CANTONA: THE RED AND THE BLACK BOOK REVIEW - September 1995
| After a slightly disturbing start,
where Ridley (the football correspondent of the Independent On Sunday) seems to imply that
most of his book was written by, in fact, cobbling bits of other people's books
together and watching a couple of videos, this settles down into one of the most sensible
and studied examinations of the wayward French genius/uncontrollable Gallic thug's
career so far. The writer seems to be an Eric fan, but wavers throughout the book between
schoolmasterly tutting at his hero's wilder moments and unwavering defence of the
indefensible. The book's main failing, for me, is the non-chronological structure - it starts with The Selhurst Park Incident, then, largely, travels backwards through time as Eric joins Man Utd, gets transferred from Leeds, moves to England from France and so on. You get the feeling, then, that you've had the most exciting bit at the beginning, and the rest is just tailing off into history, with nothing new to be revealed. This is a little unfair, as there's much of interest to be found later on (not least in the chapter devoted to various quotes from Eric on himself), but you don't get the impetus to carry on reading that doing it the other way round would surely have brought. There's not much here that you don't already know, but as a relatively unbiased, level-headed record of the story of Britain's most interesting footballer, it does a perfectly acceptable job. VERDICT: Not bad, but no book that starts more than one chapter with song lyrics by The Doors is getting three stars from me. ** |
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