Source: Telegraph
Eric Cantona: the rebel who would be king
George Best, one of few candidates for comparison, said that he would gladly have given all the champagne he had ever drunk to have played alongside Cantona in a major European match at Old Trafford.
It might have been tough to make the fantasy transaction stick – it's not hard to imagine Best having second thoughts – but you take his point.
Cantona was unique, and still occupies a special place in the heart of football fans everywhere (even in Leeds, whom he left for United as one of the greatest bargains in football history).
Many of us watching his wonderful and bizarre career here felt that the key to his character was that he was, well, French (arrogant, entrancing etc), but it's fascinating to discover from a new biography by Philippe Auclair that the French found him enigmatic as well.
Cantona,The Rebel Who Would Be King (Macmillan, £17.99) reveals early on that the likeliest clues to Cantona's character lie not in his nationality but his more local origins: he was born and raised on the outskirts of Marseille, a city that is fascinating and terrifying in equal measure, where the inhabitants take national characteristics to a further extreme, believing themselves to be "not just different, but superior" to the rest of France.
Auclair, a French football writer based for many years in England, spent three years researching the book, conducting 200 interviews and synthesizing the results into a compelling narrative, occasionally interrupted by typically Gallic appearances by the author himself.
He writes in English, and trusted his editors to remove the inevitable outbreaks into hyperbole, which they have done without removing any of the character of the prose.
The artistic references are many (Jim Morrison, Rimbaud, Picasso), but the football is always solidly present and the blots on the career are not glossed over.
The author comprehensively and convincingly rubbishes the ghosted earlier autobiography – in which Cantona himself seems to have had little interest – and establishes this book as the likeliest text on which future historians of the game may base their judgment of this extraordinary man.
It is no hagiography: Auclair notes that any decision which went against him was considered by Cantona to be either "stupidity or injustice", but there persists throughout the book a sense of awe, which is – perhaps – justifiable.
Whether or not you approve of Cantona's on-field antics, or admire his post-football artistic activities, he remains a fascinating character, and one well-served by this hefty but consistently interesting portrait.
