The Cantona kung-fu incident, 10 years on
The Croydon Advertiser today reported that, when all the Manchester United fans came to my old home town to see their team play Crystal Palace, they did so on the 10th anniversary of the notorious “Kung Fu Kick” incident. Eric Cantona, a French footballer best known for his “glittering career” at Manchester’s best-known team (the other is Manchester City, which is also intermittently a premiership team), got a two-week jail term off a judge in Croydon for giving a Palace fan a flying kung-fu kick, although it was later reduced to 120 hours of community service. A plot was hatched to taunt Palace fans by wearing Cantona masks, but they were told they wouldn’t get in if they turned up with such masks.
It’s funny that the Advertiser reports this story directly above a piece about the “Show Racism the Red Card” roadshow, a travelling campaign against racism in football (soccer). For anyone who isn’t familiar with soccer culture, racism at football grounds is a widespread and acknowledged problem, which raises its head highest when British teams play abroad and the audience entertains black players with monkey noises whenever they take possession of the ball. (By the way, the “red card” is what the referee shows a player when he’s being sent off the pitch; a yellow card is a warning.)
The thing is that Cantona’s kick followed racist abuse and spitting from the spectator concerned, who had a conviction for attempted robbery and had attended rallies by racist parties. Tony Parsons in The Daily Mirror (a left-leaning tabloid) noted that the kick didn’t do the racist thug any harm – he still managed to jump over the “bench” in court and attack the prosecution lawyer at his subsequent trial. The Idler (a satirical magazine, a bit like the Onion) went even further:
>It’s the people’s game. And on Wednesday the people saw a lippy fascist give it the big ‘un and get twatted as a result. That’s it. END OF STORY. But not for the people whose business is stories.
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>John Ley in the Telegraph (which I bought because it had the best picture of the kick) criticised Cantona’s “disregard for authority.” Eric Cantona was raised in Marseilles which was, only as many years before his birth as since Palace last won anything, ruled by the Vichy regime. The Cantona gypsy blood could have got grand-père, maman, papa, Nicole and all sent to the death camps by order of Vichy “authority”.
I wouldn’t approve of it in the way this writer did, but there’s a difference between thinking someone got their come-uppance and saying that the person who gave it to him was right. (A lot of people who opposed the recent Iraq war actually did want to see Saddam go, for example.) Nobody should have been surprised that there were racists at Palace anyway. I lived my first eight years a few streets from the Selhurst Park ground, and the National Front were known to make use of a pub near the Whitehorse / Holmesdale Road junction, just down the road from the ground (as my mother found out when she asked in there why there were no black faces to be seen, despite the mixed nature of our area).
On the subject of racism, Dictator Princess recently answered a question from Levantine Historian about what he had heard of racism in Mississippi. A friend of his was told not to sit at a given table at the University of Southern Mississippi because it was a “black” table. DP replied that, while outright racism of the Mississippi Burning variety is a thing of the past, people tend to mix with their own kind because it’s a “comfort zone”. This sort of thing isn’t restricted to the southern USA – I witnessed this myself in south London, at a sixth form college outside Croydon.
Coulsdon College, formerly Purley Sixth Form College, is pretty much at the bottom of Croydon borough, yet attracted a huge number of students from the north of the borough. The south (Purley and Coulsdon) is wealthy, Tory-voting and overwhelmingly white, while the north (Thornton Heath, Broad Green, Norbury) is less wealthy, still mostly white, but that’s where most of the ethnic minorities live. So they all came south on the number 50 bus from Norbury, and the rest of us took the 400 and 409 which was quicker and just went to the centre of town. (For anyone going there now, none of those buses goes there anymore.) The so-called Rude Boys and their fellow-travellers (the ethnic set who listened to rap, ragga and what was still known as “swing” – by no means all the black students, or indeed all black) used the Common Room, which was adjacent to the larger Canteen, which was used by most other people. The Common Room also got a lot more vandalism. Eventually, the college had to demolish the wall dividing these two rooms to get rid of this de facto segregation.
