence with his eagerness as well as his artistry. The first Mancunian goal demonstrated Éric’s ability to set and alter the rhythm of play as a conductor induces legato in a musical phrase. He held the ball just long enough for Ryan Giggs to move onside, receive what was not so much a pass as an offering, and round the Norwich keeper to establish a lead. The third saw him in the guise of a finisher, converting a straightforward chance from Paul Ince’s selfless lay-off: his eighth successful strike in seventeen games for United. Norwich lost 3–1 and, with six games still to play, it came down to a single question: who, of United and Villa, could best withstand the pressure?

The track record of the two managers involved boded well for neither. Alex Ferguson had suceeded Ron Atkinson at Old Trafford in November 1986 after a catastrophic start to that season had seen United feel the first glows of heat from what the Italians call football’s
inferno.
‘Big Ron’ had lasted a little over five seasons in Manchester, long enough to win two FA Cups and throw away a championship title in 1985–86 after his side had strung together ten victories on the trot. Ferguson’s own record in domestic competitions was better than Atkinson’s, but not by much: one FA Cup (in 1990), one League Cup (in 1992) and two runners-up spots in the top division (in 1988 and 1992) which, in the eyes of many, made him a ‘choker’ when it came to the prize all Manchester United fans had their eyes on. A tremendous success over Barcelona in the 1990–91 European Cup Winners’ Cup final had given him the breathing space that Atkinson had been denied. Luck, sound judgement and Éric Cantona helped him to exploit it to the full, in proportions that it would be foolish to ascertain. But luck definitely came first, and on two occasions.

On 10 April, a valiant Sheffield Wednesday seemed destined to bring back a point from Old Trafford with the score locked at a goal apiece after 90 minutes. That result would have given Villa (who drew 0–0 against Coventry) a two-point cushion over their rivals, but referee John Hilditch couldn’t quite bring the whistle to his lips and, unaccountably, allowed an extra 8’30” to be played that afternoon, Steve Bruce scoring the winning goal with a header seconds before Hilditch remembered it was time to go home. Alex Ferguson could afford to make a joke of it. ‘We didn’t start playing until the 99th minute,’ he said. United now led Villa by 69 points to 68. Two days later, not so much luck as a miracle or two enabled them to win 1–0 at Coventry, cancelling out Villa’s remarkable win by the same margin at Highbury. Éric played with a sprained wrist for which the team doctor refused to administer a painkiller, until the excruciating pain forced him to hand his place to Bryan Robson – who was so unfit that he had decided to drop himself to the bench in the first place and give the skipper’s armband to Steve Bruce. A bad goalkeeping error by Coventry’s Jonathan Gould gifted Dennis Irwin a goal, while a Roy Wegerle shot cannoned off Peter Schmeichel’s upright and rolled along the goal-line without crossing it. Disaster had been averted – just.

But luck had no need to intervene when Chelsea turned up at Old Trafford on 17 April to be turned over 3–0. The London club had last succumbed in Manchester sixteen years earlier, the year United last won the title, and it may be that this barely credible statistic (mentioned in every match preview) had helped Ferguson’s players concentrate on their task rather more intently than had been the case in their previous outings. It may also be that they remembered how, almost a year to the day, their failure to overcome Chelsea in similar circumstances had opened the door for Leeds to win the trophy. Lee Sharpe danced on the wing, Cantona executed the final pirouette, signing off with his eighteenth goal of the season in English domestic competitions, an astonishing return for a player whose future had been in the balance during the autumn. Still, Villa, who were in action the next day, responded in kind, and beat Manchester’s other team 3–1 – to the delight of some City supporters. United, who boasted a vastly superior goal difference (+31 v. +22), kept the upper hand but remained one slip-up away from catastrophe.

But it was Villa who imploded, conceding two goals within the first fifteen minutes of their visit to Blackburn Rovers, to end up losing 3–0 at Ewood Park. United didn’t put on the most convincing of shows either, at relegation-threatened Crystal Palace: the teams were still tied at 0–0 in the sixty-fifth minute, when Cantona and Hughes combined to break the deadlock, the Welshman concluding the move with one of his trademark volleys. Éric also provided the pass that sent Paul Ince through for United’s second goal, which effectively ended the game as a contest, and virtually gave his team the title, as a single victory in their last two games would be enough to ward off Aston Villa. In fact, just as had happened the previous season, when he’d watched himself win the championship from Lee Chapman’s sofa, the trophy fell into Cantona’s lap before he’d had time to lace his boots. The Oldham midfielder Nick Henry sent a left-footed shot past Mark Bosnich at 15:30 on 2 May, and his team held on to their slender advantage in front of 35,000 dumbstruck Aston Villa fans. The long wait had ended: when Manchester United took the field twenty-four hours later against Blackburn Rovers, it would be as champions, for the first time since 1967.

A few years ago, I started compiling what I hoped would be an English-French/French–English football glossary, which would help me in my work as a translator, and for which I had a vague hope of finding a publisher. It was a revealing task. I couldn’t have wished for a clearer illustration of the chasm between our footballing cultures. It seemed the French (and, indeed, the Spaniards, the Italians and, believe it or not, the Germans) had at their disposal an arsenal of descriptive words and phrases which my English press-box colleagues had yet to coin. I first encountered a problem when trying to find an equivalent to
‘l’amour du geste
’, an expression Éric has always been fond of using. ‘Geste’ has no equivalent, unless you accept piece of skill’, which lacks the (maybe excessive) nobility of the French noun, whose semantic history encapsulates both sleight of hand (or foot in this case) and tales of chivalry (which we call
chansons de geste
’; Cantona as Sir Lancelot – now there’s a casting idea). The British had ‘nutmeg’ for
petit pont’
(‘small bridge’, a self explanatory expression); but no
grand pont’
(‘big’ or, rather, ‘long bridge’, when the attacking player, typically a winger, kicks the ball past the defender on one side, and races on the other to get hold of it). Everything else was a ‘flick’. I couldn’t find an approximation for
aile de pigeon’
(‘pigeon’s wing’, of course), a marvellously evocative semantic shortcut for one of football’s most elegant
gestes
’: running forward, the player receives the ball slightly behind him, and by shaping his leg as a trussed bird’s wing, ‘flicks it’ in front of him with the outside of the boot. We’ve also got the
‘madjer
’, named after the delightful Moroccan player Rabah Madjer, a backheel behind the standing leg – only used when it is an attempt at goal. And the
coup du sombrero
’, a Patrick Vieira special, which involves lifiing a ball – generally on the volley – above an opponent’s head (hence
‘sombrero’,)
before resuming control of it on the other side. For a perfect example of this, watch Cantona’s famous cracker for Leeds against Chelsea at the end of the 1991–92 season, when poor Paul Elliott did a convincing impersonation of a hat-stand – twice. Or watch Paul Gascoigne fooling Colin Hendry to score the most famous of his England goals at Wembley. There are many other such words –
‘feuille morte’
(‘dead leaf’ – a shot struck with very little power, which relies on precision and surprise to float into a goalkeeper’s top corner, used almost exclusively of free kicks), and the
‘coup du foulard’
(‘kerchief’s trick’) being just two of the most popular in my home country. Even as basic a skill as a
‘déviation’
(a first-time pass in which the course of the ball is merely altered by contact with the outside of the foot) is referred to as a ‘flick’, again. What surprises me most is that it’s not as if these were outlandish pieces of skill’ that had proved beyond the talent of British-born footballers. All of them were in George Best’s repertoire, and Robin Friday’s, and Chris Waddle’s. Pelés sublime
grand pont’ –
without even touching the ball – on Uruguayan goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz in the 1970 World Cup has been played umpteen times on the BBC, not that Barry Davies or John Motson would have known how to describe it without resorting to paraphrase. But we are not talking about unique inventions such as Fernando Redondo’s ‘forward backheel’, which led to one of the greatest goals in European Cup history when Real Madrid beat Manchester United 3–2 in the first leg of the 1999–2000 Champions League semi-final. These are skills which are attempted by every street footballer in the world, be they from Sao Salvador da Bahia, Sheffield or Les Caillols. What is astonishing is that the English never developed a vocabulary that would enable them to refer to some of a footballer’s most balletic and, sometimes, efficient expressions of his talent on the training ground, in match reports or in pub conversations. Could it be that such fancy flicks were and still are considered unfair play, ‘not cricket’, if you will? Could they be perceived as too arrogant, against the true spirit of the game?