Eric the King

Superb essay on great volleyed goals over on the Guardian today. This was my favorite part, reproduced in its entirety because Cantona defined imperious. He was insufferable. He was arrogant. He was rude. He was mercurial. But he was so, so good. Moreover, he was so much better than anyone else at the time in the Premier League.
They called him Eric the King for a reason.

Here's the essay to accompany the video (from Rob Smyth of the Guardian):
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The volley is widely perceived as the hardest skill in football, but the flip side of that difficulty is that it is the perfect tool with which to demonstrate your superiority, as Eric Cantona showed at Selhurst Park in 1994. The backstory is important here: Cantona should have been sent off in the previous round, at Norwich, and in the seemingly interminable build-up to this match (the FA Cup was big news in those days), Wimbledon promised to ruffle his feathers, get in his face, and other popular cliches. Early on Vinnie Jones piled in with a laughable and predictable reducer; Cantona simply looked Jones up and down with the sort of magisterial contempt that only he could muster, and then, just before half-time, showed how you really hurt someone on a football field.

Gary Elkins made his only contribution to football history by heading Denis Irwin's long cross to the edge of the box, whereupon Cantona killed the ball with a velvety touch and then leathered it beyond Hans Segers. It was a perfectly unanswerable piece of skill that broke Wimbledon, who had been in the game until then, completely. There is some rather absurd revisionism going round about Cantona's contribution to the Premier League. He might not have been the greatest overseas player in English football history - the quality of the game in this country has increased so much in the last 15 years - but nobody has been so superior to his peers. And nobody knew how to demonstrate that superiority in such a regal manner. This was not a footballer; this was Cantona.