Eric Cantona’s kung-fu kick 20 years on – the night that changed football forever
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Version 0 of 1. The game On 10 January 1995 Manchester United bought Andy Cole from Newcastle United for £7m, one of the great English transfer sensations of the last quarter-century. Cole had been spectacularly prolific the previous season, scoring 34 league goals (none of them penalties), but at the time of his transfer had scored once in three months, allowing the Newcastle manager, Kevin Keegan, to claim that he had struck a spectacular deal for a player whose star was on the wane. Cole made his debut at home to his new team’s title rivals, Blackburn, a week later, without playing particularly well. His second game would come against Crystal Palace on 25 January, and he was the almost undivided focus of media attention in the buildup. Victory at Selhurst Park would lift United to the top of the table, albeit having played two matches more than Blackburn, with Alex Ferguson sniffing a third successive title. “After Sunday’s results we all now know that the chase is on in earnest,” he said. “I can sense that the mood within my club is right for us to make a genuine challenge.” However, the next game would not underline his side’s challenge but derail it. For all the attention focused on Cole before kick-off, at least some of those present were concentrating on Eric Cantona. The Internazionale general manager, Paolo Taveggia, and the Italian club’s prospective owner, Massimo Moratti, were in the directors’ box to watch a man they were hoping to sign over the following weeks. “The first idea I had, at the time of buying the club, was to sign Cantona and Roberto Mancini,” Moratti told Corriere dello Sport last month. “Then Cantona did it, in London, with me present, with this kung-fu kick of the Crystal Palace fan.” There would be no transfer. The first half was forgettable, if encouraging for the home side. “We were doing quite well in the first period of the game, and were probably on top,” Iain Dowie recalls. “I remember talking to Richard Shaw, saying that we’d certainly had a really good spell.” In the United dressing room they were significantly less impressed by Palace’s performance, and Shaw’s in particular. The defender had been told to shadow Cantona, and both the Frenchman and his manager were unhappy with his methods. “As we left for half-time, Cantona said: ‘No yellow cards!’” the referee, Alan Wilkie, remembered. “When we were waiting in the tunnel for the restart, he said it again and Ferguson confronted me and said: ‘Why don’t you do your fucking job!’” “I remember the game tactically,” says Palace’s John Salako, who like Dowie, is now a regular member of Sky’s Soccer Saturday lineup. “They were the big team coming to town and we needed to be organised, disciplined and to stop United playing. Richard was told to man-mark Cantona, which was something he did often. And as the game unfolded, Richard didn’t give him any room. He was like a rash.” But this was not a deliberately incendiary performance from Shaw. “Sir Alex may have been saying that,” says Dowie. “But let me tell you, I played against Richard Shaw every day in training, and that’s the way he played. He was a grab-your-shirt man. Because he wasn’t the biggest he liked to get really touch tight to you, put his foot round you, grab you, push you, pull you, bump you. Between me and you, Richard and I have come to blows a couple of times in training. I remember Chris Coleman having to settle one down. I’m a really good friend of Richard’s, but we had a couple of spats. So I can understand why it irritated Cantona because in training I got irritated by it.” Within three minutes of the restart Cantona’s irritation got the better of him. “Cantona was a player who had a hair-trigger temper, who was easy to wind up,” says Jon Champion, who commentated on the match for BBC radio and took part in BBC 5live’s ‘Cantona’s Kung-Fu Kick 20 years on’, which was broadcast this week. “Every game he played, particularly away from home, their opponents would try to play on that short fuse. And I remember thinking in the first half that Palace were giving him the sort of treatment he’d come to expect – the odd nudge here, a sly little dig there, a pull of the shirt – and he was annoyed by it. And then, three minutes into the second half, another tangle.” “The buildup went like this,” says Wilkie. “Schmeichel kicked the ball into the Palace half and when Shaw turned to run, Cantona attempted to kick him.” Eddie Walsh, one of the linesmen, could hardly have been closer to the incident, and immediately waved his flag. By the time Wilkie got to the scene he was brandishing his red card. Cantona spent a while almost spinning on the spot, turning his gaze to each side of the ground in turn. He folded down his collar, which was always upturned while he was playing, and he walked to United’s bench. He paused there but Ferguson, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his winter coat, ignored him. And so he walked on towards the tunnel, located in the far corner of the ground. And to his right Matthew Simmons, a 20-year-old double-glazing fitter, decided that he had something he’d like to say to Cantona as the Frenchman passed. The fury Simmons has said he “was in the wrong place at the wrong time”, which is arguably a little rich when he had rushed down to the front of the stand, from his seat 11 rows back, to get there. Quite what he said remains a matter of debate. At the time Simmons suggested it had been: “Off you go Cantona, it’s an early shower for you!” Others nearby alleged his precise wording was: “Fuck off back to France, you French bastard.” Cathy Churchman, a Palace fan who was legitimately stationed in the front row and was closer to Simmons than anyone else, insisted that, given the volume being generated by the 18,243 other fans present, not a single word could be heard anyway. “There was so much noise from every corner of the ground that anybody who could hear what was said was a miracle person,” she insisted. In the 2006 World Cup final Zinedine Zidane demonstrated the potentially explosive impact of a perfectly aimed insult. Just last week Pope Francis admitted that “if someone says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch”. And Cantona, having been sent off three times the previous season and with a lengthy record of misdemeanours while playing in France, clearly had a considerably shorter fuse than the pontiff. “Millions of times people say these things, and then one day you don’t accept it,” said Cantona. “Why? It’s not about words. It’s about how you feel at that moment. One day you react, but the words are exactly the same as those you have heard a million times, so it is impossible to say why you react.” But react he most certainly did. “I’d kept my eye on him as he strutted down the touchline,” says Champion. “Our commentary position was on the stand he jumped into, so what he did, he did 20 yards in front of us. We had a very good view. I didn’t see Simmons rushing down the stand, all I saw was Cantona suddenly turning round and launching himself over the advertising hoardings feet-first.” “The game hadn’t restarted,” says Dowie. “I remember witnessing it. He walks off, past the dugout. I remember this fella running right from the top all the way down, abused him, and all of a sudden he’s in there trading a couple of blows. I can almost see it to this day, when he jumps in, and then stood up to land another punch.” Several United players sped to the scene to back up their team-mate – “All I saw was Eric in trouble,” said Peter Schmeichel. “We were a team. We were all in it together, whatever.” Others, their minds on the match, missed the incident entirely. “I saw something flash in the corner of my eye,” says Dean Gordon, the Palace left-back. “It took a few seconds to register what had actually happened. I remember saying to Chris Armstrong: ‘What happened there?’ He wasn’t quite sure either. A couple of players said there was a fight.” “I just stood there transfixed. I was in total disbelief at what I’d seen. I just couldn’t believe it,” the United defender Gary Pallister told the Manchester Evening News. “I can remember seeing [United’s kit man] Norman Davies attempting to stop Eric beating the living daylights out of the fan. Thank goodness he managed to pull him away. Eric was no angel. We all knew that. He had a short fuse and everybody has a breaking point. That night and moment was Eric’s.” The aftermath Among those to have missed the incident was Ferguson. “I wasn’t looking at him when he left the pitch,” he told L’Equipe. “I was focusing on how to reorganise the team tactically, 10 against 11. Once I got home, my son Jason asked me: ‘Do you want to see the pictures? I’ve recorded the game.’ I refused and went to bed. Sleep wouldn’t come. I got up around three in the morning and I saw. The shock was huge.” It says much about the amount of attention paid to the remainder of the game that of the three Palace players I spoke to for this feature, two thought that they had lost and the third that they had won. In fact it ended 1-1, David May scoring his first league goal for United to put them in front, before Gareth Southgate equalised. “The rest of the game passed by in a blur,” says Champion, who had Mark Bright co-commentating alongside him. “I suppose the theme for the remainder of the game was trying to discuss what we’d seen, what it meant, why he might have done it, what the trigger had been – because no one knew about Simmons at this point – and also whether we would see him again. Because our feeling, and I think that of everyone else in the ground, bearing in mind what he’d just done, was that we weren’t going to see this enigmatic Frenchman in English football again.” In the immediate aftermath of the game many commentators demanded a sine die ban. “He should have walked around the track, had a shower, put on his smart French designer clothes and waited to get on the coach,” said Brian Clough (who had himself punched a couple of pitch-invading fans in 1989). “There’s something wrong with the man.” Graham Kelly, the Football Association’s chief executive, called it “a stain on our game”. Ferguson thought it was all the referee’s fault – “If you’d done your fucking job this wouldn’t have happened,” were allegedly the words used. Clearly, however, a ban was inevitable. The court case United did not wait for the authorities to act, announcing that Cantona would not play for the remainder of the season. The FA decided it was not long enough, and extended the suspension to the end of September 1995. In court Cantona was found guilty of assault and sentenced to two weeks in jail, later reduced to 120 hours’ community service. But public opinion started to gently swing his way, perhaps prompted by his brief and comically inscrutable statement to the press: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Simmons was charged with using threatening behaviour towards Cantona and, on being found guilty, vaulted a table and attacked the prosecuting counsel. It took six officers to drag him away. “I think maybe it’s like a dream for some, you know sometimes to kick these kind of people,” Cantona told the BBC in 2011. “So I did it for them. So they are happy. It’s a kind of freedom for them.” The consequences Without Cantona United went on to lose the title, by a single point, to Blackburn. That summer the Frenchman, with the first team on a pre-season visit to Malaysia and his family on holiday in Marseille, stayed alone in a Novotel near Manchester and trained with the youth team. In July he was photographed playing in an informal training-ground game against Rochdale – so informal it consisted of three thirds, lasted 73 minutes and featured 16 substitutions – which some at the FA considered in breach of the terms of his ban. For a while it seemed his ban could be extended further still. “It was a meaningless game,” fumed Ferguson. “The FA has said Eric’s ban covers all footballing activities – well, that could mean kicking a ball around in the garden with your boy.” This was more than Cantona could take; the administrative equivalent of Simmons’s insult. He fled to France and submitted a transfer request. Ferguson, insisting “I don’t want him to leave and am determined that he will stay”, and that “if he stays, I am certain that we can win the title”, followed him to Paris and eventually convinced him to return. Meanwhile the FA, under pressure from United, dropped its charges. Several years – and two successive league titles – later Ferguson said that his visit to Paris had amounted to “one of the more worthwhile acts I have performed in this stupid job of mine”. Regulations were swiftly amended to ensure that players, when sent off, walked straight to the tunnel rather than skirting the perimeter of the pitch. Indeed, when United next visited Selhurst Park – to play the then tenants Wimbledon in March 1995 – the home side’s Alan Kimble was sent off (for the crime of encroaching at a corner) and the referee, Robbie Hart, personally escorted him to the tunnel, just to be on the safe side. Some have argued that the events of that evening added to Cantona’s appeal and eventually, in the form of sponsorship deals, to his bank balance. To others it remains a stain on his reputation. “I’ve had all sorts of things shouted at me as a manager and as a player, and some of it is very difficult to cope with, you know,” says Dowie. “But you can’t condone his reaction. And the incident was very disappointing for me, because I was a great admirer of everything Manchester United stood for, and of Eric Cantona as a player.” “I don’t care about being some sort of superior person,” Cantona has said. “I just wanted to do whatever I wanted to do. If I want to kick a fan, I do it. I am not a role model. I think the more you see, the more you realise life is a circus.” |