Cantona Page 4

  But Les Caillols would not add the 1978 championship of Provence to the list of their trophies. The referee blows his whistle. Éric’s bootlaces have come undone, and the regulations are clear: a footballer’s laces must be tied. ‘The game is over. Tears flow in the dressing-room.’ That day, Cantona had ‘discovered stupidity or injustice, whatever you wish to call it’. The tale’s most revealing trait must be that neither the child nor the grown man could tell the difference between the two. There was, of course, nothing ‘unjust’ about the referee’s decision. Call him a bigot, a cretin, any name under the sun, but ‘unjust’? No. ‘Unfair’, yes, as when a child complains of something ‘unfair’ when he’s not given what he thinks he deserves. Had the goal been scored, and validated, the victim of the ‘injustice’ would have been Vivaux-Marronniers, not Les Caillols. But I doubt that anyone could persuade Cantona that his perception of right and wrong in what is, after all, one of the most regulated areas of human activity – team sports – was and remains deeply flawed. To him, when the official signalled a foul, it was as if he had killed a butterfly for no other reason than it was a butterfly, regardless of its beauty and harmlessness. To him it was a crime. Justice is an instinct, not a rulebook. No rules should circumvent invention. Those who have the ability to imagine beyond the rules have a right, maybe a duty, to break them, and damn the consequences.

  For those who were satellites around the family sun, it was more a matter of ‘managing the unmanageable, sometimes in impossible circumstances’, as one of them told me, of finding accommodation with a fascinating, endearing and ‘emotive’ young man who could charm and exasperate those who cherished him most within a matter of seconds. His English teacher at La Grande Bastide, Evelyne Lyon, adored Éric, yet felt compelled to warn him that he ‘had better watch out, because talent was not enough, and if he didn’t change his character, he would have problems later on’. He was ‘someone you always had to keep an eye on’, she said. But this she did with as much gentleness as she could muster, even when her pupil ran riot outside her own classroom. Oliver chuckles at the recollection of Cantona dashing through the corridors after a training session, ‘shouting in English, “I am the king! I am the king!”’ Célestin Oliver could see the surprise on my face. Others would call him that later, wouldn’t they? ‘I think it had to do with Muhammed Ali,’ he says, with another smile. How he loved his boy.

  Cantona was thriving at La Grande Bastide, but word of his achievements on the field hadn’t spread – yet – beyond Marseilles and Provence. OM had had a look at him, but, according to Oliver, their management had decided that Cantona was ‘too slow’ and passed on the chance to add the fourteen-year-old centre-forward’s name to their books. Jean-Marie and Joël, who also entertained dreams of becoming professionals,4 were similarly unsuccessful. Such a rejection cast a threatening shadow over Éric’s future career; if a child of Les Caillols couldn’t make it in his home-town club, who could he turn to? Thankfully, and not for the last time, luck lent a helping hand.

  The French FA had divided the country into districts whose borders mirrored the country’s départements and regions. These constituted the foundations of a pyramid, at the top of which sat national teams for each age group; a system of filters, if you will, a distillery of talent, one which would prove remarkably efficient at identifying and supporting emerging players. The chronic lack of success of Les Bleus in major tournaments, their inability to build on the exploits of the 1958 national squad, had prompted inspired administrators like George Boulogne and Fernand Sastre to undertake a complete reorganization of the detection system. Judging by the paucity of their results in European competitions, clubs couldn’t be trusted to identify and develop promising footballers – the Federation would have to take care of that. To that end, regular tournaments or ‘test-matches’ were held at every level, in Provence as elsewhere.

  Cantona may have failed to attract the attention of OM, but at fourteen-and-a-half was still good enough to be considered for selection in this context. The then technical adviser for the Marseilles region, Henri Émile, had been in touch with Célestin Oliver, who had warmly recommended Cantona for inclusion in a ‘Mediterranean squad’, a group of thirty-five players who were then separated into two teams, the ‘possibles’ and the ‘probables’. To his amusement, Émile, who would become one of the most pivotal figures in Cantona’s career, can’t remember which of these two teams the boy was assigned to. ‘Éric himself has a very vivid memory of the occasion, which we often talk about when we’re travelling together,’ Émile told me at the French FA’s Clairefontaine headquarters, ‘but was he a “possible”, or a “probable”? He doesn’t know. He had no idea what these terms meant!’ It hardly mattered, as Cantona produced a magnificent display that afternoon in the spring of 1981. What mattered was that the match had been watched by a couple of scouts from Auxerre, an up-and-coming club from northern Burgundy which had risen quickly through the divisions under the tutelage of the wiliest of managers, Guy Roux. They had made the trip to the ground in order to monitor another player, whose identity has been forgotten by everyone. But they had seen Éric, and that was enough.

  No one was keener than Roux to poach the best young talent available; his club had only acquired full professional status a couple of years earlier and its ground, the Stade de l’Abbé-Deschamps (named after the Catholic priest who had founded the Association de la jeunesse auxerroise, or AJ Auxerre or AJA), was minuscule by first-division standards. Roux had to scrape for every penny, which, it should be said, agreed with the parsimonious nature he had inherited from his peasant roots. Twenty-seven years later, as we sat down to a distinctly non-frugal lunch in one of Chablis’s restaurants (after a lengthy visit to one of the area’s most renowned cellars), Roux recalled how his chief scout’s report – his name was Jean-Pierre Duport – had been glowing enough to convince him that Cantona’s trail should be followed by the club’s second-in-command, assistant manager Daniel Rolland, in whom Roux had total confidence.

  So it was that Rolland repeatedly drove down the autoroute du soleil to judge for himself. ‘Everybody could see he was “above” the others,’ says Roux – but no one as clearly as the astute coach from Burgundy, who, feigning innocence, called Oliver to ask him what he really thought of ‘this lad . . . Éric Cantona, yes?’ There was some risk attached to uprooting an adolescent from sunny Marseilles to one of the sleepiest towns in the sleepiest of regions. As Henri Émile says, ‘You never know how far a player can go at this age. You can feel a potential. But there are things you cannot control. Psychological things – as when a player thinks he’s “made it”, too soon. They can stall. You can see a great player’s potential but you don’t have certainties. Competition alone reveals whether the player masters all the criteria of the highest level.’ But – and it is a crucial but – the way that the OM reject had seized his one opportunity to shine showed that there was steel in his character as well as skill in his boots. The importance of the occasion had not fazed him. Still, Émile cannot help thinking of a ‘what if’: ‘Éric’s told me on several occasions that, if he hadn’t been picked in this team to start with, he might not have had the same career. Maybe he could have slipped through the net . . . which just goes to show!’

  Roux still had some work to do to land his catch. Cantona’s performance for the Provençal scratch team had not escaped OGC Nice – a club with a reputation and a collection of honours that Auxerre could only look up to. This was the club for which Roger Jouve, another product of Les Caillols, was still playing three seasons earlier, and whose colours had been worn by another of Cantona’s early heroes, the Bosnian striker Jean Katalinski. Oliver himself kept telling his pupil that he should ‘go for it’ and rush down the coast to join Nice for good. By contrast, Auxerre was neither the most obvious nor the easiest choice for a stripling footballer who had not yet reached his fifteenth birthday. The medieval town, built like a low ribbon of stone along the slow waters of the Yonne, had a d
iscreet charm, but few attractions for a teenager who had grown up in the warmth of the Mediterranean. There, in the north-eastern corner of Burgundy, autumns turned sharply to harsh Continental winters, almost as soon as the vineyards had been unburdened of their last bunch of grapes. Fog was common, snow too, often at unseasonal times. Going back to Marseilles would entail long hours on the train or in the family car – the high-speed TGV link between Paris and Marseilles was only completed in 2001. Nice, with ten times the population of Auxerre, had a casino, fine restaurants, nightclubs, beaches, palm trees and girls in monokinis by the seaside. Auxerre, on the other hand, had a few choice charcuteries, splendid white wines and a clutch of cafes which closed early when they deigned to open at all (Sundays are a very quiet affair in this town).

  When it came to football, Nice, again, had dwarfed Auxerre for almost its entire history. Both clubs had been born roughly at the same time – AJA in 1905, OGC Nice three years later – but there the similarities ended. Whereas Nice’s Les Aiglons had won four French championships, two French Cups, and twice reached the quarter-finals of the European Cup, Auxerre owed its small measure of fame to its dramatic rise from the amateur ranks to the final of the 1979 French Cup, thanks to the genius of one man – Guy Roux. Glamorous Nice should have held all the cards in the duel for the acquisition of the exciting but yet unproven Cantona; but it played its hand badly. Perhaps the Niçois, who must have been aware of Auxerre’s manoeuvring, believed that the prestige attached to their red-and-black jersey, coupled with the interest they showed in the teenager, would suffice to overwhelm him. AJA was small fry after all. But Nice totally misjudged the young man’s temperament and hardly bothered to find out what could possibly prevent him from becoming one of their dozens of apprentices. Cantona finally made the trip to Nice as planned, but came back to his family laden with disappointment. He had decided to turn his back on OGCN for what seemed like the flimsiest of reasons – which he daren’t confess to his father at the time. He had asked if he could be given a jersey and pennant of Les Aiglons; quite ridiculously, the club insisted he should pay for them. He paid, but didn’t forget how little his prospective employers appeared to care for him.

  However, when Cantona accepted Roux’s invitation to Auxerre a few weeks later, nothing had been decided yet. The Auxerre manager had behaved with typical subtlety in his dealings with Célestin Oliver. ‘One day’ Tico says, ‘Guy Roux called me, and said: “Have you got a decent player in your class?” I told him – Cantona. “Send him to me.’” Guy Roux is a very, very clever man . . .’ Éric was just to take part in a small, seemingly informal clinic. The date was 1 May 1981.

  The memory of these first few days spent together brings a smile to Roux’s face. ‘We’d just finished our first year as a professional club. I was there, of course. There were quite a few of these youngsters: Galtier, Darras, Mazzolini, all these kids . . . and Éric Cantona.’ The atmosphere was more reminiscent of a holiday camp than of a test which could and did decide the future of these carefree teenagers. ‘They were larking about like toddlers, because we had a pool . . . well, a bath for the players, about the quarter of the size of this place,’ Roux says, gesturing towards the dining room of Au Petit Chablis, which would not have accommodated the larger kind of Bourguignon wedding reception. ‘But there were very few pools of that kind at the time. They were having such fun . . . I chatted with the lad, and, after a few minutes, he tells me: “I’d like a shirt”; at that time, a shirt was something . . .’ When Roux, cunning as ever, slipped a few jerseys in Cantona’s bags when time had come to bid him farewell, builders were still at work finishing the academy’s main hall. Its next recruit, filled with delight by the generosity of his future manager, still had to convince his family that the choice he had made in his heart would feel right for them too. This time, though, he was prepared to be his own man. The first decision he had taken on his own would prove to be one of the best in his whole life.

  Now is as good a moment as any to interrupt the chronological thread in Cantona’s story, to address once and for all the comments his love of painting alluded to in this first chapter, attracted later in his life, when everything he said or did became a target for the cheapest kind of mockery. A footballer who paints – how comical, how ludicrous is that? In the macho world of football, and particularly English football, an artistic inclination, especially as genuine an inclination as Cantona’s, only ranks below homosexuality if ostracism is what you’re looking for. To his enemies, Cantona’s attachment to art brought another proof of his insufferable arrogance. ‘I paint’ meant ‘I am better than you’. This is a profound misunderstanding (one among many others) of the man’s personality. Vanity had nothing to do with the need he felt to look into himself in this way. Later in life, he always resisted the temptation – I would go as far as to say that he never felt it – to use his fame as a sportsman to stage public exhibitions of his work. Painting was a private pursuit, a means to relax, too, when he would take his paintbox and head for the garrigue – the wild coastal scrubland near his home – on his own, with no other company than his two dogs. He was also aware that if he possessed a real gift, his technical ability didn’t quite match Albert’s, and that it would be cheating to pretend that he was as much a genius with a brush in his hand as with a ball at his feet. Insecurity combined with his instinct for self-protection to keep painting an interest that could only be shared with people he trusted. He was not coquettish or ashamed of what he was doing, no; he might organize a private show of some works for the benefit of close fiends and members of his family, but not more than that. The few who had access to this much-spoken-about, unfairly ridiculed and hidden part of his world, and have spoken to me about what they saw, invariably stressed the dark, even ‘tortured’ nature of most of his work. They also insisted on its quality – Gérard Houllier in particular was struck by the originality of what he was shown. Photographer Didier Fèvre, who was among Cantona’s closest friends in the late eighties and early nineties, saw him experiment with supports other than canvas, cutting up photographs which he then half-covered with brushstrokes. It is clear that, moving into adulthood, Cantona was retreating in more ways than one from the Provençal idyll his father had tried to capture. He was also developing an increasing sense of his own mortality, as a hypersensitive footballer-artist could not fail to do; once he had reached the age of thirty, physical decline would precipitate his rapid ‘death’ as an athlete, a subject which became a recurrent theme in the interviews he gave late in his career, an awareness that contributed to precipitate the announcement of his retirement in 1997.

  The language he uses when speaking of the artists he admires today is revealing. Of Zoran Music, a Slovenian painter who left haunting etchings and engravings of the Holocaust he survived: ‘It’s powerful, you feel a power . . . You feel that if he hadn’t painted, he’d have died [the French crevé, or burst, almost carries the stench of death, but has no equivalent in English].’ Of the Catalan Antoni Tàpies: ‘He gives another life to objects which are fated to die.’ His Picasso puppet featured on Les Guignols de l’info – the French equivalent of Spitting Image – was nothing but a gross caricature of the man’s sincerity and talent. It is to Cantona’s credit that he bore these cheap shots at his ‘difference’ with good grace. He genuinely enjoyed seeing his latex alter ego make a fool of himself on television with incomprehensible pronouncements (which, more often than not, concluded with his throwing his shirt away in disgust). And why not? He had long been aware of the absurdty of his public persona. The superb copy he threw away to journalists in his early twenties was littered with self-deprecating quips about his supposed ‘intellectualism’. Some got it, most didn’t. Caught between the urge to be recognized and the desire to be left alone, he laid shoals of red herrings on the slab, finding amusement, and a kind of security, in the willingness of others to gobble up his catch. Talking of which, sardines were not spared in a splendid advertising mini-feature – two-and-a-half mi
nutes long – purportedly shot for the benefit of an electronics manufacturer shortly after the denouement of the Crystal Palace affair, in the spring of 1995. In that film, arms aloft on the top of a cliff, seagulls screeching over his earnest baritone, his whole body shaking in the presence of the Muses, Cantona laughed at Cantona. This was probably the finest acting performance of his career. He might not agree with this judgement. But he would probably smile at it.

  2

  Cantona and his ‘band of merry men’.

  AUXERRE:

  THE APPRENTICE