Free Cantona by Philippe Auclair Page A

club. ‘It was a rotten game,’ says Roux. ‘My three ’keepers were unfit. In the end, [Joël] Bats played – but couldn’t kick the ball. It was pissing down. This is Rouen, the chamber-pot of France. Water everywhere. Over an hour had been played. Canto started from the middle of the pitch and ate everything: the puddles, the defenders, he left everything behind, he munched the lot, and scored with a piledriver.’ Auxerre won 2–1, thanks to a complete unknown. Two weeks later, more drama, more Cantona.
    Strasbourg this time, at the Stade de la Meinau. AJA need a single point to guarantee a place in Europe, and things aren’t going too well. ‘My son was studying there at the time,’ Roux says. ‘He’s listening to the game on the radio. We’re losing 1–0 at half-time. We’ve got to do something, I tell them, we’re not going to miss out on Europe like this! We were dead. I didn’t have a go at them, as I knew they couldn’t do more. Cantona said something like: “I’ll take care of it.” And he did. He took the ball in midfield. He pushed it once, and whacked the ball from the centre circle. Goal. 1–1, Auxerre is in the UEFA Cup.’ Cantona himself relived his equalizing goal with the clarity of a dream. No, he wasn’t in the centre circle – a little over 25 yards from his target. But as soon as he had received the ball in his own half (that much is true), he had known that something special, preordained (‘I’ve always felt I was watched over by something greater than me’) was about to happen. That was the day, 28 May 1985, on which an exceptional footballer emerged from the chrysalis. To think that, the day before the game – something that Guy Roux’s spies had failed to report – Éric, accompanied by his friend Nino (a nickname Bernard Ferrer owed to sharing a surname with one of France’s most popular sixties pop singers), had drifted from bar to bar, nightclub to nightclub, girl to girl, until four in the morning. To think that within a few weeks, the teenager would meet the woman who would anchor him at last. Cantona’s apprenticeship was over.

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    Cantona at Auxerre, May 1985.

 
AUXERRE:
THE PROFESSIONAL
     
    For Nino Ferrer, the time to settle down to the life of ‘sleeping, eating, playing, travelling without having the time to comprehend the countries [footballers] go through’ came that summer, when he got married, at the age of twenty-one. Éric was one of the first names on his list of guests, naturally. At the wedding reception, his eyes fell on Nino’s sister Isabelle, whom he had already met, albeit fleetingly, when she had visited her brother in Chablis, where she could revise for her exams in peace.
    Three years Éric’s elder, Isabelle could not have been further from the archetypal WAG, be it in looks or personality. When I met her more than twenty years later in Marseilles – she and Éric had been living apart for five years by then – she retained the charm and allure which had convinced Éric he had met the woman he wanted to grow old with. She came from a humble background not dissimilar to his, and spoke with the delightful southern lilt of the Provençal working class. She had been studying literature at the University of Aix-en-Provence and had done very well there, supporting herself by working as senior clerk in a supermarket. She was graced – le mot juste – with beautiful dark eyes and a sunny, yet slightly melancholy smile. She was no bimbo, but a very attractive young woman who was not afraid to let her heart rule her reason, as she showed when, after spending two weeks in Éric’s Auxerre flat, she jumped from the train taking her back to Provence to spend another couple of days with the man she loved. Thus was born the apocryphal tale of a near-mad Cantona forcing that same train to stop by jumping on the track in front of the locomotive. The truth was simpler, sweeter, and more fitting. She would be the discreet and faithful