Eric Cantona : Does His Arrogance Eclipse His Briliance?

There can be no doubt that as an attacker, in almost every sense, you might say, the Frenchman was one of the finest of his time.

Powerfully built, adept in the air and with his powerful right-foot, on the ground, possessed of exceptional technique, flair and originality, he could score goals or set them up with almost casual ease.

Recently, Manchester United fans voted France’s Eric Cantona their best player of all time. Ahead, mark you, even of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law.

More recently still he has appeared as the phantom protagonist of a film much praised at the Cannes Film Festival in France by the renowned director, Kenneth Loach. Something of a reprise, really of Woody Allen’s movie ‘Play it again Sam’ in which a ghostly Humphrey Bogart appears to inspire the fearful character played by Woody himself.

This time, the Allen character is a confused Manchester postman, to whom his hero, Cantona, mysteriously and somewhat inexplicably appears, to give him advice and courage.

No one can put a question forward against Cantona's abilities to make goals yet, as a new, exceptionally urbane and perceptive biography, ‘Cantona: the rebel who would be king’ by the greatly gifted Philippe Auclair all too starkly reminds us, Cantona’s whole career was punctuated by episodes of violence and intransigence.

Auclair, London correspondent of the ‘Peerless France Football’ magazine, whose immaculate English prose puts that of most English sportswriters to shame, admired and is fascinated by Cantona, but has no illusions about his explosive, contentious and sometimes irrational character.

The intriguing fact, however, is that Cantona, so often marked in his native France, not least on satirical television, for his supposedly pretentious intellectual and artistic claims, seems now to be having the better even of that argument.

For, not only has he made a new and promising career in films, not only does he continue to paint, though he asserts that he will never be as good as his father — but he is even involved in the backing of a Parisian theatrical company.

Certain episodes, however, are hard to forget. Thus, shortly before he came to England to play for Leeds United, and indeed as a consequence of his intransigence, he was up before a disciplinary committee, in Paris. Far from accepting their authority and verdict, he made a point of going up to each member in turn and insulting him. ‘Idiots!’

But the most notorious episode in his career took place on a January evening at Selhurst Park in South East London, the stadium of Crystal Palace, where Eric was playing for Manchester United.

He had in the first-half been pretty comprehensively kicked by his Palace marker, Richard Shaw, supposedly Palace’s Player of the Year, fouls ignored by the referee Alan Wilkie, but when, in the second-half, Shaw did it again, Cantona turned, kicked him back, was spotted by the linesman and sent off.

As he went, a young London hooligan with a record, it transpired, for criminal violence, one Mathew Simmons, rushed to the bottom of the stands to assail Cantona with vicious obscene abuse. Whereupon Cantona kung fu kicked him. Later, Cantona himself admitted that he didn’t quite know what came over him.

The sequel however was disastrous. “If I’d met that guy on another day,” he later told an interviewer, “things may have happened very differently, even if he had said exactly the same things. Life is weird like that.”

There was a heavy price to pay. Alex Ferguson, United’s manager erupted in Wilkie’s dressing room, shouting, “It’s all your blanking fault! If you’d done your blanking job, this wouldn’t have happened!” Alas, it had, and the sequel was punitive.

A long suspension — extended by an FA tribunal and a fine from Manchester United. An initial sentence of two weeks in gaol from a magistrates’ court later on appeal commuted to 120 days community service which Cantona happily performed, coaching young children in the Manchester area.

Famously or infamously, outside the court house after his appeal, besieged by journalists, Cantona made the enigmatic and in fact as he later admitted himself, meaningless statement, “When the seagulls follow a trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.

Thank you very much!” Later he’d admit, “I just said that. It was nothing, it did not mean anything.” But the words would resound.

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