What If... Someone repeated Eric Cantona's 'kung-fu' incident today?

Sent off for kicking an opponent off the ball, as Manchester United’s charismatic French playmaker completed his walk of shame he reacted to something shouted in his direction in the most extreme fashion: he vaulted the advertising hoarding and launched himself studs-first into the chest of a bloke called Matthew Simmons.

Hilariously, Simmons claimed later that all he had yelled was “it’s an early bath for you Mr Cantona”. Others nearby remember his vocabulary was somewhat more direct.

Nonetheless, it was no worse than Cantona had heard a thousand times before in his career. But on this occasion, perhaps frustrated by what had gone on before, perhaps annoyed at his own culpability in being sent off for the fifth time in United colours, he snapped.

An astonishing moment, best recalled by the faces of those standing in close proximity open-mouthed in shock, it was an incident that propelled the fledgling Premier League from the back pages of newspapers to the front (and in the case of The Sun, another dozen pages in between).

Driven by those with commercial interest to see the story given maximum prominence, and by the Murdoch newspaper empire keen to sell subscriptions to its new pay TV football channel on Sky and delighted that the game’s pantomime villain had given it such it such a compelling dramatic twist, it was the single most talked about item of sporting news in a generation.

But imagine for a moment if it happened now. Imagine if, after trying the referee’s patience once too often, someone like Wayne Rooney was shown the red card and on his way to the dressing room leapt into the crowd to slug it out with a leather-jacketed malcontent.

The world would go doollaly.

This would be the moment when the head of my namesake on Sky Sports News finally exploded. Never mind Jim White Day (the other JW, obviously... - Ed), they’d be still cleaning up corners of the studio a month later.

I was at the game at Selhurst that night, and it is instructive to compare the response we in the crowd had back then to what would happen now.

In 1995, I was in the stand on the opposite side of the pitch to where the row all kicked off. I would not have made a credible witness in court. Although, rather than watching the game restarting without him, my eyes were drawn to Cantona as he made his way along the touchline in front of where the family stand was then situated at Selhurst, I couldn’t really see what had happened.

All I knew was that United’s talisman had got into some sort of ruck with the crowd over there. And all around me, none of others fans were any the wiser. Indeed, I didn’t really know the full extent of the drama until I got to the pub round the corner from the ground after the game, and saw it on the telly.

Even then, we had to wait until the BBC’s highlights programme came on. At which point you could tell something serious had happened because the presenter Des Lynam put on his glasses to read his script.

There was no Sky Sports News back then, rolling out footage of the incident on a continuous loop, with rentaquote talking heads spouting on about how this was the worst thing that had ever happened in the history of civilisation.

If it had happened now, we in the crowd would have been instantly appraised. The Prime Minister would have posted an official statement on Twitter immediately. There would be a vine of the incident up on every web source, there for us all to view on our mobiles. Back then, I didn’t have a mobile. Few in the crowd did.

And while the response 20 years ago was not exactly restrained, with every man and his football following dog anxious to deliver their opinion over the next few days, in this era of news saturation, of social media swamping, the reaction would be ten times as heated, ten times as fractious, ten times as furious.

But then, it is not likely ever to happen now.

Today’s players are routinely dismissed as morally inferior to their predecessors, as greedy egomaniacs incapable of understanding the world around them. The truth is, all of them show the most admirable restraint.

If one thing hasn’t changed since 1995 it is that we fans still believe that our admission fee into the ground gives us the right to unleash the kind of abuse we would never think of using in any other circumstance.

Cantona apparently lost his rag when one idiot called him a motherf****r. Arsene Wenger has to listen to an entire stadium accusing him of being a paedophile. Watch when a player takes a corner close to opposition fans and the abuse that pours in their direction redefines the term vitriolic. And if they foolishly put their toe in the water of social media, then they can expect to have a ton of verbal ordure immediately deposited on their head.

Twenty years on, the surprise is not that Cantona did what he did. It is that in the two decades since not a single player has followed his lead and reacted in that way.

It would never happen to Wayne Ronney because like all his contemporaries he is way too controlled.

Maybe Cantona was singularly bonkers. Or maybe as a lesson in collective constraint, it is remarkable.