Who does that?
When you're released through on goal, but the pass into your path still leaves a defender between you and the goalkeeper, who actually slows down? Doesn't it make more sense to knock the ball past your marker, or least surge onto the through-ball and strike it hard, low and early - it does, doesn't it?
Well, someone should have told Eric Cantona; but then again, he never seemed to care much for convention. Away against Sheffield United, with his team already ahead 1-0, Cantona broke towards the goal and then, receiving a crossfield pass from Ryan Giggs 20 yards from the target, he eased to a halt.
But he wasn’t done – he was merely beginning. In his next movement, he stabbed his right foot sharply at the base of the ball, sending it up into the January gale in a soft, slow arc, floating it high and far beyond the goalkeeper’s reach.
As is well known, Manchester United had not won the league championship for 25 years before Cantona’s arrival, and with him they won four of the next five. During that time he taught them not only how to win, but to win with authority. Cantona could have simply attempted a more pragmatic finish. But I think he was making a point that day in 1995.
An act of sporting brilliance can be demoralising. To score a spectacular goal when the game is in the balance is not only to put your team ahead, but to remind your opposition that they will never be truly equal. When Cantona sent that chip up into the winter wind, he was telling Sheffield United: "match this for beauty. Aha, that’s right - of course you can’t".
Several of football’s other geniuses have thus used their superior skill as a weapon. Perhaps the most notable example in recent times was Andrea Pirlo’s penalty in the Euro 2012 quarterfinal shoot-out against England. Italy’s Pirlo, who waited for Joe Hart to fall to the floor before drifting his spot-kick down the middle of the goal, later revealed that he had done so to break the will of the England goalkeeper.
The most consistent trickster of this nature was Ronaldinho, the Brazilian who knew well the power of bringing the tools of playground humiliation onto some of the world’s biggest stages.
And so it was with Eric Cantona. So many of his goals were not so much scores as statements. Witness, for example, his two penalties against Chelsea in the 1994 FA Cup Final, each of which he struck in precisely the same direction. In both cases he was apparently telling their goalkeeper, the helpless Dimitry Kharine, that "Look, I’m playing the upgrade of the game that you thought you were," Chelsea, of course, would go on to learn this casual contempt themselves under Jose Mourinho: it is an aloofness that is the hallmark of repeat champions.
That’s the irony of it: of all those seemingly throwaway goals that great players score at the end of an evening’s rout. When footballers such as Cantona first join a club, it is often complained – if not feared – that they represent style over substance. But, as Cantona’s trophy-laden legacy at Manchester United has shown, sometimes style is the most substantial thing there is.