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Cantona sat at the extreme end of that spectrum. Anything that stopped him playing or curtailed his enjoyment of the game became the enemy: referees with their red cards, defenders with their physical treatment, coaches with their stymied tactics, supporters with their abuse. All this explains his fury in Istanbul and south London.

Cantona’s desire to ‘feel that rush’ blended with an anarchistic edge to his personality that lay not in a mistrust of authority per se, but a need to enjoy freedom of expression. ‘Above all I need to be free,’ he writes in Cantona on Cantona. ‘I don’t like to feel constrained by rules or conventions. There’s a limit to how far this idea can go, and there’s a fine line between freedom and chaos. But to some extent I espouse the idea of anarchy.’

Rather than rules, Cantona preferred to administer justice according to an ethical code; one that his critics might argue lacked calibration. So when Simmons screamed xenophobic abuse in his face, Cantona’s temper and determination to dispense moral retribution led to a spectacular assault. The accusation from Simmons that Cantona was a ‘lunatic’ was spectacularly misplaced.