Cantona (69 page)

That word, ‘death’, kept coming back in a fascinating interview Éric gave to David Walsh of the
Sunday Times
in 2006. ‘When you are a footballer,’ he told the journalist, ‘you do something very public, you do it because it is a passion and you feel alive when you’re doing it. You feel alive also because people recognize you for the job you do. Then you quit and it’s like a death. A lot of footballers are afraid and that is why they go on TV to speak about the game. They do it for themselves. It is important because it helps them to feel alive again, to deal with their fears about this death.’

A bemused Amelia Gentleman had recorded similar thoughts for the
Guardian
in 2003.

Éric Cantona’s life was brief. He was born as a professional footballer on 5 November 1983, in Auxerre, and died on 11 May 1997 at Old Trafford. Less than fourteen years, a blink within a blink within eternity. The man lived on, became an actor, took France to a world title in beach soccer, divorced Isabelle, remarried, might even come back to football as a manager for all we know. It is not a sad story; at least I hope that the story I’ve told is not a sad one. He achieved a great deal, he failed sometimes. He erred. But he was true to his half-truths when most are content to lie, and that – lying – he never did. He was naïve, flawed, arrogant, self-serving, violent, egotistical. But he was also the most generous of men, for what he gave he gave for the sake of giving. He enriched the lives of millions, he fed their dreams and – sometimes – realized them. As I’m about to say goodbye to him, that is the one picture of Éric I want to keep: Cantona the provider of beauty, the eternal child doomed to age, who knows it and chooses to give two fingers to fate. I’ll be my own man, he says, and fuck the whole lot of you who think I can’t do it. It is pathetic, it is admirable, it is Éric Cantona.

Michael Browne puts the finishing touches to
The Art of the Game.

Acknowledgements

My task as a biographer was two-fold. I first had to assemble and sift through thousands and thousands of pages of documentation on my own, which I did by reading through every single piece written about Cantona in the French and English publications I believed to be the most trustworthy,
⁵⁷
starting from his professional debut at Auxerre, when he was just seventeen. collating all the interviews he’d given from 1987 to the present day; and watching every video of Éric in action that I could get access to. The staff of the British Library in Colindale must be thanked for their willingness to carry hundreds of rolls of microfilm throughout the best part of two years for my sake, and so should my colleagues at
France Football
, who bore my constant questioning with fortitude for an even longer period.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude in that regard to my French fellow journalists, three of them in particular: Erik Bielderman, Jérôme Cazadieu of
L’Équipe Magazine
(whose superb 2007 ‘Cantona Special’ provided me with vital first-hand material) and Jean-Marie Lanoé of
France Football.
Their generosity in passing on and allowing me to use the information they had at their disposal I’m not sure I can ever repay. This was a rewarding exercise: a great deal that appeared mysterious at first found a ready explanation in contemporary accounts, provided one was prepared to search long and hard for a credible source – and spend the time and effort to check it. Most of this material has never been made available to the British public before. Cantona, despite his reputation of being a silent, brooding type, was remarkably approachable and forthright with French reporters until the long ban that was imposed on him in the spring of 1995, but the British tabloid press had yet to acquire its present habit of cherry-picking ‘exclusives’ in foreign publications. The translations are mine; the awkwardness of some of Éric’s statements is more often than not a fair reflection of his idiosyncratic speech patterns rather than that of my own limitations, however.

Once I had established a factual foundation for my work, I approached many of the most most significant protagonists in Cantona’s story, who were not always the most famous ones. As they number into the hundreds, I hope to be forgiven if I single out Gérard Houllier, Guy Roux, Didier Fèvre, Henri Émile, Célestin Oliver, Gary McAllister and Sir Alex Ferguson, as their testimonies (Sir Alex’s in person on two occasions, but mostly through the conduit of Erik Bielderman, with whom he enjoys a truly unique relationship) provided the spine of much of this work. I should also add that several of my interviewees asked for their anonymity to be preserved, and that I respected their wish: their discretion had purely personal motivations, and, crucially, none of them used it as a licence to blacken Éric’s character – in fact, the contrary was true.

Thus armed, I threw myself into the actual writing of this biography. Though French, it is in English that I composed it, and as I’m neither Joseph Conrad nor Vladimir Nabokov, it was fortunate that I had, in Richard Milner and Jon Butler, two editors of tremendous skill and sensitivity, as unstinting in their encouragements as they were in their hunt for gallicisms. Foreigners tend to ripen their adopted language to the extent that a mouthful of it can tease the palate, and another one make you feel like retching (as this sentence illustrates). Thanks to them, and – in the last furlong – to Natasha Martin and John English, the worst was averted. Jonathan Harris and David Luxton, without whom this book wouldn’t have existed in the first place, showed me that ‘agent’ needn’t be a dirty word, and can sometimes be synonymous with ‘friend’. Photographer Isabelle Waternaux didn’t just provide me with a magnificent portrait for the cover of this book, but also with precious reminiscences. Last, a
merci
to Jonathan Wilson, the sharpest of readers, who spared me a few blushes by pointing out some factual errors which would have greatly endangered what standing I enjoy in the press box had they gone unnoticed.

1
  Galtier played for a number of professional teams from 1985 to 1999, including Lille, Nîmes and, twice, Marseille, and finished his career holding together the defence of Liaoning Yuandong, in China. He then became the most trusted assistant of manager Alain Perrin, following him from club to club – among others Portsmouth FC, Olympique Lyonnais and, at the time of writing, St Étienne. Galtier was also a key member of the French under-21 side that gave Cantona his only international honour, the European Championships of 1988.

2
  This title,
Un Rêve modeste et fou
, is taken from Louis Aragon’s collection of poems ‘Les Poètes’, and was set to music by the French communist/romantic troubadour Jean Ferrat. An approximate translation of that stanza could read, with apologies to Aragon, ‘To have – maybe – been useful/This a humble and crazy dream/It would’ve been better to silence it/You’ll lay me in the earth with it/Like a star at the bottom of a hole’.

3
  That book, published in France by Robert Laffont in 1993, written with the help of ghostwriter Pierre-Louis Basse, was hastily translated into English a year later under the title
Cantona: My Story.
Éric himself seems to have shown little interest in its preparation, and, as the deadline loomed, two members of his entourage were drafted in to fill in gaps in the text. In the first two pages, the reader was informed that Time [sic] Square was in London and that Gérard Philipe (died 1959) was France’s main screen idol at the time of Cantonas birth (1966). Other factual inaccuracies include the date of Cantona’s signing his first professional contract with Auxerre.

4
  Jean-Marie, the least gifted of the three brothers, became a businessman and later rejoined the footballing world, but as an agent. He still looks after a number of French professionals, the World Cup-winning goalkeeper Fabien Barthez among others. Joël managed to carve a peripatetic career with Olympique Marseille, Stade Rennais, FC Antwerp, SCO Angers, Ujpest and . . . Stockport County, a point at which his story and Éric’s become entangled for good, as you will see.

5
  Prunier would be Cantona’s teammate at Manchester United in the 1995–96 season; see page 414.

6
  AJA had finished third in the league in 1983–84, and, having drawn Sporting Lisbon, exited the UEFA Cup at the first hurdle.

7
  On 28 November 1995 (after an unsuccessful appeal), Tapie was sentenced to a two-year jail term (sixteen months suspended) and a FF20,000 fine for ‘subornation of witness’ in the ‘OM-VA affair’, which I’ll come to in greater detail later in this book. He served six months in prison. Two years later, he was convicted of embezzlement by the Tribunal Correctionnel de Marseille on 4 July 1997, and sentenced to a three-year jail term (eighteen months suspended). The appeal court of Aix-en Provence reduced the sentence to three years (suspended) and a FF300,000 fine on 4 June 1998. Last, in December 2005, having been found guilty of tax evasion (‘fraude fiscale’) he was sentenced to a three-year jail term (twenty-eight months suspended) by the 11
^th
Chamber of the Tribunal Correctionnel of Paris.

8
  There was also a heart, as Tapie showed on the darkest day in OM’s history: the tragedy of the Stade de Furiani, in Corsica. On 5 May 1992, a couple of minutes before a French Cup semi-final between SEC Bastia and Marseille was supposed to kick-off, a makeshift stand which had been erected to accommodate an extra 10,000 spectators collapsed, causing the death of eighteen people (a number of journalists among them), and maiming dozens more for life. The OM chairman spent the evening tending the injured and administering first aid when needed. One of the victims he helped had swallowed his tongue and, without his intervention, would have died that night. The man who owed his life to Tapie was my friend Jean-Marie Lanoé.

9
  French international defender, who was part of the gold-winning French team at the 1984 Olympic Games and would be Cantona’s teammate at Bordeaux.

10
  In the 31 games they played together for France, Papin scored 22 goals, Cantona 10. But Éric provided 3 assists to JPP, and only received a single one from him.

11
  PSG finished a mere three points behind OM in the end.

12
  The Cantona and Paille transfers were financed – for the most part – by the City Council of Montpellier, then under the control of local Socialist panjandrum George Frèche, who topped up the FF10m grant the club received each year with another FF4m of taxpayers’ money. The County Council of the Hérault
département
chipped in with an extra FF3m in exchange for a renaming of the club, previously known as Montpellier-La Paillade, and Nicollin himself plucked FF4m from his company’s bank account (a company which specialized in the collection and recycling of domestic and industrial waste in the region and, yes, derived much of its income from the patronage of various institutional bodies). Such municipal involvement in French football was common at the time and entirely legitimate. It was a political gamble as much as anything else, not that Éric and Stéphane were aware of it.

13
  ‘5m Francs were set aside each year to buy matches in the French League and the European Cup, that is 20m Francs from 1989 to 1993, including European games against Athens and Sofia.’ This is a verbatim excerpt from the report submitted on 21 November 1995 by the prosecution service of Aix-en-Provence’s Court of Appeal to the French National Assembly, in order to lift Tapies parliamentary immunity. This document was leaked to French magazine
L’Express
in December of the same year. Even though they were raised in the courtroom, it should be stressed however that neither Tapie nor his clubs were prosecuted specifically for this alleged infringement.

14
  One of these is worth a mention: a 2–1 victory over West Germany in February 1990, in which Éric scored the decisive goal. The
Mannschaft
would, of course, be crowned world champions in the summer. What could France have achieved, had Cantona not been suspended for over a year in 1988, when qualification was still within their grasp?