Eric Cantona kung-fu kick was crazy… but Premier League stars are now sterile, boring robot clones – let them be human
THIRTY years on from Eric Cantona’s kung-fu kick and I can remember it like it was yesterday.
I was allowed to watch the highlights the following morning as a six-year-old.
It was just crazy, wasn’t it?
After being red-carded at Crystal Palace, the Manchester United maverick copped abuse from home fans as he walked off.
His response? He launched himself at one of his tormentors.
If anything, Cantona became an even bigger superstar because of it, single-handedly taking the recently formed Premier League to another level in terms of the drama and theatre of it all.
It’s infamous. Do you know how angry you’ve got to be to do that?
I’m an angry person and during my career I thought about smacking an abusive fan in the stands but never had the guts to do it.
And yet here was Cantona – one of the best we have ever seen in the Premier League era, in English football – and he just snapped.
I can safely say we will never see anything like that in football again.
In principle, that is a good thing.
You can’t behave like that on a football pitch, no matter how much abuse you’re receiving from supporters – whether racial, homophobic or just downright horrible.
We don’t want to see people being assaulted, just like we didn’t want to see Paolo Di Canio at Sheffield Wednesday shove referee Paul Alcock to the ground, in 1998.
But there is a part of me that thinks we have gone too far the other way.
The players in the Prem now are almost like robots.
Why shouldn’t they be able to react like a human, within reason?
Instead, they come across as incredibly restrained, watered down, so much so that the game can be a bit sterile.
It’s all about preserving the business side of things as opposed to entertainment and shock and awe.
I used to love watching ‘Premier League Years’, a programme on Sky looking back at old seasons.
You see some of the more recent ones now and even the celebrations are boring.
We haven’t got personalities any more … a Cantona, a Di Canio, a Paul Gascoigne.
That maverick, rough-around-the-edges type who can make a mistake but we don’t kill them for it.
Cantona was rightly criticised and punished for his actions, serving a nine-month ban, but it was also right for him to be welcomed back once he had done his time.
Can you imagine if a Prem player did a similar thing now?
Their career would be over, discarded for good, sponsorship deals ripped up, left in the gutter, labelled a criminal, an animal.
In the modern game, there has to be a balance, to encourage individuality without crossing a line.
Otherwise, we will just be watching 11 clones against another 11 clones every season.
We seem to put massive pressure on players to be perfect in everything they do but no one is perfect.
We see so many examples even today of fans going out of their way to discriminate against and antagonise players.
This week alone, a teenager has been banned for three years for making racist gestures at a Peterborough match last year.
And another has been arrested and released on bail after the wife of Arsenal star Kai Havertz received horrific messages on Instagram.
Declan Rice was pelted with plastic cups and other missiles during Arsenal’s Champions League win over Dinamo Zagreb in midweek.
And yet it is footballers who are constantly being told NOT to react.
That is not what made the Premier League the best in the world, on and off the pitch.