Cantona, By Philippe Auclair

A Marseilles teenager runs through school after football practice shouting "I am the king! I am the king!" It's not too fanciful to draw a direct line from that image to the scene in a south London stadium around 15 years later when the teenager, now a professional footballer of prodigious repute, leapt over the wall on his way to an early bath and demonstrated his kung fu skills on the opposing fan who had sprinted down the steps to berate him.

As a footballer, Eric Cantona was a rum cove: a rising star and bad boy who detonated his career in his own country, found glorious resurrection at Leeds United and Manchester United, detonated his career again with his infamous kick - which he once described as the best thing he'd done in football - came back to great effect and even greater acclaim, then retired ridiculously early by modern standards.

Philippe Auclair, a football journalist on both sides of the Channel, has striven mightily to solve the mysteries of Cantona's character. Cantona was at his fantastic best under father figures with eyes conveniently blind to his worst excesses: Célestin Oliver, his school coach; Guy Roux, the ancient coach at Auxerre, who chuckles as he describes the explosions that punctuated their time together; Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager forever grateful to the Frenchman for being the crucial last piece of a side fit to grace Old Trafford's so-called "Theatre of Dreams".

He had been the great prodigy, a French Gazza with brains. Then with his tricks and flicks, passing and shooting, unpredictability and vision, he was in the vanguard of the foreign invasion that helped make the English Premiership arguably the world's most attractive sporting brand. There's a shaming passage in which Auclair lists all the pieces of skill - the "grand pont", or the "aile de pigeon", the "coup du sombrero" and the "feuille morte" - that have no English footballing translation.

The image Auclair says he chooses to retain is "Cantona the provider of beauty, the eternal child, doomed to age, who knows it and chooses to give two fingers to fate". Judging him by the highest standards, there's no question as to whether Cantona should be installed in football's pantheon: he's not even close. In Manchester United's European campaigns he rarely impressed; he spurned the chance to lead a generation of French players that would eventually conquer the world. Whenever in sight of his profession's summit, he turned back. On big occasions he seemed to suffer from a complex stage fright. But when everything went right, his magic was potent, his catalysing effect extraordinary.

Auclair believes the key to the rage that both fuelled and disfigured his career is that "however great his onfield achievements may be, he had never become the tormented, misunderstood creator of genius he wished to be". He had a pretty good stab at it, though.