Cantona interview: Dec 94

is that it’s a question of being tough with yourself in order to liberate yourself on a match day. That’s the most important thing. That’s what I’m trying to live.”

There is, in what Cantona has to say about football, the heroic sense of struggle, of wrestling to overcome doubt and desperation to achieve the dizzy heights of perfection. But this is not suffering, he claims, “because at the same time when I manage to solve a problem it’s a massive liberation. In any case, in life you do everything you can to reach a peak of happiness. To do so you have to go through the worst depths of despair and you have to will yourself out of it.

Read Part Two on Thursday.