T Cain, Moses, Eyal Berkovic ... no Jewish tradition is more venerable than arguing with the ref. Most of us agree on the Laws of the Game, but when it comes to Interpretation of the Laws, differences of opinion have been known. But though occasionally, as the likes of Abraham and more recently Steven Gerrard have discovered, He may change His mind, usually the referee’s decision is final.
Even among so notoriously, gloriously disputatious a people as ours, few have taken divine backchat to such heights — or indeed depths — as the reluctant prophet Jonah. Bidden journey to Nineveh, to warn its sinful citizens of the Lord’s wrath, he absconded from his mission, hot-footing it to Jaffa and boarding ship for Tarshish, whereupon the Lord sent a storm and booked him his famous cetaceous ferry back to terra firma. Chastened, he delivered his missive to the Ninevans, who atoned and were spared. So what does Jonah do? Rail against God for letting them off the hook, and storm off to sulk in the desert, where the two of them get in another row, this time over His failure to water a plant.
It is this great tale of rebellion, punishment, marine biology, more rebellion, more punishment, and inept gardening, that holds the key to one of football’s greatest mysteries. I speak, of course, of Eric Cantona’s famous ‘seagulls’ comment of 1995. What a machaiah it was for us haggadists of football! You’ve no idea what it’s like, week after week, trying to glean enlightenment from a post-match interview. So imagine our excitement when Cantona tossed us his allegorical sardines.
The Frenchman, you will recall, had been sent off for kicking Crystal Palace defender Richard Shaw. But not content with breaking the laws of the game, he took rebellion to the next level and broke the laws of the land, launching himself kung-fu style at an abusive Palace fan on his way off the pitch. Sentenced to one hundred hours’ community service, Cantona sat down to face the press, and haltingly pronounced the following riddle:
‘When the seagulls... follow the trawler... it is because they think... sardines... will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much.’
And with that, he upped and left.
For many, the meaning was simple: Cantona is the trawler, the seagulls are the press, and the sardines are the snippets of good copy they wait to snap up. Cantona gave them a quote which signified only their own desire for a quote: a gnomic ‘no comment’.
But not all scholars agree. Rabbi Aaron de Cider-Korshun, as ever, urges us to pay attention to the context. In his version, the seagulls are the fans, wheeling around the bloated trawler of football, squawking for a player to be spat out into their pitiless maws. And the Frankfurt scholar Holda Heilein points out that by invoking two sets of creatures, one kosher (sardines) and one traife (seagulls), Cantona was invoking the incident that led to his sending-off (Shaw had been pulling at his shirt). Here the originally ‘unclean’ act was committed by Shaw (the seagull), with the result that the previously ‘clean’ Cantona (the sardine) is unjustly hurled into a metaphorical sea of ignominy.
Heilein’s colleague, Havina Bitova-Meyer, goes further, claiming that Cantona, with his thick French accent, said not ‘ze trawler’ but ‘ze Torah’, and not ‘sardines’ but ‘sertine’ — ie, ‘thirteen’. This is a reference to verse 13 of the dietary prohibitions in Leviticus, which forbids eating birds of prey. In this interpretation, the whole sardine aspect is a red herring.
For myself, I believe the aphorism is a clear allusion to the Book of Jonah, with the trawler as an updated, technological whale. Jonah wanted to see retribution passed upon Ninevah for its wickedness — just as the press wanted to see Cantona punished for his assault. But when the Ninevans repented, the Lord relented — likewise, the court reduced the contrite Cantona’s sentence to community service. So Eric’s message to the press was this: ‘Accept the court’s decision. Do not bay for a harsher punishment — like Jonah, you are but harbingers, not arbiters, of justice.’
In a broader sense, Jonah’s story is about a man who is given a divine purpose but cannot reconcile himself to it. It teaches us a lesson about pursuing one’s true purpose in life. For the press, that means reporting the news, not making it; for fans, it means supporting the players, not baiting them; for Eric, it means kicking a ball, not members of the public. As for the rest of us, we read Jonah and consider what, in our youth, we felt destined to become — and whether we have stayed faithful to that dream. Or, as Tony Gubba might put it, ‘Just how important was that early goal?’
So why, in the end, do we keep on arguing the toss? Why, when we know we have gone astray, do we protest our innocence? Do we really think, like Jonah, that we can flee from the Lord’s sight? Or hope to change His mind? Or, perhaps, that the sheer pleasure of a good argument will beguile Him and earn us a second chance?
Well, you never know. The theologian Ford O. Fischal tells a story about a man who returns to see his rabbi after five years’ absence.
‘Five years ago,’ says the man, ‘I had a heart attack. You said it was a final warning from God. So I quit pork, quit seafood, quit everything — except women, rabbi. There, I failed. So sure enough, last week I had another massive coronary. And yet here I am, alive! Two final warnings! Does that not prove, O rabbi, that God is merciful?’
‘On the contrary,’ replied the sage, ‘It proves we’re all in trouble.’
‘How so?’ asked the man.
‘It looks like we’ve got Graham Poll.’
Having spent twenty-one years as a rabbi in his native Morecambe, and a brief spell as inside-right for Preston North End, Rabbi Savage is now a freelance Talmudic scholar.
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