The French footballer revealed that the enigmatic words he uttered after the famous kick in the face of a fan in 1995 were a kind of revenge against journalists
When, speaking to journalists for the first time after throwing a violent kick in the face of an opposing fan, the French footballer Eric Cantona uttered the phrase “when seagulls follow a fishing boat, it’s because they think the sardines will be thrown into the sea”, no one understood what he meant. More than two months had passed since, on 25 January 1995, the Manchester United striker ended up at the center of one of the most famous scandals in the history of English football. The attack, which occurred during a championship match against Crystal Palace, was shown continuously on English TV in the following days, and had definitively confirmed Cantona’s reputation as an irascible and unpredictable player.
Almost thirty years later, Cantona said that that enigmatic phrase, which was discussed and quoted for years, actually meant nothing. «They wanted me to talk, and I talked. That thing came out of me, and I left. The press tried to make sense of it and make it all philosophical. (…) They wanted to find a meaning and they all asked me to explain, and I didn’t say anything,” he told the French TV program C in the airwhere he intervened to sing a song from a record he just released (because Cantona has dedicated himself to a lot of different activities over the years).
The explanation is particularly consistent with his character, legendary in the recent history of European football both for his creativity on the pitch and for the frequent occasions in which he stood out for histrionic, boastful, aggressive, undisciplined, surprising, funny and mysterious behaviour. Among many things, Cantona tried to run in the French presidential elections and was an actor on many occasions, including a famous series of Nike commercials and a Ken Loach film in which he played a version of himself who helps a postman in a crisis. age to take back control of one’s life.
When he kicked the Crystal Palace fan he was 28 years old and in his third season with Manchester United, the English team of which he became one of the greatest symbols (with ruthless competition) and with which he then won four championships in five years. In the first half of the match an opposing defender gave him no respite, limiting him with great effectiveness and a good dose of fouls not called. Three minutes into the second half, after a clearance by the Manchester United goalkeeper, Cantona freed himself from the defender’s marking by kicking him and was sent off.
As he lazily walked off the pitch, 20-year-old Matthew Simmons, who was watching the game, shouted something at him, probably: “Fuck off back to France, you bastard of a Frenchman.” Cantona gave him an almost martial arts kick, then got up awkwardly and punched him. It wasn’t clear how much it hit Simmons, but it was still evidently one of the most violent and gratuitous gestures ever seen on a European football pitch.
– Read also: The history of Cantona football to a fan
Cantona was immediately suspended by Manchester United and fined £20,000. The English Federation extended the suspension from the fields until October and added another ten thousand pounds fine (that would be around 56 thousand euros today). As regards civil justice, Cantona won an appeal to reduce the sentence from two weeks of detention to 120 hours of community service.
It was after the hearing at which the sentence was handed down, on March 31, 1995, that Cantona agreed to speak to journalists for the first time. He spoke seriously, even stopping halfway to take a sip of water, and only said the sentence about seagulls and sardines, his face impassive. «Thank you all», he concluded, getting up, amidst the somewhat incredulous laughter of those present. Those few words would go down in football history.
On the French television program, Cantona explained that it was his revenge against the press, who had renamed him “the madman” and who had defined the one in which he had kicked the fan “the evening that football died of shame” . Later, Cantona would say he had only one regret about that day, and that was that he didn’t hit Simmons harder.
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