250 Days. Daniel Storey
a player in whom he had bestowed considerable faith. Manchester United had been widely derided for taking a chance on the enfant terrible. If Cantona’s performances in his first two seasons had proved Ferguson right, here was the sting in the tail.
Manchester United’s manager couldn’t say that there had been no warning signs. When playing for Auxerre, Cantona punched teammate Bruno Martini after a disagreement. During a charity match in Sedan for victims of an earthquake in Armenia, he kicked the ball into the crowd, threw his shirt at the referee and stormed off the pitch. In September 1988 he called France national team coach Henri Michel ‘a bag of shit’ in a post-match interview and was banned from playing for the national team until after Michel’s eventual sacking.
In 1991, when playing for Nîmes against St-Étienne, Cantona threw the ball at the referee and was given a four-game ban. When hauled in front of a disciplinary commission to explain himself and be told that other clubs had complained about his behaviour, Cantona approached the face of each member of the panel and called each of them an idiot in turn. The ban was promptly extended to two months.
That ban led to Cantona retiring from football at the age of 25, but he was talked round by Michel Platini, who believed that such a talent was too big a loss for the national team. It was Platini who persuaded Cantona to consider a move to England, having burned his bridges in Ligue 1.
If Ferguson’s aim was to smooth the roughest edges of Cantona’s ill-discipline, he barely managed it. Six months after joining United, Cantona was found guilty of misconduct and fined £1,000 after Leeds United fans accused him of spitting at them. Cantona claimed that he had spat at a wall. The disciplinary commission certainly agreed that there were mitigating circumstances, Cantona having been subjected to constant abuse from Leeds supporters.
In 1993/94, his first full season at Old Trafford, Cantona was sent off twice in the space of four days against Arsenal and Swindon. The first dismissal was for a stamp on the chest of John Moncur, the second for two yellow cards. The accusation against Ferguson’s United was that they were becoming undermined by their own indiscipline. For better and worse, the players were following Cantona’s lead.
Matters deteriorated even further in September 1994 in Galatasaray’s Ali Sami Yen Stadium, a daunting atmosphere for any player. Cantona was again sent off, right on the full-time whistle, and was reportedly struck by a police officer’s baton as he headed down the tunnel. Incensed by the assault, Cantona attempted to force his way through stewards and officials to confront the police officer, and had to be dragged to the dressing room and guarded by teammates.
‘Pally [Pallister], Robbo [Bryan Robson] and Brucey [Steve Bruce] had to drag Eric in and hold him there,’ Gary Neville remembers in his autobiography. ‘The experienced lads were going to the shower two by two so that Eric was never left alone in the dressing room. They ended up walking him to the coach to stop him going back after the police.’
This suggests two things: that Cantona’s combustibility was hardly a secret to Manchester United’s coaches and players, and that his anger took a considerable time to dissipate.
The uncomfortable truth for Ferguson is that Cantona was an accident waiting to happen and that the incident at Selhurst Park – while initially shocking – was not at all surprising. Manchester United’s manager backed himself to curb such ‘over-enthusiasm’ but was not successful, even if he rightly considered that Cantona’s quality outweighed the pitfalls.
In an interview with the Observer in 2004, Cantona – perhaps unwittingly – alluded to the inevitability of such incidents and his own lack of control. ‘If I’d met that guy on another day, things may have happened differently even if he had said the same things. Life is weird like that. You’re on a tightrope every day.’
Further evidence arrives in another Cantona quote, this time on the subject of being challenged. ‘I want to be like a gambler in a casino who can feel that rush of adrenaline not just when he’s on a roll, but all of the time,’ he said. ‘He gambles because he needs that buzz, he wants to experience it every moment of his life. That’s the way I want to play.’
This is the definition of playing on the edge, with every extreme element of the psyche bubbling just beneath the surface. It is a style that is rarely admitted to by sportspeople, for whom the typical strategy to achieve excellence is to rely upon an inner calm that enables composure in the crunch moments.
Cantona was a team player and very rarely selfish in possession of the ball, and yet he says that penalties – football’s most individual moment – were his ultimate buzz because they offered him a few seconds during which all eyes were on him to perform. He was driven to achieve, not necessarily to help the team or for personal glory, but through an addiction to the feeling of displaying immense skill and entertaining spectators in doing so.
That might sound peculiar, but it’s actually a persuasive argument. Becoming a professional footballer and maintaining your fitness and level of performance is incredibly hard. Dragging yourself through such physical and mental exhaustion for neither money nor love but to satisfy an addiction makes some sense. After all, many retired players speak of their propensity to succumb to other addictions because of their need to recreate football’s adrenaline rush.
Cantona sat at the extreme end of that spectrum. Anything that stopped him playing or curtailed his enjoyment of the game became the enemy: referees with their red cards, defenders with their physical treatment, coaches with their stymied tactics, supporters with their abuse. All this explains his fury in Istanbul and south London.
Cantona’s desire to ‘feel that rush’ blended with an anarchistic edge to his personality that lay not in a mistrust of authority per se, but a need to enjoy freedom of expression. ‘Above all I need to be free,’ he writes in Cantona on Cantona. ‘I don’t like to feel constrained by rules or conventions. There’s a limit to how far this idea can go, and there’s a fine line between freedom and chaos. But to some extent I espouse the idea of anarchy.’
Rather than rules, Cantona preferred to administer justice according to an ethical code; one that his critics might argue lacked calibration. So when Simmons screamed xenophobic abuse in his face, Cantona’s temper and determination to dispense moral retribution led to a spectacular assault. The accusation from Simmons that Cantona was a ‘lunatic’ was spectacularly misplaced.
Amid the myriad explanations for the attack, one thing remains certain: Cantona stayed true to his principles and never regretted his actions. ‘I’ve said before I should have kicked him harder but maybe tomorrow I’ll say something else,’ he said in 2017. ‘I cannot regret it. It was a great feeling. I learned from it – I think he [Simmons] learned too.’
Had you spoken to Ferguson on the morning of 26 January 1995, he might have had a slightly different view. Manchester United had travelled south to Selhurst Park with the chance to go top of the Premier League. They travelled back north without a victory, with potential criminal charges hanging over two key players and with their most talented attacker once again thrust into disciplinary controversy. Lock the doors and windows and batten down the hatches at Old Trafford. A storm was brewing.
‘Good on you Eric’
Ferguson had always been predisposed to defend Cantona, because of both his extraordinary talent and his tempestuous reputation. Manchester United’s manager was aware when signing Cantona that he would require a particular strand of his man-management, but he rejected the notion that the Frenchman’s disciplinary problems before arriving at Old Trafford should define how he was treated.
‘He had been a bit of a wayward character at his other clubs and had gained a reputation for being unruly and difficult,’ Ferguson wrote in Leading. ‘It was almost as if he was considered some sort of demon. That made no sense to me. When you are dealing with individuals with unusual talent, it makes sense to treat them differently. I just made it a point to ignore what had happened in the past and treat Eric as a new