Richard Williams on Eric Cantona, catalyst of Manchester United’s stunning revival, who announced his early retirement this week
HOW typical of Eric Cantona that he should stand not upon the order of his going, but simply clear off. No farewell tours, no curtain calls. Yet, being Cantona, somehow the sense of a coup de thtre was heightened by his absence on the day his retirement was announced.
As a philosopher, he may never have provided a threat to Blaise Pascal, but those who doubted his intelligence and integrity are left to chew on a decision that, in its refusal to entertain crowd- pleasing gestures, backed up everything he ever said about detesting cheap sentimentality.
Barely a month after the first small signs of decline were detected, he decided to go. As Manchester United fought off the last challenge to their fourth Premier League title in five years, and as their latest attempt to win the European Cup crashed at the semi-final stage, the Frenchman was beginning to show his age.
He turned 31 this week. Most top professional footballers battle on into their mid-30s, deploying guile to outwit younger and faster opponents as the hairline recedes and the midriff thickens. Some, such as Ray Wilkins of England and Gordon Strachan of Scotland, are still trotting out of the tunnel in their 40s. Their love of the game is transparent; their inability to conceive of a life beyond it is touching, and confirms the fans’ belief that their decision to make such heavy emotional investment in football was not misguided.
Cantona never promised such solace. His singularity was his hallmark in a game whose players are raised from childhood in a culture of dependence, where they feed and play together, develop their tastes and habits collectively, and have their passports doled out during trips abroad and collected up afterwards. The culture keeps them loyal, keeps them motivated as a unit. Cantona, l’tranger, operated from a different motivational kit.
There have been many mavericks in British football, but their unorthodoxy has usually been defined by hedonistic indiscipline. Cantona was unorthodox in other ways. His favourite musicians were William Sheller, a Breton troubadour, and Jim Morrison. He admired rebels: the painter Nicolas de Stal, the actor Mickey Rourke, the poet Rimbaud. He often went back to the family house in Provence and painted abstract expressionist canvases inspired by the light and colours of the hills behind Marseille.
Despite a salary of more than half a million pounds a year, he lived quietly and modestly in England with his wife Isabelle, a teacher, and their two children. During the family’s time in a semi-detached house in Leeds, he wrote: “The house and the district are not plush or exclusive, making the atmosphere very pleasing to me. Many of our neighbours are Pakistanis or West Indians, as well as English. They are straightforward, friendly and generous. I prefer by far our little English house with its wild piece of garden to those vast Victorian houses among which I’m sure I would soon get fed up.”
Getting fed up was another Cantona trademark, although his problems with authority generally arose when his sense of honour and justice was offended – when a defender’s unfair challenge went unpunished, or when a lout on the terraces insulted his mother. Professional sportsmen are supposed to grin and bear such slights, but Cantona reminded us that forbearance is not always possible, or even desirable.
As a footballer, his most outstanding characteristic was an almost ascetic devotion to his craft. Unsure of what to expect from one with such a lurid reputation, his young team-mates were immediately impressed by his insistence on staying at the training ground after the morning sessions, putting in extra time on sharpening his already superior skills. They stayed, too, learning from his example.
He may have been a stranger, but he was not a loner. “The image is of an individualist,” his friend Grard Houllier, the technical director of the French football federation, said, “but that comes from those who don’t take the trouble to know him properly. He’s the opposite of that. If I wanted to define him, I’d say that he’s an island – but an island of freedom, generosity and pride.”
He leaves the game with an extraordinary record of achievement. To Manchester United, he will always be the catalyst enabling them to win their first league championship in a quarter of a century, his arrival in the winter of 1993 banishing the shadows cast by a glorious past. Returning from the eight-month suspension imposed after his altercation with a fan in 1995, he scored the winning goal in an FA Cup final and was named player of the year.
The cartoonish hauteur, symbolised by the upturned shirt collar, was backed by deeds. Some years earlier, in France, he threw the ball at a referee whose decisiondispleased him. “That gesture,” he said later, “was a natural part of my personality. I take responsibility for it. There are perhaps more beautiful or more ugly personalities. You need a particular talent only to want to please. I don’t have this talent.”
The English – and not just Manchester United fans – loved him because of it. In the great convulsion that changed football’s position in contemporary society, there could have been no more effective agent provocateur.