Saipan ?????
The opening line of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ sees Martin Sheen’s character waking bleary eyed on a bed with his voiceover saying, ‘Saigon ….s**t!’. With a tweak it could be the same for moody mercurial football icon Roy Keane reminiscing about the 2002 World Cup, ‘Saipan ….s**t!’. It was a small Japanese island where the Republic of Ireland football team, having scraped through on points went to train for the 2002 World Cup finals and its where everything…… well kicked off between Keane and the manager Mick McCarthy in explosive style
It all kicked off in Saipan?
It hardly surprising as the film makes clear that for some players its possibly a once in a lifetime opportunity to play in the world’s biggest tournament and Keane was wholly committed to being on peak form for a player who already was arguably the best player in his country at the time. So it’s hardly surprising that when the team arrived at what turned out to be a seen far better days hotel with an appalling football ground to train made worse by the fact that they didn’t even have any footballs to train with. But whilst he committed to eating healthily replacing his room minibar with healthy shakes the rest of the team partied like some Club 18-30 nightmare.
Those lead actors….
Eanne Hardwicke channels the spirit of Keane brilliantly and his nemesis Mick McCarthy is played equally well by the always excellent Steve Coogan, the water to Keane’s fire. And it all builds to a bombastic and vitriolic showdown in the hotels battered ballroom.
So should you see it?
Don’t be put off thinking this is a sports movie, its far more than that with an alpha male star player going head to head with his far more reserved manager quietly working his way through an arsenal of techniques to get the player onside. For Irish football fans this remains a story of much debate to this day just as to who was to blame for what happened and it’s compellingly told in a football match minded 90 minutes economically told with much archive footage that sets the context and that will have you both for and against each man often within the same scene. Saipan is one of football’s great stories and doesn’t take sides but is guaranteed to have you questioning just who scored an own goal.
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We chatted to Glenn Leyburn & Lisa Barros D’Sa, the directors of ‘Saipan’, and asked them what Roy Keane had said about the film……
Here’s the Saipan trailer……
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