An Ireland apart: How Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy's Saipan fallout went box office

Saipan. More than two decades on, one word is still enough to send a shudder down the spine of every Ireland fan. Few place names evoke such an instant reaction – within football, Saipan is only associated with one thing.

Some may not be able to identify it as the tiny capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, or point to it on a map, halfway between Papua New Guinea and Japan. But everyone in Ireland knows it as the far-flung place where Roy Keane and boss Mick McCarthy had the mother of all bust-ups ahead of the 2002 World Cup, leading to Keane’s exit before the tournament had even begun.

Jason McAteer certainly remembers it. Together with the rest of the squad, he was in the room when McCarthy called out Keane over an interview the captain had given to a newspaper, criticising the Republic of Ireland’s less-than-optimal training camp for the World Cup.

Together with the rest of the squad, McAteer witnessed it descend into a furious slanging match. Keane was livid when McCarthy appeared to question whether he was really injured when he missed the intercontinental play-off in Iran that secured Ireland’s qualification, responding by calling the boss “a liar” and “a f**king wanker”.

“I don’t rate you as a manager and I don’t rate you as a person,” Keane continued, before telling McCarthy to “stick your World Cup up your arse, you can stick it up your bollocks”. The Ireland manager responded by sending Keane home. Even today, those who were in the room can’t quite believe it happened.

“I’d been in dressing rooms at club level where there’d been fights, things chucked against walls, players getting pinned by their throats – I thought I’d seen it all,” McAteer tells FFT now. “But here I was witnessing something that I’d never seen before. Usually when there’s an argument, it’s about results, for the good of the team. This was personal, between two people with a lot of history. It grew and grew, to the point it became very uncomfortable. I just thought, ‘S**t, this is only going to end badly.’”

The dispute overshadowed what still remains Ireland’s last appearance at the World Cup. Arguably more famous even than the sight of McCarthy on the touchline celebrating Robbie Keane’s injury-time equaliser against Germany in Japan, was the footage of Roy Keane walking his dog Triggs back in England, fully 6,000 miles away.

The saga gained such infamy that Father Ted creator Arthur Mathews was involved in penning a Dublin theatre production on the events called I, Keano, while another Irish comedy writer made up an entire autobiography for Triggs, spanning 400 pages. Today, the bust-up still resonates to such a degree that it’s being immortalised as a fully fledged movie, simply entitled Saipan, which stars Steve Coogan as McCarthy and is set for release in cinemas in Ireland on January 1, and in the UK on January 23.

Reviews for advance screenings have been encouraging. Like The Damned United, the 2009 movie that depicted Brian Clough’s turbulent 44-day spell as Leeds boss, the implosion of a football great can provide compelling drama.

Saipan: The Republic of Ireland's Diana moment

Glenn Leyburn still laughs about the moment when the Saipan script arrived. A Liverpool fan from Northern Ireland, he’s co-directed three previous feature films with his wife Lisa Barros D’Sa – among them the successful Ordinary Love, starring Liam Neeson. Writer Paul Fraser wanted to know whether they would make this their latest project.

“Lisa saw the email before I did – she shouted from the next room, ‘Oh, there’s a script in, but it’s about football, we’re not making it’,” Leyburn smiles. “Just to be sure, I read it anyway…” He was instantly engrossed. Barros D’Sa may not be a football fan, but they quickly realised that was exactly why their double act might work with this script – whether a viewer already knew every detail of what happened in Saipan or not, the movie had to engage them.

“It’s not that I dislike football, but I’m not an expert,” Barros D’Sa clarifies. “We actually felt though that it was a good way to make the film – it’s an important story to football fans, so we wanted to make sure we respected that side, but also understand why it meant something generally in Irish culture.” At the time, the saga was headline news for days on both sides of the Irish Sea. “For Ireland, it was that Princess Diana moment where programming basically stopped on TV and everything was given over to this story,” Leyburn says.

“Ireland’s taoiseach commented on it, everyone was commenting on it. I can remember the endless Sky Sports News coverage, too, of Roy walking up and down with his dog.”

It’s a scene that has been recreated in the movie, which doesn’t miss the opportunity for some humour amid the furore. The directors make no secret of the fact that artistic licence is used at points, but the fallout is told with the seriousness in which the row unfolded. “It’s a very pure drama, even a tragedy, with these two characters involved in this head-on collision, which happens in slow-motion but feels inevitable,” Barros D’Sa explains to FFT.

Landing Coogan to play McCarthy was a coup. The Alan Partridge star, who has collected a plethora of awards during his three-decade film career, was drawn in by the fact that, like himself, McCarthy is a second-generation Irishman, who may have an English accent but has always been staunchly proud of his roots.

“That was one of the aspects he was really interested in, having grown up in an Irish family like Steve did,” Barros D’Sa adds. “Some people would call Mick a ‘Plastic Paddy’, but his family are Irish and had to leave Ireland for economic reasons. Steve’s brothers were more into football than he was, but he told us that his mum was a big Manchester United and Roy Keane fan. He was our dream casting for that role.”

Playing Keane is Eanna Hardwicke, a star of previous dramas including BBC crime series The Sixth Commandment. The boyhood Aston Villa fan hails from Cork, just like Keane does, so has always looked up to a man who was one of the world’s best players in 2002 – even if he was five years old when Saipan actually happened. At the time, it was the cause of arguments in households across the country, debating whether Keane or McCarthy were at fault.

“I remember it,” Hardwicke tells us, despite his tender age back then. “I can remember that everyone was angry and I was being told by various adults to say this or that! To get to do this, something that was such an influential part of my childhood, playing someone who’s an iconic person from my city, it was all too brilliant to be true. Cork is a small city and we’re called the rebel county. Roy is a character who typified that.”

‘Roy was in a good mood…”

The film has sparked fascination among members of Ireland’s 2002 World Cup squad. “My friend asked, ‘Who’s going to play you?’ – they should have let me play myself!” Clinton Morrison laughs, as he talks to FFT. “I have no clue who’s playing me or if I’m in it, but I can’t wait to watch it. If someone gets a cameo role playing me, I’m happy!”

Like McAteer, Morrison remembers the argument like it was yesterday. Used to high standards at Manchester United, and having had tension with McCarthy since their days playing together for Ireland, Keane had been dissatisfied for days with a variety of elements of the pre-tournament camp, from the state of the training pitch to the fact there weren’t even any footballs when they first arrived. The midfielder had already threatened to go home once – talked out of it by a phone call from United boss Alex Ferguson, played in the movie by renowned impressionist Jon Culshaw. Despite Keane’s discontent, Morrison remembers the Ireland skipper actually being in a better frame of mind before the infamous team meeting in which McCarthy confronted him.

“An hour or so before that, we’d had dinner, and I was having a good chat with him for half an hour about football and the World Cup,” Morrison recalls. “He was in a positive mood. There’s a perception of ‘Roy Keane’s a hothead, he doesn’t have time for people’. He has time for people, he had a lot of time for me.

“But then that team meeting was so awkward – I was sitting two chairs away from Roy thinking, ‘I can’t believe the manager and our best player are having an argument in front of everyone, is this really happening?’ We had a game in a few days and we were arguing about facilities and training kit getting lost, all things that should have been set in place by the FAI [FA of Ireland] months before the tournament. Roy was making really good points about that, but it could have been done in a different way.

“I like Mick, he gave me an opportunity with Ireland, but he could have handled the situation better. If you’re going to confront Roy Keane, don’t confront him in front of everybody. I get why he had to send Roy home in the end though – you don’t want to be disrespected by a player in front of people.”

The movie might not have happened at all but for McAteer – his goal against the Netherlands confirmed Ireland’s progress to the play-offs and eliminated the Dutch. He’d later fall out with Keane, though – unhappy with events in Saipan and what the Manchester United star wrote about it in his autobiography, McAteer had needle with Keane while playing for Sunderland, which resulted in Keane elbowing him and getting sent off. As he walked off the pitch, McAteer gestured that Keane should write about the red card in his next book.

“We felt we’d been let down,” McAteer admits now of Keane’s actions in Saipan. “Roy was such a good player, arguably the best midfielder in the world, and we’d lost him. We had a manager that we loved, who turned grey overnight and was under so much scrutiny. It was horrible to be around that environment.”

Foot like a traction engine

There will be scrutiny as to whether the movie favours Keane or McCarthy more. “We’re waiting with anticipation to see who comes out of it looking good and who doesn’t,” says McAteer. But the directors insist they intended to favour neither. “It’s not a good drama if it’s one-sided,” Barros D’Sa explains. “You want to feel both sides of the story.”

Leyburn agrees. “I’ve heard people say that if you were in Roy’s camp before the film, you’ll probably stay in Roy’s camp, and if you were in Mick’s camp before, you’ll probably stay there too,” he says. “That’s all we could hope for. Both men were doing their best for the country, they both wanted the same thing, yet couldn’t seem to communicate with each other. That’s the greatest tragedy of the whole situation.”

Before filming, the production team reached out to both men, to make them aware of the movie and offer them the opportunity to speak to the respective actors playing them, should they wish. McCarthy wasn’t jumping for joy to hear that one of the most difficult moments of his life was being depicted in a movie, and probably isn’t going to be rushing down to watch the premiere, but did agree to speak to Coogan.

“Steve was keen to make contact, both of our actors did in all courtesy reach out,” Barros D’Sa reveals. “Mick had a chat with Steve not long before we shot the film. They had a really good conversation and Steve was very clear that he wanted to tell the story from Mick’s point of view, so Mick was able to give him a few additional insights that we did bring into the story.”

Keane opted not to be involved. “He didn’t speak to Eanna, but we respect that, we understand,” Leyburn says. Barros D’Sa adds, “We’ve made stories about real-life people before and it’s If Keane ever sits down to watch it, the film-makers hope he appreciates they did their best to portray him fairly – if he thinks differently, no-one would be surprised if he comes out and says so publicly. “He is a man who’s known for his forthright opinions…” Leyburn smiles, if a little nervously.

Hardwicke hopes he’s played Keane in a respectful fashion, too. “I wouldn’t dare want to speak for Roy Keane, but I imagine it’s a strange thing for anyone to have a film made about something that they lived through,” the actor says. “I was a fan of his before we started filming, and even more so afterwards.” Other members of the cast also made contact with their respective players – Niall McNamee, who combines acting with a career as a singer-songwriter, depicted back-up goalkeeper Alan Kelly.

“I know a couple of Irish players, so I couldn’t resist, I asked Andy Reid for Alan’s number and cold-called him,” McNamee says. “I said, ‘Listen, this is f**king weird, but my name’s Niall, I’m on set and I’m playing you in a movie about Saipan.’ He didn’t believe me – he hung up at first because he thought it was a radio show, ringing up as a prank. But he rang back, chatted and became a good mate. He brought his family to my gig in Manchester last year.”

For obvious financial reasons, the cast weren’t flown to Saipan for filming – a few scenes took place in Tenerife, but most were filmed in Northern Ireland. “I thought, ‘It’s set on an island near Japan, where are we going to go and film this?’” McNamee chuckles at the prospect of an intriguing overseas trip. “They said, ‘We’re going to make Belfast look like that.’ I was like, ‘Right…’” Working with Coogan was a thrill, though. “I’m the biggest Alan Partridge fan in the world,” says the Leeds United supporter, who also travels home and away watching the Irish national team. “There were a few days during filming where they said, ‘Right lads, go and have a kickabout.’ To put on the jersey, it’s the closest I’ll get to representing my country – well, unless it’s f**king Eurovision, which it won’t be.

“When I’m with my mates though, it’s usually only a matter of time before I quote something from Alan Partridge. When we were shooting, somebody hit a screamer past me and without even thinking, I just went, ‘S**t, did you see that? He must have a foot like a traction engine!’ Then immediately I was like, ‘Oh s**t…’ I went so red – thankfully Steve didn’t hear me!”

A bittersweet World Cup

Despite one of the worst build-ups to a tournament any national team has ever experienced, Ireland did themselves proud at the World Cup. Draws against Cameroon and Germany preceded a win over Saudi Arabia that saw McCarthy’s side through, before they pushed Spain all the way in the last 16, only losing on penalties.

“I actually think everything galvanised the squad,” Morrison says now. “Ireland squads were always like that – there was a great togetherness.” McAteer concurs. “I played in different Ireland teams, with the ageing players from 1990, in the 1994 team, through to 2002, and we were built on team spirit,” he says, referencing the country’s three World Cup appearances.

“That was our legacy, as part of the greatest Ireland team there’s ever been. We had to roll our sleeves up when we lost Roy. Did it unite us? It probably did. Did it get us through the last 10 minutes against Germany and help get us an equaliser? Probably. It was, ‘Let’s do it for us.’” Nevertheless, there’s still a sadness about what happened in Saipan – a sadness that’s reflected in the movie, at the end of the scene depicting the infamous bust-up. McCarthy was gone as manager within six months, while Keane only returned for nine more caps in 2004 and 2005. But all the bitterness could have been so easily avoided.

“For me, the argument soured the whole experience of that World Cup,” McAteer admits. “The 1994 World Cup was the best six weeks of my life and I craved that again, I’d always wanted to play in another. One of the greatest feelings I’ve had in my life was when we qualified again for 2002, so for that big argument to happen in Saipan and for that cloud to be left hanging over us, it really tarnished the entire experience – I didn’t enjoy it. I was gutted about what happened, absolutely gutted.”

So was everyone there on the fateful day in the Northern Mariana Islands. Saipan will forever be associated with Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy.