BIOGRAPHY: Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be KingBy Philippe Auclair, Macmillan, 469pp, £17.99
IT'S JUST OVER 12 years since Eric Cantona lowered his collar, packed away his number seven shirt and bid adieu to professional football. But while his profile might not be quite as high as it was at the peak of his playing career, he's hardly slipped from view either, most recently appearing in Ken Loach's film Looking for Eric.
“We forget you’re just a man,” his devotee, Eric Bishop, says to him when recalling the stormy aftermath of that kung fu kick on a Crystal Palace fan. “I am not a man, I am Cantona,” he replies, as only Eric Cantona could.
True, Cantona follows the declaration with a grin and a chuckle, seemingly poking fun at his deification in some quarters, but to this day Manchester United supporters, who continue to sing his name, can still be seen wearing his shirt with 'Dieu' emblazoned upon it. Godlike to some, then; to others he was overrated, overhyped, pampered and indulged. "A big player in small games, a small player in big games," they'd argue. The truth, as is usually the case, lies somewhere in between, as French journalist Philippe Auclair argues in his book Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King, as complete a biography of the player as there is ever likely to be.
Auclair makes no bones about his admiration for his compatriot, describing him as the player who “transformed English football to a greater extent than any other player of the modern age”. It is a claim that might be greeted with howls of derision in some quarters, but Cantona’s impact on the English game was, indeed, profound, at a time when relatively few non-British or non-Irish players were employed by the leading clubs.
Arsenal, for example, had just two “foreign” first team regulars – Denmark’s John Jensen and Sweden’s Anders Limpar – in the season Cantona moved to England, joining Leeds United in 1992. Now, of course, there’s barely an Englishman to be found at the London club.
In that sense Auclair is correct, Cantona’s impact at United was immense, his arrival at the club, in late 1992, coinciding with them winning their first Premier League title (or First Division, as it was called before then) since 1967. The team was effectively built around Cantona, his flair and creative spark (and goals) allowing it to shed its air of predictability.
His success was one of the reasons most other clubs went in search of a little je ne sais quoifor their teams, leading them to doing much of their shopping abroad, Cantona dispelling the notion that most "foreign" players couldn't cope with the pace and physicality of the English game.
Auclair, then, does not overstate Cantona’s influence on the English game, but in other areas he is, perhaps, overly generous to the man. He writes that he was “emotionally maimed by the corrupting power of professional football”, his revulsion at its growing commercialisation contributing to his decision to retire at the age of thirty.
The truth, though, was that Cantona profited handsomely from this “corrupting power”, his face adorning Nike billboards all around Old Trafford on the day “hundreds of supporters, many of them in tears” converged to mourn his retirement.
After being banned for nine months for hurdling the advertising hoarding at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park and kung fu kicking Matthew Simmons, Cantona took part in a controversial Nike ad that made light of his disciplinary record. “I have been punished for striking a goalkeeper. For spitting at supporters. For throwing my shirt at a referee. For calling my manager a bag of shit. I called those who judged me a bunch of idiots,” he said. And then, with a grin: “I thought I might have trouble finding a sponsor”.
He played the game, then, on and off the pitch, contributing in no small part to the “growing commercialisation” of English football. And while hardly condoning Cantona’s actions at Selhurst Park that night Auclair offers a debatable argument that “had it not been for the identity and the previous record of its perpetrator, Cantona’s offence would not have warranted more than a footnote in a litany of far more serious misdemeanours”.
Many would have argued that if it was not for the identity of the perpetrator, and the identity of the club he played for, he, Cantona, might well have been banned for life. That’s not to say that Auclair goes lightly on all of Cantona’s misdemeanours, there is plenty of criticism, too, for many of the self-inflicted woes that befell his career. He does, though, blanch at the caricature of Cantona so favoured by many of those who attempted to analyse him, that of the volatile and slightly crazy Frenchman. Instead Auclair offers fascinating insights to the player’s personality, with the aid of early interviews and anecdotes from his youth.
And, we learn, he came by it honestly. When television crews descended on his father, Albert’s house after Cantona’s ban, he quickly had them retreating: “When my son plays well you never come here. And now, you’re running! Put away that microphone, because, with the fur around it, it looks like a rabbit’s tail. And rabbits, I shoot them!” Rabbits, sardines, trawlers – the family had a way with words.
A difficult man to understand, perhaps, but Auclair’s absorbing book goes a great deal of the way towards unravelling Cantona’s story. And he is, we learn, but a man.
Mary Hannigan is an Irish Timesjournalist
