Sixteen years after uttering that line — the one public response to an assault conviction over his kung-fu kick at Crystal Palace — King Eric has lost none of his ability to be abstruse.
For this week he has, if we can ever credit comparisons from one so intellectually detached and so, well, French, decided to bracket Sir Alex Ferguson with Mahatma Gandhi. In a riot of an interview with The New York Times, he declares: “Today, he is like Gandhi on the game side. With Manchester, I prefer to say, to think, to realise that Ferguson is a kind of genius.
On the surface, Cantona is merely alerting United to the “problems” likely to beset the club upon Ferguson’s retirement. But his ruminations raise some absorbing questions: how, for example, did the father of the Indian nation ever establish a yardstick for top-flight management? Gandhi offers, suddenly, a fashionable reference point.
AC Milan’s loan star, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, was at it earlier this winter when he said of his former mentor at Barcelona, Pep Guardiola: “With the way he dresses and talks, he always wants to look like a philosopher. He reminds me a bit of Gandhi”.
Ibra’s subtle grasp of satyagraha, or 'force of truth’, had evidently gone unnoticed. And yet, the juxtaposition of Gandhi and football is not as jarring as might first appear.
While a lawyer in South Africa, the young Gandhi saw that the game’s popularity among the poor would allow him to reach people whose political activism he most wanted to stir.
As a figurehead for non-violent protest against the apartheid regime, he established three football clubs in the 1900s, all under the banner of 'Passive Resisters’.
There are even images in Durban’s Old Court House museum that picture him alongside members of the teams. Gandhi appeared enraptured by football’s inherent nobility and its elevation of the team ethic.
Poobalan Govindasamy, president of the country’s indoor football association, goes further, arguing that it allowed him to “find spiritual peace”.
All very powerful, but by what measure does Cantona discern a link with Ferguson? Would Gandhi have mustered the slightest affection for Manchester United and their Croesus-like wealth? Plus, could he have dared imagine, having visited the Lancashire mill towns in the 1930s, that Blackburn’s team would one day be owned by a family from India?
As Ferguson, a keen amateur historian, would doubtless acknowledge, any equating of his leadership style with Gandhi’s, risks being horrendously glib. All that can be said with certainty is that the Scot has always been animated by the same searing sense of social injustice. He recalls only too acutely the moment when, glimpsing his father’s payslip, he discovered that the reward for a 70-hour week at a freezing Clydeside shipyard was £7.
Choosing to be a footballer did not make him any less militant. As Falkirk’s centre-forward, he led a players’ strike when the management withheld their lunch allowance.
He does not forget, either, that he acquired a mansion in Cheshire thanks to his determination in a grim Govan tenement to “make something of myself”.
Here, alas, parallels must end. The irascible Ferguson has never been remotely in touch with Gandhi’s emollient rhetoric — save, perhaps, for the time he sent up his own notorious abruptness to reporters ahead of United’s Champions League final in Moscow. “I love you all,” he told the press conference. “I’ve come to spread peace!”But if he is hardly forged in Gandhi’s image, he has never lost sight of the lessons sport and politics can take from one another.
An Old Labour man, in 2009 he agreed to an interview with Alastair Campbell, his improbable ally at New Labour. The transcript illustrated his fascinating debt to Abraham Lincoln. Ferguson had been handed a copy by Campbell of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s acclaimed Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals the previous summer.
“My God, what a brilliant book,” he said. “I can learn about the art of team building from all sorts of places. It’s all about managing people and relationships, in the end.”So there you have it. If only Cantona had said: “Today, he is like Lincoln.”As with Sardine-gate, we shall have to put it down as another case of the mangled metaphor.
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