How United could do with some Cantona magic now
ERIC Cantona’s competitive Manchester United debut as a substitute in the derby at Old Trafford, 30 years ago, was circumspect and understated.
Just 10 words of introduction from the stadium announcer, 45 minutes of football and such a modest contribution that he left the field as a man of mystery. Cantona (right) had such a broad perspective on the world, and football’s sometimes insignificant place within it, that he only ever seemed to be passing through.
He took up residence in a hotel near Worsley Brow on Manchester’s eastern fringe, having moved from Leeds United in the autumn of 1992, and reflected in an interview with a French journalist at the time that it suited him well.
‘I do not need to give three months’ notice at a hotel, or to organise moving out, with all the time it takes,’ he said. ‘A credit card is all you need to say goodbye.’ It was hard to know how to view those words. Was this Cantona the adventurer, too egotistical to fully commit? Or Cantona the free spirit?
An answer materialised this week in an interview with The Athletic in which the 56-year-old reflected on how, after his brief first retirement from football in 1991, a two-month period of enforced isolation led him to reframe his expectations about football people and fans.
‘At that time I found something,’ Cantona said. ‘I realised I expected too much from people. I thought I loved these kinds of people and I wanted them to love me. Then I realised, you become a prisoner of this idea. So I tried to find the solution. In French, it is to say “Je suis de passage” (‘I am in transit’). It helped me a lot as a man and a player. I started to not care.’
His team-mates from that time would say he cared a very great deal, though Alex Ferguson clearly intuited the same restive, independent soul and the need to give the man his space.
Cantona reframed Ferguson’s notion of how a footballer might exist and conduct himself and the extraordinary note the manager sent to him in August 1997, after he had said he was leaving, was a little less than a love letter.
‘When we restarted training, I kept waiting for you to turn up as normal,’ Ferguson wrote. ‘But I think that was in hope not realism and I knew in your eyes when we met, your time at Manchester United was over.’
Ferguson was not the only one to feel the loss, as the Premier League’s relentless evolution deadened the game in so many ways, with the corporate gloss and the social media cesspit leaving players reluctant to speak freely. It would never have been so with Cantona. ‘You know, when I sign a contract with a brand, they say to me there is a clause that I cannot give my idea about politics,’ he said this week.
‘So I say, if you want me to sign, then you forget that clause. You want to work with me? Why? Because of who I am. You know how I am. Everyone knows how I am. But you want to work with me and want me to be somebody else? No. I behave the way I want to behave. Nobody will tell me how to behave.’
His dismissal of David Beckham’s ambassadorship of Qatar in the interview is brutally perfunctory: ‘A big, big mistake.’
His assessment of players who are supposedly ‘socially engaged’ is shrewd. ‘Engagement’ is Chilean player Carlos Caszely opposing the Pinochet dictatorship, he says.
Iran’s footballers have been engaged in something equally dangerous this week.
‘Where it is risky, you have nobody. So they are all cheap sheep,’ Cantona says. ‘They are just in the business like everybody.’
He clearly feels this strongly because he starts to make sheep noises for emphasis while stating it. He would have been in his element this weekend because he was particularly successful against the clubs which United fans despise the most.
He dominated the Manchester derby in the mid-1990s with seven goals in eight games. The two he scored in the 3-2 win at Maine Road in November 1993 are among the best remembered.
This week’s interview included Cantona’s revelation that he had suggested to former United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward that he might be appointed as ‘president of football’ at Old Trafford.
The executive’s reluctance was perhaps understandable because it is anyone guess where that kind of appointment might lead.
But Cantona’s departure from the British game was like a light going out and there has been no player remotely like him in the 25 years since. As Ferguson put it in that letter: ‘I keep hoping that I will discover a young Cantona! It is a dream!’