Cantona (3 page)

In 1966, with already her four-year-old son Jean-Marie to care for, Eléonore (a seamstress by trade), was about to have a second child. Their house was nowhere near ready to be lived in but, contrary to the legend that would have Albert taking the family to Paris (where he had found a job as a psychiatric nurse), it was in Marseilles that she gave birth to Éric Daniel Pierre Cantona on 24 May. A third son, Joël, would follow in October 1967, completing the family. Work had now sufficiently progressed for all of them to occupy the home that Joseph built, though it was by no means finished. The three boys would jump over heaps of concrete bricks and bags of cement until they became teenagers. Their house, as if carried on the shoulders of the grandparents’ home, cut a striking silhouette on the hill. Like the family who lived in it, the house was different, which enhanced the status of the boys and their parents in the small community of Les Caillols.

A singular presence on the rocks, surrounded by dark trees, the seat of the clan spoke for the values it shared: hard work, stubbornness, pride, and reliance on each other. The Cantonas were by no means outcasts; their diverse origins held nothing exotic for the neighbours for whom, as we’ve seen, settling in Marseilles was still part of living memory. Nevertheless, it took time for ‘outsiders’ to gain their confidence and be invited to the huge table where three generations of Cantonas sat, always eating together, laughing at the ceaseless jokes cracked by Albert. As Éric’s brother Joël recalled to one journalist, ‘These Sardinian and Catalan roots, adapted to Marseilles, [had] created an unusual mix. Our parents had a strong personality, which everyone respected, as my father was a natural leader. So, yes, there was [a sense of] honour, but also the typical warmth of Mediterranean families.’ Despite Albert’s strong sense of discipline, there was also mayhem, more often than not involving Éric. The little boy ‘loved playing, but loved to win above everything else’, Jean-Marie told
L’Équipe Magazine
in 2007, thinking of one incident when, having been beaten twice in a row at table tennis (which the brothers somehow managed to play in the attic which doubled up as a painting studio for Albert), the younger Cantona, beside himself with fury, managed to jump on the table with such force that it broke in two. And ‘ping-pong’ mattered little to Éric compared to football, of course.

Éric’s father, Albert, had been a decent goalkeeper himself, not quite good enough to cut it in one of the better clubs of the area, but sufficient to become the coach of his three sons. The situation of the house made playing with a proper ball quite a tricky exercise; the patio offered a bit of space, but a misdirected kick easily sent the ball rolling all the way down the hill, where it would be fetched and brought back by a grumbling neighbour. The brothers were so caught up in their game that they’d crumple old newspapers into the semblance of a sphere to carry on playing, rather than run down the slope themselves. Other matches were played at night, in their bedrooms. The legs of a wardrobe became goalposts, and rolled-up socks were close enough in shape to the real thing to kick and argue about.

‘We could hear them talk all the time,’ Albert recalled. ‘“Did the ball cross the line? No, it didn’t!” We sometimes had to pick one of them up by the scruff of their neck to make the others stop.’ Stop – but not for long.

The passion for football that ran through the three sons ran through the father as well. He could have punished the unruly children by preventing them from attending Olympique de Marseille (OM) games at the Stade-Vélodrome; in fact, he took them there himself, to watch Josip Skoblar (‘the Yugoslavian goal-machine’) and the Swedish winger Roger Magnusson, who produced some of the most ravishing football seen in Europe in the early seventies. On one of these early visits to Marseilles’ stadium, on 20 October 1972, Éric, perched on Albert’s shoulders, was one of 48,000 spectators who saw Ajax, the European champions, beat Marseille by two goals to one. The beauty of this Dutch exhibition struck the six-year-old boy to such an extent that, to this day, no other team (not even the Brazilians, ‘who pass the ball as if it were a gift’) has taken the place of Johann Cruyff’s in Cantona’s pantheon. Cruyff, ‘a real artist, a visionary’, inspired such a devotion to the
Oranje
in the young boy that when, in the autumn of 1981, France met the Netherlands for a crucial World Cup qualifier, he prayed for the defeat of his countrymen. France won 2–0. Marseillais first, footballer second, Frenchman a distant third.

Around the time he conceived this violent passion for Ajax’s ‘total football’, at the age of six, Éric was old enough to sign his first registration form. Just as the elder Jean-Marie had done, and like Joël would do, he joined SO Caillolais, where he was asked to go in goal. This was a logical choice for Albert’s son, but did not hold much appeal for him, and was a waste of his prodigious gift. How prodigious that gift was soon became apparent. In any case, he’d had the good fortune to grow up almost next door to the very best football school Marseilles could provide.

Sports Olympiques Caillolais was already an institution by the time Éric joined in 1972. Founded in 1939, a few months before France declared war on Germany, it had established itself as a feeder club nonpareil to the best teams in the Provence-Côte d’Azur region, including the ‘giants’ Olympique de Marseille and OGC Nice. Its youth teams regularly made mincemeat of what opposition other
quartiers
dared to enter in local competitions: the mass of cups and medals that greet the visitor to the club today bears witness to this enduring success. Its most famous product, until Cantona became ‘Canto’, had been Roger Jouve, a midfielder who was capped by France seven times in the seventies and won the national title with RC Strasbourg, having been the heartbeat of OGC Nice for thirteen seasons. The great Jean Tigana joined the club the same year as Éric, though he was his elder by more than ten years; and to this day, no fewer than eleven Caillolais have progressed through the club’s ranks to become professionals, an astonishing number considering the not-for-profit association’s lack of resources, and its complete reliance on the generosity of unpaid coaching and administrative staff. Cantona could not have wished for a better footballing education.

One of his teammates at the time, who also sat with him at the desks of the local
école communale
, was Christophe Galtier, no mean player himself.
¹
Cantona did not take long to make an impression. Galtier recalled how his friend, having played just one game between the posts, insisted on joining the forward line. As was their habit, the cocky Caillolais had scored some fifteen goals without reply, and their new ’keeper hadn’t had as much as a touch of the ball. Football was not supposed to be that boring, something Éric articulated in loftier terms once he had retired from the game: ‘Even as a footballer, I was always being creative. I could never have played a defensive role because I would have been forced to destroy the other players’ creativity.’

A few weeks after the massacre to which he had been a frustrated witness, the reluctant goalie got his way and was deployed upfield at a prestigious under-twelve tournament held in Cannes. Les Caillols won (naturally), Cantona earning the distinction of being voted the competition’s best player. The young Éric still put the gloves on from time to time, however, when his team was practising penalties on the rugged pitch, or when the three brothers (joined by Galtier) hit the ball in one of the club’s two car parks, a battered bus shelter having become the goal. Like Maradona and Platini, Cantona learnt the game ‘dribbling with tin cans in the street’; he would always feel that these impromptu kickabouts not only helped him refine his skill, and taught him how to exploit the most exiguous of spaces, but also represented a more noble, more authentic form of the game he loved. As he told a French journalist in 1993: ‘My luck is that I have kept the spirit of street football. In the street, when I was a
minot
[‘a lad’, in the patois of Marseilles], if a player had a red shirt, and I had it too, we played together, in the same team. There was no strategy, no tactics. Only improvisation. And pleasure. What I have kept from this time is pleasure, the uncertainty of the result, and spontaneity. Whatever else is said, in today’s football, despite everything, a player remains more spontaneous than artists who claim to be spontaneous themselves.’ Not everyone shared these convictions, as he was to discover later.

Albert didn’t mind Éric deserting the net. He knew enough of the game to realize what a special talent the second of his sons possessed. ‘It wasn’t necessary for my father to tell me I was good, I could see it in his eyes. It’s better if it’s not said but shown in other ways.’ Of the 200-plus matches Éric played wearing the blue and yellow of SO Caillolais, only a handful were lost. Nobody knows quite how many goals he scored. But, without giving in to the Marseillais penchant for embellishment, it must have been hundreds, and this when the bob-haired youth often played against much older opponents (‘at nine, he was already playing like a fifteen-year-old’ is a comment that I have often come across). The quality of his first touch, his assurance in front of the goal and, above all, the confidence he had in his mastery of the ball set him aside from what, even by Les Caillols’ high standards, was the best generation of footballers the club had ever seen. Yves Cicculo, a man whose life has been enmeshed with SOC for six decades, from playing in the youth team to assuming the presidency, has often commented on the ‘pride’, ‘the natural class and charisma’ of the little boy he first saw shortly after his sixth birthday: ‘That attitude is not for show – that is the real Cantona. He was one of those rare players you knew would become a pro. He made us dream even when he was a small boy. He didn’t need to be taught football; football was innate in him.’

His family did nothing to discourage Éric from feeling ‘special’; far from it. Albert provided extra coaching; words of advice too, as when he told his son after a rare defeat: ‘There is nothing more stupid than a footballer who pretends to be more indispensable to the game than the ball. Rather than run with the ball, make the ball do the work, give it and look quickly. Look before you receive the ball and then give it, and always remember that the ball goes quicker than you can carry it’ – words that Cantona claimed to remember verbatim when, in 1993, he dictated his somewhat eccentric (and factually unreliable) autobiography,
Un Rêve modeste et fou
²
(‘A Humble and Crazy Dream’). But Albert was not the only Cantona to position himself on the touch-line when Sunday came; in fact, the whole family gathered behind the railings. Éric’s paternal grandmother, Lucienne, was never seen without an umbrella; the story goes that she didn’t use it just to protect herself from the light of the sun, but also to accompany her diatribes against whoever had had the cheek to rough up her grandson.

Whether because of jealousy, or out of genuine concern for the child’s well-being, not everyone took kindly to the Cantonas’ behaviour. In 1995, immediately after Cantona’s infamous assault on a thuggish fan at Crystal Palace, the
Mail on Sunday
dispatched a reporter to Marseilles with a clear brief: to find out whether there was a cloud of darkness over Cantona’s childhood, which might explain his life-long conflicts with authority and outbursts of violence. The journalist didn’t come home empty-handed. Jules Bartoli, who had been Éric’s coach in the under-11s team of Les Caillols, painted a picture of a child who was far too easily indulged by his parents, Albert in particular: ‘In French we say
‘chouchouter’
[‘pamper’] – he had special treatment and was obviously his father’s favourite. There were three sons, but the father seemed interested only in watching Éric. He was very systematic about it. Maybe Éric received too much attention from his parents.’ More interestingly, Bartoli is quoted as saying: ‘Éric did not know how to lose because his team simply never lost. In one season, he scored forty-two goals and the team didn’t suffer a single defeat. If he had learned how to lose, maybe he wouldn’t do so many stupid things now.’ It is tempting to add – ‘and he may not have scored so many goals either’. Yves Cicculo, usually so full of praise for his most famous player, concurred, up to a point: ‘If Éric had enjoyed a more normal adolescence, he might have had more serenity. But he started with our club at six and had left home by fifteen. Parents don’t think of the sacrifices their children must make. Some children crack straight away. Éric didn’t, but the experience may have destroyed his youth. It certainly changed his character.’ Perhaps there is an element of truth in these opinions, provided Cicculo’s ‘may’ is understood not as a figure of speech, but as a mark of genuine uncertainty. Whenever Cantona himself has spoken of his childhood, which he has often done, it has always been in nostalgic terms, as if the higgledy-piggledy house on the hill had been built in some Arcadia. This idealized vision was not exclusively his; the few who were allowed to enter the inner circle of the clan, like Christophe Galtier, have spoken of its ‘love, warmth and lack of hypocrisy’ with fondness and a deep sense of gratitude for having been accepted within it.

Even if one concedes that Bartoli ‘may’ have had a point, Les Caillols was not the kind of nightmarish place inhabited by many other gifted athletes in their youth. Éric did not become a performing monkey dancing to his father’s tune. He
did
suffer from bullying, however, not at the hands of those closest to him, but when he was singled out by the son of his very first schoolteacher, ‘someone you knew was very unhappy’ – Éric’s words – when he was only five years old. The teacher’s son, a leather-clad biker, visited his mother from time to time in the classroom, and used Éric as a target for his own anger. The form this bullying took can only be guessed at; but the little boy never once complained, and only betrayed his disarray when he was asked by the bully’s mother to stand up and read a poem or a story in class. Éric must have complied, but with such unease that one of the lasting effects of his trauma was a phobia of speaking or reading in public. He only confessed to this three decades later, when he had already embarked on an acting career. Trust him not to do things by halves, even when it comes to catharsis.