A new film attempting to dramatise one of the most infamous rows in football history has landed, but it leaves more questions than answers. 'Saipan', directed by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, focuses on the explosive confrontation between Republic of Ireland captain Roy Keane and manager Mick McCarthy just days before the 2002 World Cup.
The film, released in Ireland on Boxing Day and set for a UK release on 23 January, meticulously recreates the aesthetic of the era. The kits, tracksuits, and press conference settings are startlingly accurate, often intercut with real archival footage. Yet, this painstaking attention to surface detail only highlights the film's deeper flaws in storytelling and historical accuracy.
The Problem with Dramatising Documented History
The central quandary of 'Saipan' is its very existence as a drama. The key incident—a heated team meeting in a hotel restaurant culminating in Keane's legendary "stick it up your bollocks" tirade—was never filmed. However, the many press conferences and interviews surrounding the fallout were.
This leads to the surreal experience of watching Steve Coogan impersonate Mick McCarthy in a recreated press conference, when the original footage is readily available. The exercise begins to feel like an aesthetic experiment, akin to Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of 'Psycho', rather than a narrative that provides new understanding.
Factual Liberties and a Shifting Dynamic
Where the film takes significant liberties, it damages the complex truth of the event. Most egregiously, the script has Keane attacking McCarthy for not being "Irish enough." In reality, no account from those present supports this; it invents an Anglo-Irish tension that simply didn't exist, not least because several key players who sided with Keane were themselves English-born.
The casting also physically alters the confrontation's power dynamic. Coogan, while adept, is 16 years older than McCarthy was at the time and notably shorter than Éanna Hardwicke's Keane. In reality, McCarthy is taller than Keane. The film thus transforms the scene from a clash between a formidable manager and his intense captain into something that visually resembles a younger athlete bullying an older, smaller man.
Missed Context and Simplified Narratives
The film fails to grapple with why the Saipan incident cleaved the Irish nation in two. Beyond a brief montage, there's little exploration of how Keane was seen by many as the embodiment of a new, professional, Celtic Tiger Ireland, while McCarthy represented a more traditional, perhaps less rigorous past. The conflict was a proxy for a national identity crisis, not merely a football argument.
Other changes are less defensible. The film portrays Keane's explosive interview with the Irish Times as a betrayal by the journalist, who allegedly broke an embargo. This is untrue and serves to lessen Keane's own accountability for the escalating crisis.
What Could Have Been
The most compelling moments in 'Saipan' are not the dramatisations but the actual clips from 2002: the crackly satellite feeds, the passionate RTÉ studio debates featuring Bill O'Herlihy and Eamon Dunphy, and the raw emotion of public reaction. This footage captures the authentic texture and national significance of the event in a way the dramatised scenes cannot.
Ultimately, 'Saipan' feels like a missed opportunity. It is caught between a slavish, redundant recreation of what was already filmed and a fictionalised, often inaccurate version of what was not. The film offers the consolation of a simple, dramatised narrative, but in doing so, it becomes less interesting and less truthful than the messy, complicated reality it seeks to portray. Beyond the iconic insult, this version of 'Saipan' doesn't have much else to say.
