January 25, 1995. Selhurst Park, London.

January 25, 2020 7:46 AM

The Kick. The press conference. 25 years on. In his own words looking back.

Lego version of The Kick.

Context in video form.

Bonus: '66 WAS A GREAT YEAR FOR ENGLISH FOOTBALL.

posted by any portmanteau in a storm (11 comments total)

I know the press conference wasn't from the same day as The Kick but it was about The Kick and looking back the two are always discussed in tandem anyway.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 7:47 AM on January 25, 2020

On the day after The Kick, The Guardian carried a very short letter parodying what was then a popular Man Utd chant on the terraces. The letter read: "Ooof! Argh! Cantona!"
posted by Paul Slade at 8:14 AM on January 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

As a teenager trying to follow United from Canada I didn't catch any of this in real time. Maybe a sentence in the tiny European Soccer roundup in the newspaper saying that Cantona karate kicked a spectator at the game and would be out for the rest of the season. I don't think I saw actual footage of The Kick until 5 years ago when the last retrospectives on it came out.

I think the idiots in stands would be a lot quieter today if there was a non-zero chance that they'd get karate kicked by Raheem Sterling, Mario Balotelli, or Romelu Lukaku. Kick it Out, right?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:53 AM on January 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

I am a Liverpool supporter so have no love for Man Utd but when the trial occurred I heartily agreed with the Independent's view that the more you heard about Matthew Simmons the more you thought Cantona's only mistake was to stop kicking him.

Also, is there an article about 25 years of Jonathan Pearce being an insufferable cock.
posted by fullerine at 10:19 AM on January 25, 2020 [5 favorites]

Is this like a local version of the Zidane headbutt?
posted by scruss at 10:35 AM on January 25, 2020

Players with similar temperaments and talent so there are parallels.
Also, like Simmons, Marco Materazzi definitely deserved it.
posted by fullerine at 10:45 AM on January 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

US-based Crystal Palace fan here.
Matthew Simmons, a 20-year-old double-glazing fitter
CP changed their team name to the Eagles from... The Glaziers about 20 years before this. A Glazier being the object of this farce is...employisterical.
posted by persona at 11:29 AM on January 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

And now the Glazers own Manchester United and running it into the ground while extracting as much wealth from it as they can.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:18 PM on January 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

A bloke I knew through work got into trouble because of this. He'd made up some lie involving a sick relative to explain why he couldn't attend a business function that evening, and the next day he was on the front page of every newspaper in the country as one of the fans in the crowd.
posted by essexjan at 3:54 PM on January 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

Danny Baker's response, as a Millwall fan, was that Cantona should have had "an immediate pay rise, and straight back on the park".
posted by essexjan at 3:56 PM on January 25, 2020

It's 'passing strange that this is everywhere referred to as a "Kung Fu" kick when the facts that Cantona is French, had a strong French accent, and Simmons insults were explicitly Francophobic would seem to make it far more natural to see it as a 'Savate' kick given that Savate is kick-based and the native French form of hand to hand combat:

Savate takes its name from the French for "old shoe" (heavy footwear, especially the boots used by French military and sailors) (cf. French-English loanwords sabot and sabotage and Spanish cognate zapato). The modern formalized form is mainly an amalgam of French street fighting techniques from the beginning of the 19th century. Savate was then a type of street fighting common in Paris and northern France.[9][10][11]

In the south, especially in the port of Marseille, sailors developed a fighting style involving high kicks and open-handed slaps. It is conjectured that this kicking style was developed in this way to allow the fighter to use a hand to hold onto something for balance on a rocking ship's deck, and that the kicks and slaps were used on land to avoid the legal penalties for using a closed fist, which was considered a deadly weapon under the law. It was known as the jeu marseillais (game from Marseille), and was later renamed chausson (slipper, after the type of shoes the sailors wore). In contrast, at this time in England (the home of boxing and the Queensberry rules), kicking was seen as unsportsmanlike.

And also since Cantona followed up his kick with that 'underappreciated' roundhouse punch.
posted by jamjam at 7:32 PM on January 25, 2020 [1 favorite]