His presence in the dressing room was galvanising."Everything about Eric is cool," Ryan Giggs once told me "He's the best dresser at the club. He can wear anything and just look dif- ferent class."Even that collarless jacket? That cardigan?It is no coincidence that he has won a league championship medal every year for the last four (twice with United, and before them Leeds and, in France, with Marseilles) These teams triumphed because he was playing for them Cantona is not, perhaps, the best player in the world. Cantona's certainty in his own abilities was contagious: from the moment he arrived, he transformed a team adept at falling at the final fence into Double winners. Alex Ferguson was the first coach he had encountered who recognised that if the massive organ that is the Cantona ego is accommodated, flattered, soothed and given space, it will reward you And the reward at United has been substantial. It did not matter that time and again he was sent off, fined, suspended, banned - nothing was in his mind when he was crossed the next time but the red mist of revenge.
Thus at Selhurst Park, though he must have known the place was stuffed with those with a vested interest in his future, he responded to a verbal assault from a flabby- jowelled prat with a dispatch that suggested he was a man indifferent to consequence.But at United they were prepared to indulge him, to make a Faustian contract with his dark side in a way that no previous employer had You can understand why. Time and again he stamped on lesser opponents who he felt had wronged him. He possessed, for example, the kind of contempt for pressure that you would want if you needed someone to take a penalty in the FA Cup final.This ability, however, is the same instinct which meant he did not spare a thought about what might happen if he indulged his habit of seeking instant revenge for a slight. In fact, in the two-and- a-half years he has been in resid- ence, the staff and fans of Manchester United have grown to recognise Cantona as the model professional: the man who never misses training, who spends hours polishing his skills when lesser performers are content to leave theirs unattended, the man whose patience with fans seeking his attention goes well beyond the required remit (the first thing he did after drop-kicking that ITN reporter on the beach in Guadaloupe was to sign an autograph).They also discovered, from the first moment he pulled on one of the ludicrous nylon bibs that passes as a United shirt, that he was a man who played without fear.
Cantona is not in the usual run of gifted but problem players. He is not like Maradona or Romario or Gascoigne or Best, a man of talent compromised by grotesque appetites, ever-growing entourages or lacklustre approach to his craft. At the time, there was a lot of talk about not condoning what he did, but I reckon at root we think it was a fantastic thing to do."And it is in this that Martin Edwards and Massimo Moratti have sensed the real value of Cantona: his differentness. Like him, we're picked on and hated because we reckon we are the best. What he was saying with that kick was what we want to say: you cannot say that sort of thing to us and get away with it We are United, respect us. "But they've touched a nerve with those shirts, which I think they are fully justified in exploiting." The nerve, Kurt reckons, is this."There's something about Cantona which symbolises what the hard-core United fan feels about themselves. Since Manchester is home to most of the small-scale enterprises specialising in the quick-turnaround production of T-shirts with topical jokes on the front (commonly known as swag working), these are almost certainly manufactured by the same outfits which are selling the parody of those Nike posters with the caption 1995 was a great year for english football, eric got f****d outside Liverpool's ground.
It is called having it both ways."It's easy to slag off the swag workers," said Richard Kurt, author of the book United We Stood. One has Matthew Simmons's face, address and telephone number over the legend wanted for treason; another has an impression of a boot sole across the chest with the caption i've met eric cantona; a third has a picture of Cantona astride a motorbike, Terminator-style, saying i'll be back. There are at least a dozen unofficial, non-United-approved T-shirts circling Manchester at the moment. It was what might be called a vote of thanks.If you are looking for memorabilia cele- brating Cantona's attack on Matthew Simmons, it is not hard to find. Recently, the company announced that it has no plans to scrap the deal with Cantona, which is not due to expire until after next year's European Championships. To nobody's surprise, least of all Nike's, more free media coverage followed, most of it hooting with laughter at the presumption of it.
"Eric knows what he did was wrong and we would not seek to condone it in any way."Indeed, soon after the Selhurst incident, a commercial was launched featuring Cantona loudly declaiming that violence in sport can- not be justified whatever the circumstance. Not that the company would ever accept they were cashing in."We deplore violence in all sport," said Simon Taylor, Nike's head of marketing. An advertisement featuring the footballer cataloguing his misdemeanours and then expressing surprise that he had ever found a sponsor was played on TV news and documentaries to the point of exhaustion, giving Nike acres of free coverage, and a neat opportunity to raise two fingers at the television authorities which had banned it in the first place. The fact that the picture was of a rugby boot with metal studs rather than the plastic moulded soles Cantona was wearing was an irrelevance; it was publicity Max Clifford would lie for.Nike was in a particularly strong position to benefit from Cantona's notoriety since the company had nurtured it in the first place, just as it had that of a previous client, John McEnroe.