Decoding Eric Cantona's 'confusing' speech at UEFA ceremony

Clarity lies in the ears — and brain — of the beholder. And in these times of pat comments and just-so opinion, Eric Cantona insisted on the beholder having to earn his clarity. The former France and Manchester United forward used lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear, science’s war against ageing, and a vision of dystopia to drive home one singular point while accepting the UEFA President’s Award in Monaco on Friday: his love of football.
What may have been a baffling rant, even eliciting titters, to an audience not confined to those in the hall in Monaco along with Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, was actually a penetrative comment on how love for something — in Cantona’s case, football — can survive, even as it is unable to dismiss, the world raging and howling and tweeting around us.

Cantona started his small speech with the Duke of Gloucester’s lines in King Lear in which he attempts to find a reason — of there being no reason at all — for all the senseless cruelty and brutality he, Gloucester, like other humans, has experienced. The gods destroy us, not with any care or preparation that comes with punishment or vengeance, but for fun, ‘just’, ‘for their sport’ — a telling usage in the context of a sporting gathering and from a sportsperson.

Cantona followed this, seemingly with no obvious logic, with how science is proceeding towards a capability where it would not just be able to slow down ageing – a fundamental aspect that is always a tick-tock in a professional footballer’s life, not to mention any living being’s life – but also that science could one day make natural death through ‘wear and tear’ and disease a thing of the past. This mechanical aspect of the human body is another aspect that anyone who has played, plays or watches a sport is acutely aware of — injuries that keep footballers away from their footballing, ‘not playing’ being micro-deaths of their own.

The Frenchman then pointed out that in this world of hyper-therapeutics, death will come only through fatal accidents, murders and wars (that is, sanctified murders) — mostly man-made phenomena, getting killed under a landslide or in an earthquake also being accidents, which insurance agents categorise under a ‘god clause’. Then, disagreeing with the likes of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker — who in his book, The Better Angels of our Nature, believes that violence in the world has declined over time and will continue to do so — ‘King Eric’ stated that these means of ‘unnatural’ deaths will multiply, thereby cutting into whatever boons of long and happy lives science is to unravel in the future.

Having described this gloom-hopedoom curve of human existence, Cantona suddenly swivelled everything to himself, shrinking the field play of the world into the singular act of holding the world between his own feet: ‘I love football. Thank you.’ Why did Cantona make such a statement? Because he could. Why did he make it at such a platform? Because there is no rule — not Fifa’s, not the world’s — barring the world of football from engaging in the world beyond. In 1995, Cantona had told the media after winning his appeal against a two-week prison sentence for kicking an abusive football spectator in the chest, ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea’.

Many had then found his statement gnomic, even doubly ridiculous because they could not understand it, and could not understand a footballer — rather than a philosopher or writer or a Jedi master — saying it. What he meant was that the herd, whether seagulls or the media and its consumers, always will follow the food, the subject, the salacious ‘story’. Therefore, the hacks were interested in Cantona’s statement after the court verdict to fill up print space. Nothing less, nothing more.

On Friday, Cantona’s speech, rife with the loudness and violence of the world and its people, emphasised that even in this mess, this clutter, this horror, one can find beauty, joy and 90-odd minute bursts of happiness in another human creation: football. Or, in whatever a person chooses one’s ‘football’ to be.