Thirty years after Eric Cantona Kungfu-Kick and I can remember it as if it were yesterday.
As a six -year -old I was allowed to view the highlights the next morning.
It was just crazy, right?
After he received a red card in Crystal Palace, Manchester United's outsider was confronted with insults by home fans when he walked away.
His reaction? He threw himself on one of his seepage spirits.
Cantona was at least an even bigger superstar, and brought the recently formed Premier League to another level in terms of drama and theater on his own.
It's notorious. Do you know how angry you should be to do that?
I am an angry person and during my career I thought about beating an offensive fan in the stands, but I never had the guts to do it.
And yet there Cantona-one of the best we have ever seen in the Premier League era, in English football-and he just snarled.
I can safely say that we will never see such a thing in football again.
In principle, that is a good thing.
You cannot behave that way on a football field, no matter how many insults you get from the supporters – whether they are racist, homophobic or downright terrible.
We do not want people to be attacked, just as we did not want Paulo Di Canio on Sheffield Wednesday referee Paul Alcock to push the ground in 1998.
But there is a part of me that thinks we went too far the other way.
The players in the Prem now almost look like robots.
Why would they not be able to, within reasonable limits, if a person respond?
Instead, they come across as incredibly modest and weakened, so much so that the game can be a bit sterile.
It is all about maintaining the business side of the case, in contrast to entertainment and shock and awe.
I always liked to look at 'Premier League Years', a program on Sky in which I look back on old seasons.
You now see some of the more recent and even the celebrations are boring.
We no longer have personalities … a Cantona, a di canio, a Paul Gascoigne.
That quirky, rugged type that can make a mistake, but we don't kill them for it.
Cantona was rightly criticized and punished for his actions and was imposed on a nine -month ban, but it was also right that he was welcomed again as soon as he had served his time.
Can you imagine that a prem player would do something similar now?
Their career is said to have been over, forever rejected, torn up sponsorship agreements, left in the gutter, labeled as a criminal, an animal.
In the modern game there must be a balance to encourage individuality without crossing a border.
Otherwise we look at eleven clones against another eleven cloning every season.
It seems that we put enormous pressure on players to be perfect in everything they do, but nobody is perfect.
Even today we see so many examples of fans who do their utmost to discriminate against players.
This week alone, a teenager for three years was suspended for making racist gestures during a competition in Peterborough last year.
And another was arrested and released on bail after the wife of Arsenal star Kai Havertz received horrible messages on Instagram.
Declan Rice was pelted halfway through the week with plastic cups and other rockets during the Champions League victory of Arsenal on Dinamo Zagreb.
And yet they are footballers who are constantly told that they should not respond.
That is not what made the Premier League the best in the world, both on and outside the field.
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