Eric Cantona by Philippe Auclair

Author:Philippe Auclair [Auclair, Philippe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Usenet, C429, Kat, Exratorrents
ISBN: 9780330511858
Publisher: Pan
Published: 2009-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

12

Cantona’s return to Elland Road.

THE HOMECOMING:

1992–93

‘If there was ever a player in this world who was made for Manchester United, it was Cantona. I think he had been searching all his life for somebody who looked at him and made him feel that a place was his home. He had travelled around so many countries; there is a wee bit of the gypsy about some people. But when he came here, he knew: this is my place.’ Alex Ferguson

Isabelle and Raphaël – who was now two years old – had stayed behind in their Moortown semi near Roundhay Park, where many of the family’s possessions remained in the sealed cardboard boxes that had been sent from Nîmes at the beginning of the previous summer. Éric had lived like a soldier who is billeted wherever his regiment is sent, not like the vagabond of his youthful dreams. For Isabelle, there was no sense of adventure in being pulled this way and that in the wake of an unsettled player; only tedium and uncertainty. In the seven years they had lived together, the young couple had moved their belongings from Auxerre to Aix-en-Provence, Martigues, Marseilles, Nîmes and Leeds (Éric lived on his own in Bordeaux), but not once had they settled. Only Guy Roux’s house in the forest had felt like a real home, at a time when there was no child to find a school for and fame was just a rumour.

Isabelle had grown fond of Leeds. She had found a job which suited her, running French conversation classes at the local university. Her neighbours, cautious at first, had taken to the unassuming Frenchwoman, just as she had taken to their simplicity and warm-heartedness. The Cantonas’ small garden often filled with Raphael’s schoolmates on evenings and weekends, and the children were soon followed by their parents, whom Isabelle came to rely upon more and more to guide her through the apprenticeship of life in another country. ‘Where I come from,’ she told a passing journalist, ‘people live outdoors, so we try to do the same thing here. We just take an umbrella.’ And umbrella in hand, Éric and Isabelle set out to explore the countryside of Yorkshire. They discovered Bridlington, Scarborough, Bolton Abbey, Haworth and walked the galleries of Leeds City Museum. Éric’s still imperfect command of English made their visits to movie theatres less frequent than they would have wished (once in Manchester, when it had improved, he would be a regular visitor to the Cornerhouse, a cinéma d’art et d’essai beneath the railway arches by Oxford Road station); but, all in all, their life passed pleasantly enough. Eiland Road would become a bowl of hate when Cantona returned there in his new colours, but the crowd’s venom had not brimmed over the stadium walls at that stage. In Isabelle’s presence, ‘people were sad,’ she said, ‘but not nasty or aggressive’ – not yet, anyway. She preferred to remember the extraordinary welcome the fans had given her husband, which had brought tears to her eyes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.