What If...Cantona Had Been An Owl?

Wednesday Take A Big Gamble - Trev Swoop For Mad Eric

Thus squealed the January 1992 tabloid headline atop the news that Tricky Trevor Francis was running the rule over Eric Cantona at Hillsborough.

The popular belief is that Francis invited him for a trial - Cantona played in an indoor six-a-side against a touring side from Baltimore (that hotbed of football against which all are judged) - but thought he needed more time to make up his mind and asked him to stay on for a week, not least so he could see him play on grass.

Cantona, never shy about his own abilities and quite reasonably feeling that a player of his international pedigree should need little introduction, thought it was an affront and declined. Years later, he in fact insisted: "He didn't invite me for a trial. I was there for a week and I thought I was there to sign." Adding later, "my parrot has boots, not wings, how can he fly to the moon when all around him are baking bread?" Okay, no he didn't. But he probably thought it.

Perhaps the Steel City didn't impress him. Surrounded by seven hills of some of the most brutal social housing in the Western world, in the early 90s it was at a pretty low ebb. Maybe the heavy metal bands, thin beer in plastic glasses and adhesive floor at the Wapentake weren't to his taste.

Whatever the real story, Cantona did not hang around at Hillsborough and Howard Wilkinson snapped him up for Leeds in February. He helped the Whites to the league title in the last year before it became the Premiership and then, of course, he went to Man United and so on and so forth.

Had he stayed, Sheffield Wednesday's history could have been very different. Easy to forget now but Sheff Wed were once a big club playing at one of the country's biggest, most important stadiums. Tumbleweed may now blow where thickset men with guttural South Yorkshire vowels once stood, but it was once a mighty place.

They had won the League Cup in the 1990-1991 season and gained promotion to the top flight. In 1991-1992 they finished third in the First Division back when we took such possibilities for granted in a competitive league; the next season they got to the finals of both domestic cups with a team that included Chris Waddle, Chris Woods, Carlton Palmer, Roland Nilsson, Danny Wilson, John Sheridan, David Hirst and Mark Bright. Des Walker arrived in the summer of 1993. This was a seriously good team, except for Carlton obviously, who to give him his due, was excellent comedy value and had apparently been fitted with robotic-style telescopic legs.

A bit of luck, a spark of Gallic genius and maybe they would have won a Cup double and pushed on in the league. The Premiership was just beginning and the Owls had one of the country's largest fanbases - not much smaller than, say, Arsenal.

With the new money coming into football and the rise of interest from floating voters, their talented side was an attractive package. How much more so had they had some pots to show off. A bit more creativity and a bit less long-legged grind and who knows what they could he achieved? Later in the 90s the purchase of Bergkamp was crucial in transforming Arsenal's fortunes and style of play. Cantona could have been Wednesday's Bergkamp.

No player was capturing the imagination of the neophyte football fan in the early days of the Premiership like Cantona. With the collar turned up, the shoulders shrugged and the kung fu-ing of beastly fans all attributes we admire so much in any player. With him on board, Wednesday could have been THE fashionable team just as the waves of Champions League and TV money started to crash onto these shores.

The Premiership saw a raft of bandwagon-jumpers adopt Manchester United, and alright Wednesday were never going to be quite that big, but silverware could very easily have put them near the top of the chasing pack, capable of challenging season in, season out.

They had a young, media-friendly manager in Trevor Francis. Odd though it might now seem, Francis was thought of in very high regard. An ex-England player who had learned at Cloughie's knee, he advocated a passing game based on skill and pace.

With the innate bushy eye-browed magnificence of Cantona on board, Wednesday would have had a side of flair and talent, and along with a big fanbase, were unburdened by being hated by anyone except the red side of the People's Republic of Sheffield, obviously.

But how quickly, disastrously did it all come crashing down. The 1990s was one long, slow decline for the Owls. Francis went at the end of the 1995 season and David Pleat was brought in with the remit of building a new team. Big players left and some hideous big-money flops arrived, players like £1.5 million Marc Degryse and £2 million Darko Kovacevic (16 games).

The board quickly realised he was the football equal of a stray Brussels sprout underneath the fridge and didn't let Pleat stink the place up too long and brought in the rugged, square-jawed no-nonsense Danny Wilson, under whom the crazy spending reached its peak with the likes of Benito Carbone and the in-no-way-a-Nazi Paolo Di Canio arriving, pushing over referees and then legging it with big bags of South Yorkshire cash while fans wept into pints of Stones Best Bitter.

Ultimately the Wednesday story is a morality tale. No club more typified the reckless, foolhardy throw-money-at-the-problem approach of the Premiership leading up to the new millennium than Wednesday, whose plummet down the pyramid has been ghastly to watch. They languish in the second tier like an old punch-drunk boxer, staggering around, wondering where it all went wrong, the whiff of stale cologne and brandy the only memories of the good times.

We contend that the signing of Eric Cantona could have propelled this club into the other direction and, with some financial prudence (admittedly this is asking a lot of a football club), it could be them snapping around the heels of the superclubs at the right half of the Premier League table.

Who in 1991 would have thought that in 2008 the most succesful club in Yorkshire would be Hull City? Owls fans can be forgiven for wondering what the hell went wrong.

Alan Tyers and John Nicholson