“Cantona is dismissed. Can there be a place in the game for a man with such extravagant talent and such wicked temperament? A man who has quite rightly been dismissed,“ commentator Jonathan Pearce told his listeners at Capital Gold after Eric Cantona was presented with the red card before going absolutely nuclear on King Eric when the Frenchman jumped the advertising board feet first into Matthew Simmons.
“Oh, my goodness me! He just kicked… he’s punched a fan! Eric Cantona has jumped in and scissor-kung-fu-kicked a fan. I have never seen as disgraceful an incident as that in all my years in football. Eric Cantona should be thrown out of the game for that sort of incident. I care not one jot about his supreme talent. He launched himself six feet into the crowd and kung-fu kicked a supporter who was, without a shadow of doubt, giving him stick,” an outraged Pearce shouted into his microphone, while various people on the pitch were trying to get to grips with things.
Following a rather uneventful first half, “barring persistent fouling from the Crystal Palace team,” as Rob Fletcher describes it in his book about the 1994/95 season “Chaos, controversy and THAT kung-Fu kick” all hell broke loose just three minutes after the interval. Sensing the constant fouling was getting to Cantona, some of the players in the Manchester United squad tried to intervene before mayhem ensued, Lee Sharpe tells Tribalfootball of an evening where he was in the United line-up.“They had been bullying him all game and he was losing his rag. I think a few of the senior player's pulled the manager to one side at half-time and said; “listen, you're going to have to get the Frenchman off before he's going to kill somebody,” Sharpe says, representing Texas Poker.
“The manager said; “oh, no, I've just pulled him aside in the tunnel. I've told him to calm down and take a deep breath. We need him out there to win us the second half. And he's promised me he's going to do something special,” Sharpe continues.
No hairdryer treatment from Sir Alex
While it was a fairly uneventful first half, Gary Pallister remembers something had been brewing in Cantona for some time.
“I think we all sensed a frustration in Eric. Not that we knew it was going to come out the way it did that night but he was taking a lot of stick at grounds. He was getting spat at, he was getting abused and leading up to that game he was getting embroiled in a few situations on the pitch. You felt as though it was eventually going to come to a head, although not quite as spectacularly as it actually did,” says Pallister when looking back on that windy January evening.
“The way Eric was treated when he was on the pitch, players trying to wind him up, crowd getting on his back and some of the stuff that he was hearing and seeing from fans when he arrived at games was not nice. That night he decided to show some instant justice,” Pallister adds while denying the thought of any of the senior players ever confronting Cantona about the incident. Not even some of the bigger characters in the United dressing room.
“We didn’t because Eric was different to 99.9% of players. We understood he was targeted by not just fans, but by players on the pitch as well, because he did have a volatile temperament. But he was also an exceptional player and to be fair, if we had been playing against him, we might have been doing exactly the same because that's the kind of character he is. He'll react, he won't take any nonsense,” Pallister tells Tribalfootball.
Not even the often-fearsome sir Alex Ferguson let Cantona get a taste of his famous hairdryer treatment.
“We came into the dressing room and the manager went absolutely ballistic at everyone for only getting a 1-1 draw,” Lee Sharpe says with a very vivid memory of that night; “And remember, we played most of the second half with 10 men as well. David May scored his first goal for United that night and still got a rollicking off the manager for not looking after Gareth Southgate who scored for Crystal Palace!
“It was, “F**** Pallister, Incey, you haven’t laid a glove on anybody tonight, Sharpie, my f**** grandmother’s quicker than you and so on, until he gets to Cantona and then just calmly says; “and Eric, you can’t go around doing things like that, son”. We were just flabbergasted,” says Sharpie with a huge grin which nobody dared doing that evening.
Cantona loved a night out
Other players might have held their hands up to their teammates after getting sent off, but not Cantona and not even after such and extraordinary incident.
”He shrugged his shoulders and got on with things,” says Sharpie who believed the following ban was more or less justified.
“You can't get away with doing things like that. He just launched over this fence and Kung-Fu kicked a guy in the chest! It was bizarre,” says Sharpie of a situation which eventually cost Cantona a nine-month suspension and Manchester United finished the season second behind Blackburn. However, Pallister dismisses any thought of Cantona’s suspension costing United their third Premier League title on the bounce.
“I think it’s disrespectful to the team to suggest that we would have won it if Eric was there. He might have made the difference or he wouldn't but it still went to the last game that season. Blackburn were kind of imploding towards the end of the season and they stumbled across the line. They had a goal-scoring machine in Alan Shearer, so, fair play to them, but we could quite easily have nicked the league that year without Eric if we'd have taken one of numerous chances at West Ham,” states Pallister who, for all his faults, loved playing with Eric Cantona in his side.
“Eric gave us a different angle; he brought an imagination and a confidence and a swagger to the team. He was the missing piece of the jigsaw because his creativity, his strength, his vision was so important to bring in more goals to the team.”
Clearly missing the piece in that jigsaw, Pallister, Sharpe and co. welcomed the Frenchman back following his suspension.
“We were delighted when he came back. We knew what a top-class player he was. And we were a better team with him on the pitch than off it. So, there were never any problems. Eric was different but he embraced everything about English football. He loved coming on a day out with the lads. At the time you would hear a lot of the foreigners talk about all the English players eat the wrong stuff and drink the wrong stuff and whatnot, but Eric loved a day out with the boys or what we'd call ‘a team meeting’. We'd all go down to the pub and have a few beers, he would drink a glass of champagne which is a little bit different from the pints of Guinness but he just loved being out. He was a great team mate.”
- Gary Pallister was talking to Tribalfootball on behalf of Betano