Cantona (66 page)

Marcello Lippi looked after a formidably well-organized Juventus team which was renowned for its miserliness in defence, but also possessed almost unrivalled riches in attack, as could be expected of any side counting Zidane, Bokši
, Del Piero and Vieri in its ranks. Ferguson feared Juve’s creativity with good reason; the last time United had met a European team of similar pedigree in Europe, they had been swept away: Barcelona had murdered them 4–0 in the Nou Camp, a memory seared into the Scot’s brain. To avoid a repetition of that catastrophe, he deployed a thick midfield curtain, with Cantona his single target man. The absence of the injured Roy Keane partly accounted for this cautiousness but in truth, as he later admitted, Ferguson didn’t know what his best team was.

For Éric, these considerations came a distant second to the excitement he felt at playing ‘what is already a final’. Milan and Inter had both been close to taking him away from first French, then English football, but he had never played on Italian soil before. There was the added spice of coming across a fellow
Bleu
, a footballer he didn’t rate and a man he despised, midfielder Didier Deschamps. Cantona, who had refused to talk to journalists for close to two years, broke his silence for an interview with
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, in which he took the gloves off and slipped on a knuckleduster. ‘Deschamps,’ he said ‘is there because he always gives 100 per cent of himself, but he’ll always be a water-carrier [
a phrase that stuck, as you know
]. You find players like him on every street corner.’ Anger simmered behind the scorn. ‘Today, Didier speaks as if he were a monk. He gives moral lessons, but he’ll end up succumbing to all the vices of the world.’ What he was hinting at can only be guessed; but I remember feeling at the time that he could only be alluding to the rumours that had been sullying Marseille’s reputation when Deschamps was in Bernard Tapie’s employment – which, in Éric’s estimation, automatically made him one of the OM chairman’s ‘creatures’.

But his appetite for revenge, sharp as it was, went unsated. A change in the UEFA rulebook allowed the United manager to field as many ‘foreigners’ as he liked, for the very first time, and it was hoped that his players could now give a truer account of themselves. Judging by what they did on that night of 11 September, they weren’t very good. United were outplayed, out-thought, outpaced, and ultimately fortunate to escape with the narrowest of defeats, by a single goal scored by Zinédine Zidane. Cantona, with the fearsome Uruguayan Paolo Montero on his coat-tails, could not find an inch of space, whereas the Leeds defenders had left him with acres four days beforehand. He was barely seen. The lone-striker experiment had failed. Ferguson singled out Éric for praise, though, blaming the severity of his team’s defeat (in manner if not according to the scoreline) on their inexperience. ‘We have the players to improve,’ he said, ‘but they must take the lesson from Éric Cantona. He never gave the ball away once.’ In truth, he had seen very little of it.

How far United still had to go (and how long Éric would have to wait) before they were able to compete with, let alone beat the best of Continental opposition was demonstrated
a contrario
when they destroyed Nottingham Forest 4–1 three days after their humbling in Turin. Forest hadn’t yet lost all of the football Brian Clough and Peter Taylor had taught them, but couldn’t contain a side that had regained its exuberance when it returned to its default setting, a 4-4-1-1 formation in which Cantona had the freedom to roam behind Ole-Gunnar Solskjær. Were United’s shortcomings Éric’s as well? With no Deschamps to cut the supply from midfield and no Montero to spoil it, Cantona created two goals and scored a brace himself, the eighth double of his United career. In the next game, though, a scoreless draw at Villa Park, he drifted into anonymity, nor did he shine in the 2–0 victory over Rapid Vienna that followed – Roy Keane, in his second game since coming back from a knee operation, was United’s catalyst in this unremarkable success against feeble opposition.

Blowing hot and cold on the field, Éric remained a prize asset off it. Nike presented him with an improved contract, rumoured to be worth £500,000 a year, which tied him to the American company for a further four years.

Éric had turned thirty in May, an age at which, today, most players opt for a lucrative last contract if they don’t opt out altogether. But football hadn’t yet become a young man’s game in 1996. A number of the Premiership’s most popular players were Cantona’s elders: Ruud Gullit (thirty-four), Chris Waddle (then with Bradford, thirty-five), Ian Wright (thirty-two), Gianluca Vialli (thirty-two), Stuart Pearce (thirty-four), not to mention most of the Arsenal back four, of course, or Teddy Sheringham, Éric’s almost exact contemporary, for whom life began at thirty. Still, Cantona paced himself as if he were five years older, choosing his games with great care when, six months earlier, he had thrown himself whole into every minute of every match and willed his team to two trophies. To quote a journalist who reported on a crucial 1–0 win over league leaders Liverpool in mid-October, Éric strove to ‘make himself invisible’. Alex Ferguson had his own theory to explain this disappearing act: now that he was no longer selected to play for his country, Cantona had to train on his own during the international breaks. This argument didn’t hold water. Éric had never been more influential, and inspired, than in the five months that preceded the Euro 96 tournament in which he had refused to take part. There is no doubt that the realization that he would never put the blue jersey on again – and that a new team was gelling into a tremendously dangerous unit before his very eyes, without him, their former captain – led him to withdraw into regrets he was too proud to confess. Like Maupassant’s character who, one evening, discovering white strands in his hair, mutters, ‘Finished,’ Cantona had to face his own mortality. But the lure of Europe still glowed in the near distance, fresh oxygen to feed a weakening fire.

United were back in Istanbul on 16 October, the city where Bryan Robson and Éric had been roughed up by policemen and where United hadn’t scored in their two previous visits. Their opponents were not Galatasaray this time, but Fenerbahçe, whose fanatical support couldn’t prevent them from slumping to a 2–0 defeat. A beaming Ferguson told the press he now believed that ‘this team can go all the way in this competition’. Cantona’s display, one of his very best in the Champions League, gave substance to this profession of faith. Frequently dropping back to midfield to beat a steady tempo, United’s conductor helped create David Beckham’s goal and provided the finish for his side’s second. He had now scored five in fifteen European games.

Then he sank, as did all around him. Four days after the elation felt in the Şükrü Saraco
lu Stadium, Newcasde blew United to smithereens at St James’ Park. Final score: 5–0 (and five bookings for the visitors, one of them for Éric, who reprised his private war with Philippe Albert that afternoon). This was Alex Ferguson’s worst-ever managerial defeat. United then folded abjectly at Southampton, shipping six goals and having Roy Keane sent off, as Cantona should have been for a nasty, cowardly kick at Ulrich van Gobbel, whose only crime was to have won the ball cleanly from him. Another, later foul earned Éric the yellow card he fully deserved. Fenerbahçe were next to exploit United’s frailty, winning 1–0 in Manchester. Never before had the Old Trafford crowd seen their team lose at home on a European night, and there had been 56 of these since United became the first English team to enter the European Cup, in the 1956–57 season. Strangely, Ferguson chose to play a 4-5-1 formation again. Cantona didn’t play in the hole: he vanished into one, and by the end of a woeful week, his team had dropped out of the Premiership’s top five. Chelsea took advantage of two bad mistakes by Peter Schmeichel to bring three points back from Old Trafford. Thankfully, another international break followed, giving Alex Ferguson a fortnight to reflect on his team’s current failings and prepare for their second game against Juventus.

Éric looked refreshed by this period of rest, far sharper than he had been for a good while, awoken, perhaps, by the prospect of avenging the 1–0 defeat conceded at the Stadio delle Alpi in September. Arsenal, now managed by Arsène Wenger, lost in Lancashire – a fast, bruising affair in which Peter Schmeichel rediscovered his old authority. Juve, however, resisted United’s vibrant challenge and came out victors once more, again by a single goal. Éric himself had exerted close to no influence on the game. His timing had gone astray, and his temper too – he was booked for a typical ‘striker’s tackle’ on Bokši
. Across the halfway line, he could see the man he had called a ‘water-carrier’ control space with unerring intelligence, winding Juve’s spring with simple, measured passes. But while Deschamps was magnificent, Cantona remained a spectator, gauche and ineffectual.

By the time Leicester had been beaten 3–1, on 30 November, Cantona hadn’t scored in eight games. He looked heavy – he
was
heavy, close to 90 kilos. I’m examining a photograph taken at United’s next game, a 2–0 victory in Rapid Vienna’s Gerhard Hanappi Stadium. On the left, Ryan Giggs, perfectly balanced, hair flowing, is gliding past an Austrian defender while, two yards away from him, on the right, Cantona looks on. A huge Cantona, with the thighs of a weightlifter, a huge neck, a huge chin. He still exudes strength, but there is something awkward about him. No wonder people had started to talk about the ‘old Cantona’.

This was, however, Éric’s best game for some considerable time. He played his part – as a lone striker, again – in setting up Giggs’s opening goal, when he went past Zingler with a delightful shimmy, and put the result beyond doubt when he was found by an impeccable David Beckham pass in the penalty box. But he couldn’t sustain that night’s excellence, sometimes a passenger, sometimes the pilot, often within the same match. He didn’t do much when United drew 2–2 at West Ham, but what he did, he did superbly, threading a peach of ball to send Solskjær in on goal when he noticed a fleeting moment of hesitancy in the Hammers back four, who were unsure whether they should use the offside trap as a weapon against the Norwegian striker. That was almost his only contribution to the game – but it had been decisive. Rarely, too rarely, he conjured a display of athleticism and elegance no other player – bar Dennis Bergkamp – could match in England, as when Sunderland, a gritty side which had drawn at Anfield and beaten Chelsea, were annihilated 5–0 three days before Christmas. He had already scored a penalty when, twelve minutes from time, he created one of his masterpieces. I’ve watched footage of this miraculous goal dozens of times, but the beauty of its execution still astonishes me. Just inside Sunderland’s half, harnessed by Ord and Ball, he set himself free with a stupendous double feint, somehow found McClair, who instantly returned the ball to him, which, still running, he chipped from 18 yards over the head of his former Nîmes teammate Lionel Perez. What is extraordinary is that Éric found a way to stop without stopping, slowing down imperceptibly to compose himself and brush the underside of the ball with his bootlaces, sending it to the only spot where the rushing ’keeper couldn’t reach it. The celebration was almost as memorable as the goal. Éric, affecting a haughty inscrutability, did nothing but straighten his back and puff out his chest, a Roman imperator savouring his triumph: all that was missing was David Beckham holding the laurels above his shaven head. Then Cantona broke into a beautiful smile, as if to say: ‘Did you see that one? Did you see?’ How could you not love such a player?