Sunday was the 20th anniversary of one of the
seminal moments in Eric Cantona’s career. One that had a profound effect on Man
United. As well as on Cantona’s reputation. Sunday was the anniversary of the
kung-fu kick heard ‘round England.
Sunday was the 20th anniversary of Eric Cantona’s kick on Matthew
Simmons, at Selhurst
Park.
In reading the retrospectives that Old Mother Beeb and the
Grauniad offered, a few interesting things showed up to me. First, one of the
very important points that everyone makes about Cantona, is that he was a man
who wanted to do what he wanted to do. He didn’t always feel like it was
important to remain within the confines that surrounded him. Throughout his
career he was known as L’enfant terrible due
to his issues with discipline. But it speaks to something deeper, to look at
Cantona within his own context.
As a philosophy student, I found myself in love with
Existentialism. I found in Albert Camus a kindred spirit. Someone who saw a lot
of the same things about society and life, that I was seeing. He just happened
to articulate them, in a manner that was accessible to me, in my mid-20s.
Camus’ most famous work is a book called The
Stranger. It’s main character Meursault finds himself in much the same type
of existence as Eric Cantona. In the book, Meursault is arrested and sentenced
to death for committing murder. When asked, repeatedly as to his motivation for
doing so, yet he could rarely explain why he committed the murder. Momentary
impulse. In the book, Meursault is raging at being blinded by the sunlight
reflecting off the beach, and fighting heatstroke. That’s the best guess you
can get as for Meursault’s motivations. With this as the basis, the argument
could be made that Eric Cantona’s professional football career was similar to
that of Meursault’s life, in The Stranger.
Eric Cantona had a way about him. He was the type of footballer
whom you either loved zealously. Or you loathed equally as zealously. He was
incendiary. He was arrogant. He was mercurial. He was magnificent. He was not
man. He was Cantona. He was unlike anything that England had seen before. And
truthfully, as I started diving into football played before I came into it, he
was unlike anything I’d ever encountered before. He was genuinely his own
player. And that made him revolutionary to me.
Football in England,
in the early 90s was an exercise in the absurd. The Football League and FA were
still recovering from the Taylor Report, and its recommendation of moving from
terraces at the football grounds, to all-seaters. England was in the process of
transitioning back into European competition after a lengthy ban due to Heysel.
On top of all of this madness, SKY felt that the early-90s were a great time to
invent football by ushering the
Premier League era. In a lot of ways, it was a time when English football was
looking for heroes, to help pull them from the doldrums of the late 80s. It
needed someone to come along to reinvigorate and energize the game from its
slumber. It came, in a manner of speaking, and proved to be more than they
could handle.
Eric Cantona was the everything that the Premier League
needed at its inception. He embodied a lot of what the Premier League, still,
believes football should be about. It was the time of players like Matthew Le Tissier,
Alan Shearer, Tony Adams, John Barnes, Teddy Sheringham, Andy Cole, and Peter
Schmeichel. It was a time of players who were larger than life. But none of
these guys could capture the imagination in much the same way that Cantona did.
He began his career, in England,
at Leeds. He was a part of the Leeds squad who won the old Football League championship
in ’92. The story of how he got transferred to Man United is the story of
legend, and has been told to death. So I won’t share it here, except to highlight
that part of the reason why Man United got him, was because he was considered
to be a bit of a troublemaker to Howard Wilkinson.
Cantona as a player was as enigmatic as you may have ever
seen. But he was also very much mercurial. Allegations of how he wouldn’t show
up for big matches, but would steal
the show in matches that didn’t matter are rife on the internet. His detractors
are adamant that he was a blight upon football, and that he should have been
banned for life, for his actions at Selhurst
Park, 20 years ago Sunday.
Yet, for all of those who want to see his legend and legacy torn down; Cantona
has an almost Christ-like following. Those who preach of his legend revere him as
King Eric. The same one who scored
the beautiful chipped goal against Sunderland,
was also capable of terrible temper tantrums. The complexity of his character,
and the complexity of the man beneath the Cantona
exterior is unfathomably intense.
With this in mind, let’s reference the events of that night
at
Selhurst. He was feeling aggrieved at the referee for not punishing Richard Shaw. He took
umbrage upon the continual kicking he was receiving from Richard Shaw. When the
referee finally bothered to brandish a card, it was a straight red to Cantona
for a well-placed retaliatory kick on Shaw. Cantona had a knack about him for
drawing attention, especially negative. And this was no exception. So, he was
given his marching orders. Converging events. Meursault, in his own similar
way, got caught in a build up of events. From his
Maman’s passing, to his relationship with Marie, to the plot with
Raymond to catch Raymond’s girlfriend cheating and to beat her. Eventually,
much like Meursault and the Arab, because of his aggravation at the brightness
of the sun on the beach; Cantona hit his breaking point after being disparaged,
and kung-fu kicked Matthew Simmons into history.
Cantona, as a player, was adamantly determined to do things
by his own rules. He never really felt remorse for his decisions. He just
acknowledged them, and moved on. Much in the same way that Meursault never
truly felt remorse for killing the Arab. Meursault’s tenuous relationship with
the chaplain, especially in how the chaplain is threatened by Meursault’s stubbornness
about seeking forgiveness; it’s Cantona and the FA, or the media. Meursault
would rebuff the chaplain without bothering to hear him out. And Cantona
famously had the apology to the prostitute had supposedly spent the night with,
as well as his infamous quote about seagulls and trawlers. Their flippancy is indicative
of their disdain for the society who cannot understand that you don’t
necessarily need a justifiable cause to do something. Without delving into the
philosophical paradox that arises from the projection of one’s morality onto
another, that’s really the point. Meursault and Cantona existed in their own
worlds. They did what they wanted. They did not worry about what consequence it
may bring. They accepted their consequence, albeit begrudgingly, and moved on.
In Cantona’s case, it was a 9 month ban, and for Meursault, it was execution.
It was a drastic response and consequence for a choice made, in the heat of the
moment, by a man whose perception of the world, and his role in it; something
that convention and society cannot understand. Therein lies the absurdity. To
Cantona and Meursault, the reactions of society at their actions makes no
sense. To them, it is a blowing out of proportion, the events that took place
around them. In this sense, the context of man fighting against an absurd
tempest surrounding him, becomes clearer. They were just men who wanted to live
their own lives. And it wasn’t until they were worn down by the system they
raged against, that they ultimately relented.
Eric Cantona, to me, was very much the fish out of water
story. While he excelled in facets of English football, he wasn’t for the game.
It wasn’t a good fit for him. While he may not have killed an Arab, he did randomly kick and punch a Crystal Palace supporter. He also opened a can
of worms of animosity between his former club and Palace, that ultimately got a
Palace supporter killed. Maybe the parallels run deeper than I thought.
I suspect that Meursault, had he been a footballer, would
have been of a similar mettle. His indifference to straying from his own path
would have brandished him as a troublemaker. And maybe a scintillating goal or
two for the ages. He would, had he been born of this world, been Eric Cantona.
Enigmatic. Mercurial. And most importantly, controversial. And he’d have
everyone’s attention, whether they loved him or not.
