It began with a tweet from WikiLeaks on Saturday: "Julian #Assange and Manchester United's Eric #Cantona earlier today cross training for #counterintelligenceworldcup." The accompanying photo showed exactly that: the WikiLeaks founder, in his room in the Ecuadorian embassy, eyeing a fitness tracker, next to a sweat-drenched, pretty miserable-looking Cantona. Soon after, film director Romain Gavras tweeted a short video of Cantona huffing and puffing on the running machine (the same one, incidentally, that was given to Assange by Ken Loach, who worked with Cantona for his 2009 film Looking for Eric) with the words:
#Assange #Cantona #counterintelligenceworldcup @wikileaks http://t.co/58T5kQbiCp
— romain gavras (@ROMAIN_GAVRAS) July 12, 2014
Beyond that, we don't know much. According to an Assange spokesman, the pair "discussed a future collaboration", which will be revealed "in due course". The obvious conclusion is that they will announce said "counterintelligence World Cup", presumably some sort of misguided five-a-side tournament played by teams of retired anti-establishment footballer-cum-actors and wanted whistleblowers, possibly within the confines of a corridor in the Ecuadorian embassy. But that seems, on investigation, unlikely, since the hashtag was created by WikiLeaks a week earlier as a topical catch-all term for the ongoing stories about Germany's plan to resume spying on the US.
No, it seems more likely that the two are in the early stages of cooking up a film idea. One that, on this evidence, for some reason requires Assange to establish that the former footballer is in peak physical condition. At a guess, get ready for Cantona's star turn in Julian Assange: All-Action Hero. It's probably not the real explanation, sure, but in the face of a sight this baffling, it's all we've got.
