"...Cantona was an astoundingly gifted football player, a bit like Cruyff, and difficult to contain in a single side. And that’s the reason he came to England, because the French couldn’t abide him – imagine a man too arrogant for the French! He was all that. And what the book attempts to tell you, by going back to his origins, is that he’s not even accepted as a Frenchman. He comes from this strange family that lived in a cave that was built into the side of a mountain.



In this book Philippe Auclair, a French football correspondent based in London, turns his pursuit of Eric into an obsession to unravel the strange, and thus compelling, nature of the man. ‘I play with passion and fire. I have to accept that sometimes this fire does harm’ is one line in the book. Ultimately I’m not sure that Auclair, or any man, could explain everything that moves and motivates the dark side of this wonderful showman player. But I doubt anyone gets closer to it. And the irony is that Cantona never really played for France. He did play, maybe 30 times, but I remember the day he was dropped from the French squad. I remember asking the French team coach ‘Why?’ And the guy said to me, which was an astonishing thing to say, ‘Because I’ve got somebody better.’ And actually it proved right, because the guy he had was Zinedine Zidane. So if Cantona hadn’t been such a rebel, we might never have seen the beauty of Zidane…..."(reviewed by Rob Hughes in FiveBooks).



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/rob-hughes-on-football ( )