It has been confirmed that Steve Coogan, man of many voices, will play the former Ireland soccer manager Mick McCarthy and that Éanna Hardwicke, among the nation’s hottest young actors, will play Roy Keane, his former captain, in a film based on the fallings-out in the Ireland camp at the 2002 Fifa World Cup, in Japan.
Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, Saipan – named for the Pacific island where the aggravation kicked off – is to begin shooting in Ireland before the end of the summer. D’Sa and Leyburn are best known here for their work on the raucous Belfast music movie Good Vibrations and on the romance Ordinary Love, starring Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville.
Paul Fraser, who has worked on such acclaimed Shane Meadows projects as Dead Man’s Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass, has written the script for Wild Atlantic Pictures and Fine Point Films.
More than 20 years later, controversy still rages around the dispute between Keane and McCarthy, who disagreed about strategy, training conditions and travel arrangements. McCarthy ultimately sent Keane home, announcing that he would not be playing in the tournament.
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The story has already generated a stage musical, I, Keano, from Arthur Mathews, Michael Nugent and Paul Woodfull. Quotes, some apocryphal, have become the stuff of parody and T-shirt logo.
“I’ve basically had enough of certain things,” Keane told The Irish Times in a famously fiery interview. “I’ve come over here to do well, and I want people around me to want to do well. If I feel we’re not all wanting the same things, there’s no point.”
Keane did not play for his country again until 2004, after McCarthy had stepped down as manager. Ireland have yet to again appear at the World Cup finals.
Coogan has experience in re-creating memorable characters from the north of England. Of Manchester-Irish stock, he has, in a busy career, played the music mogul Tony Wilson, the disgraced DJ Jimmy Savile, the comic Stan Laurel and the property developer Paul Raymond. McCarthy, raised in South Yorkshire, feels like a good fit for the actor and comic.
[ Éanna Hardwicke: ‘There is a shift. Young men are more open’Opens in new window ]
“I am doing a film that unfortunately I can’t talk about right now,” Éanna Hardwicke tantalisingly told The Irish Times last month. We now know what that is. The actor, like Keane a son of Cork, made his screen debut, 15 years ago, as a juvenile, in Conor McPherson’s The Eclipse. In 2020 he was among a host of actors, Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Fionn O’Shea among them, propelled to fame in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. He recently received a Bafta nomination for his performance in the BBC’s true-life crime drama The Sixth Commandment.
“A million words have been written about what happened on that fateful week in 2002 on the tiny island of Saipan,” the new film’s producers Macdara Kelleher and John Keville explained. “Next year audiences will finally get to experience first-hand the feud between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy and why it was labelled ‘the worst preparation for a World Cup campaign ever.’”
Made with the participation of Screen Ireland and Northern Ireland Screen, Saipan is to shoot in both Ireland and Saipan, which is part of the Northern Mariana Islands. Wildcard Distribution plans to release the film domestically next summer. The directors described themselves as thrilled to tell the story “that briefly made a tiny volcanic island in the Pacific one of the most famous places on earth.”
Roy Keane, Mick McCarthy and the pain of Saipan, 20 years on: Part one
A volcanic eruption and Roy Keane is sent home: Saipan, 20 years on: Part two
A nation divided: Saipan, 20 years on: Part three
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