It has been almost a quarter of a century since the infamous events in Saipan. That is still not enough time for many traumatised Irish football fans to want to watch a movie about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That is understandable but unfortunate, because \u2018Saipan<\/a>\u2019 is worth seeing, in spite of its many flaws.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00c9anna Hardwicke\u2019s performance as his fellow Corkman has rightly been heralded.\u00a0<\/p>\n Roy Keane is sui generis. Forget his footballing ability; that dark, brooding intensity combined with a rare intelligence sets him apart from others in his industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n Almost twenty years since he last kicked a ball professionally, he retains his magnetism. People watch football discussion shows and attend live events to hear what Keane has to say.\u00a0<\/p>\n The force of his words has diminished due to overexposure in \u2018The Overlap\u2019 era, but nothing could erase what he possesses in spades.\u00a0<\/p>\n It would be an achievement for a Hollywood A-lister to make himself convincing as Keane, and yet the little-known Hardwicke pulls it off.\u00a0<\/p>\n Steve Coogan is also convincing as the much less remarkable Mick McCarthy. The most impressive part of \u2018Saipan\u2019 is in its depiction of this protagonist-v-antagonist relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is hard to make a football movie. The existence of the most popular sport globally has not given rise to many credible cinematic productions, in contrast to sports more naturally suited to the silver screen like boxing and American football.\u00a0<\/p>\n Soccer is much too skillful for actors to produce lifelike performances on the field, and so a football movie\u2019s strengths must rest on what happens off the field.\u00a0<\/p>\n Directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D\u2019Sa exploit the rich ground offered by the Saipan affair and produce a psychological and philosophical battle which captures the viewer\u2019s attention and holds it for 90 minutes (an appropriate time, that).\u00a0<\/p>\n Where the film falls down \u2013 aside from a script which is too predictable, and factually wrong beyond the limits afforded by artistic licence \u2013 is in its reductive depiction of the Irish camp.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ireland\u2019s 2002 squad contained many remarkable characters who had played important roles in getting Ireland to the World Cup.<\/p>\n With the partial exception of Niall Quinn (played by Jack Hickey), none of them really emerge here. There is the squad and there is Keane, unhappily set apart from them, ill at ease with his teammates socially.\u00a0<\/p>\n Early on, McCarthy is shown being interviewed by a journalist who describes Roy Keane as being unique as an elite level player who could have an impact on the World Cup.<\/p>\n This is a wretched slight against Robbie Keane and Damien Duff, not to mention top-quality players like Denis Irwin and Paul McGrath who had represented Ireland at World Cup level previously.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Football Association of Ireland was always going to be lampooned. Here, the shambolic association is personified by the fictional character of \u2018Dickie Moloney,\u2019 who as the same suggests is badly overplayed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nobody is ever going to defend the FAI. Subsequent developments in the John Delaney era suggest that its underlying culture is unreformable.\u00a0<\/p>\n Irish football was always vastly bigger than the FAI or Roy Keane though, including in those tragic weeks in the summer of 2002 when the nation willed a heroic side on, in the knowledge that our best player was not with them.<\/p>\n Both central characters are shown to be complex, neither is made out to be a true villain, and yet there is a lack of seriousness which spoils things.\u00a0<\/p>\n At a pivotal moment, a fictional phone call between McCarthy (ready to lead his side in Japan) and Keane (sitting at home in Manchester) is inserted into the narrative.\u00a0<\/p>\n This feels like an attempt to lessen the ambiguities at the heart of the dispute, as if the audience was not capable of coping and needed a neater resolution instead.\u00a0<\/p>\n But there is no interpretation of the Saipan tragedy which can be free of ambiguity, from its genesis to its end.\u00a0<\/p>\n In late 2001, Keane made a mistake by needlessly opting out of the crucial second leg against Iran on grounds of injury (after all, he played a full 90 minutes for Manchester United 48 hours later<\/a>); McCarthy made a similar error when he threw this in his captain\u2019s face at a decisive moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n McCarthy should not have tolerated years of FAI incompetence as his perfectionist talisman\u2019s patience were worn down; Keane should have recognised that a talented squad was peaking in spite of all this.<\/p>\n Keane should not have spoken to a journalist after the initial bust-up on Saipan had been resolved; given that Keane\u2019s comments were substantially true, McCarthy should not have confronted him in front of the entire squad.\u00a0<\/p>\n Knowing even some of the facts, you cannot take either man\u2019s side fully. As the chairman of the naval tribunal tells Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington\u2019s characters at the end of \u2018Crimson Tide<\/a>\u2019: \u201cYou were both right, and you were also both wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Ireland was for a time divided into two fractious camps each arguing for their own position, in a dispute which is occasionally compared to the Civil War.\u00a0<\/p>\n By focusing too much on the two men involved, a crucial actor is almost ignored here: the Irish football public.\u00a0<\/p>\n Similar to the Italia 90 experience, what happened at home in Ireland was as important to the Saipan affair as what happened on that Pacific island.<\/p>\n All we get here is a brief vox pop which does not do this justice. The Irish people watching on, like the Irish squad, are skipped over with ease.\u00a0<\/p>\n A more complex and nuanced take could have been presented here, and would possibly have turned an enjoyable movie into an outstanding one, worthy of its main star\u2019s formidable performance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n This sense of partial fulfilment is apt. Saipan is a tragic controversy about what could have been. You do not have to be a football fan who takes Shankly\u2019s words about it being a matter of life and death seriously to ponder over what could have happened if Ireland had had Roy Keane available, particularly against Spain in the last 16.<\/p>\n That Irish team with Keane in it was not going to win the World Cup \u2013 the Brazilian team of Ronaldo, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho was unstoppable \u2013 but they were on the weaker side of the draw, and there truly was a path to reaching the final. Being beaten in a World Cup final would have been Ireland\u2019s greatest sporting accomplishment and Roy Keane\u2019s as well.<\/p>\n Perhaps this possibility still torments him along with his other demons. But Roy Keane\u2019s burning rage goes hand-in-hand with his burning desire.\u00a0<\/p>\n When we look back to the decisive victory over a world class Dutch side at Lansdowne Road which led to Ireland qualifying for the World Cup, two iconic Roy Keane moments stand out.<\/p>\n Firstly, the clattering<\/a> of Marc Overmars 30 seconds in, which set the tempo immediately. Secondly, more importantly, Keane\u2019s role in Ireland\u2019s winning goal<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n He gets the ball in the middle of the pitch. He goes one way and then the other, rounding his Dutch opponent while showing a technical ability well beyond that of his teammates. He surges forward as the crowd begins to roar. Before he is cut down he gets the ball safely to Duff, who passes to Finnan, who passes to McAteer\u2026<\/p>\n The twin components of his persona were inseparable in that match and during his whole career, and the creators of \u2018Saipan\u2019 make that clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n An opening montage of his career highlights quickly turns into a montage of his red cards, his lashing out and his most shocking tackles. Violence, brilliance, defiance, leadership, rebellion.\u00a0<\/p>\n He wouldn\u2019t have been Roy Keane without all of it gelled together. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has been almost a quarter of a century since the infamous events in Saipan. That is still…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,1043,61,60,272,270,563,271,55729],"class_list":{"0":"post-227539","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-mick-mccarthy","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-review","15":"tag-roy-keane","16":"tag-saipan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}