Free Cantona by Philippe Auclair

army. Mercier, a prudent man, had asked to be relieved of his duties shortly after Éric’s arrival at the Bataillon , and only supervised a handful of international games, including one against West Germany, before passing on the baton to Jacky Braun. Braun declined to be interviewed for this book, as he would ‘only have unpleasant things to say’ about Cantona. A pity. He might have shed some light on an eventful tour of Gabon which saw Éric ‘flirt with death’, that is: experience a very nasty trip after smoking the local dope with strangers in the capital Libreville. ‘Fear quickly took the place of curiosity,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘The fear of dying. [ . . .] I had been looking for artificial paradises, but it is anguish that was waiting for me at the end of such a journey. One does not resist the attraction of the forbidden fruit . . .’ Tellingly, a rite of passage had become a brush with the Grim Reaper. Éric never did things by halves.
    Cantona’s understanding of the logic that led to his being assigned to Joinville differed from Mercier’s and Roux’s. To him, his mentor had connived with an accomplice to give him a chance to sow his wild oats before he settled down with a fiancée or a bride – like most professional footballers do at a very young age – to a life of ‘sleeping, eating, playing, travelling without having the time to comprehend the countries [they] go through’. It’s hard to see in this anything but an attempt to justify the recklessness of his behaviour at the time, which was exacerbated by his visceral rejection of any kind of institutional authority. He knew that Joinville conscripts enjoyed a privileged status. They could do pretty much as they pleased, and get away with acts of indiscipline that would have earned ordinary squaddies a few nights in jail. He exploited this leniency to the full. Roux, who paid weekly visits to the barracks, was appalled by what the colonel in charge of the Bataillon told him. A general had announced his intention to meet the flower of France’s youth; but Cantona had developed an aversion to shaving at the time, and looked like an extra from Papillon. Unfortunately, this particular soldier had very personal views on what constituted an order. His adjutant tried to cajole him into getting rid of his coal-dark stubble, but to no avail. The colonel didn’t fare any better. ‘I do not shave,’ was Cantona’s answer, each syllable of ‘ ‘Je-ne-me-ra-se-pas’ enunciated in a low, forbidding baritone. The officers relented. They put Éric in a lorry and sent him on an impromptu trip to Orléans, a hundred and fifty miles away, to collect bags of potatoes.
    This chore must have felt like a victory, another white flag hoisted by the men in uniform. It is no wonder that Éric, unlike 99 per cent of his contemporaries, had fond memories of his time at the service of the nation. Five years later, he crossed Mercier’s path again, when Montpellier played a game in Châteauroux, to where the coach had retired. Coming out of the dressing-room, he recognized his benevolent manager, gave him a mock military salute and exclamed: ‘Ah, Monsieur Mercier, yes, sir!’ – in English. ‘The first thing I told my players,’ Mercier explained, ‘was – do not discuss a referee’s decisions more than a US Marine would discuss an officer’s order.’ Roux’s plan to have ‘the lad knocked into shape’ hadn’t quite worked as planned.
    It hardly mattered, though. Right at the end of the season, as Auxerre were striving for a place in the UEFA Cup for the second time in their history, 6 the uncontrollable Éric gave two magnificent demonstrations of what Roux does not hesitate to call his ‘genius’. The first of these was on 14 May 1985, in the antiquated décor of the Stade Robert-Diochon, in Rouen, nine days before Cantona’s nineteenth birthday, when he scored the first of his 23 league goals (in 81 appearances) for the Burgundy