Eric Cantona

"Yes, he’s right now appearing in films. He’s actually playing himself in one, the film that’s really made a big breakthrough [ Looking for Eric ], but he is someone around the French film set. And, in a way, as this book tells you, he was an actor all along. He was an astoundingly gifted football player, a bit like Cruyff, and difficult to contain in a single side. And that’s the reason he came to England, because the French couldn’t abide him – imagine a man too arrogant for the French! He was all that. And what the book attempts to tell you, by going back to his origins, is that he’s not even accepted as a Frenchman. He comes from this strange family that lived in a cave that was built into the side of a mountain in the Caillols area of Marseilles. His grandfather was artistic, so painting is one of his hobbies; poetry is another, though he’s lousy at it. And it used to come out when he was playing, that when he did something wrong he did it spectacularly wrong. Like the kung-fu kick he gave to a member of the audience, when he was playing for Manchester United. They played away at Crystal Palace and a spectator was taunting him with racist comments about him being a frog, and he literally ran the width of the field and launched himself feet first into this guy, catching him the head. He was banned for about eight months from playing – and almost the biggest success that the Manchester United manager, who had been there for 26 years, ever had, was tempting him to come back and play again. Because he’d decided that if the English wanted to ban him, he was never going to come back. And he did come back, and instantly changed one of the biggest and most difficult stalemates that I’ve ever seen in my life, just through sheer arrogant but wonderfully gifted ability. He was an extraordinary performer, but none of the English, me included, ever worked him out. You never could quite tell why he was a rebel, or why he was difficult. If he didn’t like a club he was playing for, it didn’t matter what contract he was on or anything else, he went. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In this book Philippe Auclair, a French football correspondent based in London, turns his pursuit of Eric into an obsession to unravel the strange, and thus compelling, nature of the man. ‘I play with passion and fire. I have to accept that sometimes this fire does harm’ is one line in the book. Ultimately I’m not sure that Auclair, or any man, could explain everything that moves and motivates the dark side of this wonderful showman player. But I doubt anyone gets closer to it. And the irony is that Cantona never really played for France. He did play, maybe 30 times, but I remember the day he was dropped from the French squad. I remember asking the French team coach ‘Why?’ And the guy said to me, which was an astonishing thing to say, ‘Because I’ve got somebody better.’ And actually it proved right, because the guy he had was Zinedine Zidane. So if Cantona hadn’t been such a rebel, we might never have seen the beauty of Zidane…"