To be a member of the Ireland Football team in the year 2002 is to be housed in an old run-down room in an old run-down hotel. The air conditioning is furred with dust and rust and lint; when switched on it emits a sleep-obliterating whine. The lobby maintains a gone-to-pot look and feels dead, as if the air has all been squeezed out. The training ground is so shoddy—“We’re training on an assault course”—that an asphalt car-park surface would be less likely to cause career-limiting injury. A mangy goat nonchalantly chews the turf. The platters of food prepared by the kitchen comprise stale-looking triangular sandwiches and the jugs of drink provided are filled with the kind of fruit juice that comes from concentrate and is found in the “basics” ranges at supermarkets. At least the management has prepared a huge cut-out head of Roy Keane, the team’s charismatic captain. Unfortunately it doesn’t fit into the elevator.
“You think the Portuguese are eating cheese sandwiches?” Roy asks. “You think the Brazilians are putting their feet up?” He fumes at a team-mate, “We’re here for the World Cup, not golf, Steve.” But he grizzles most with team manager Mick McCarthy, played by Steve Coogan, the content of some of which is pure poison, to say the least. “We’re going to do the work?” he sputters, requesting poached eggs for breakfast, replacing all the miniatures in the minibar with smoothies, and parachuting in his physio. “We should be prepared. That’s not controversial.” The operation could evenly be described as a shambles—“We don’t have kits. We don’t have drinks. We don’t have sunscreen. We don’t have footballs.” But it’s O.K., the head of the football association tells him, “I’ve sent out for more Nivea and Lucozade,” and meanwhile, “the golf club has given us free passes.” But Roy doesn’t take the off-ramp. “Have you seen the catering?” he asks. “It’s not the Ritz,” Mick says. “It’s not even school dinners,” replies Roy. Meanwhile his team mates couldn’t care less; they guzzle alcoholic drinks by the bottle in the sauna in the evening, manhandle golf buggies in the moonlight, and stuff platters of pastries in the morning.
Late one night Roy bears his soul to a journalist who announces her intention to publish by stuffing a Post-It note under his hotel-room door. The clever, pithy headline simply says, “Fail to prepare. Prepare to fail.” “You need to learn to keep your mouth shut,” his wife back home—which is one of those fierce-looking mansions behind permanently locked gates at the end of an oversized cul-de-sac—tells him. “I’m sorry the papers were harsh,” one of Roy’s pals says. “I don’t read them,” Roy snaps. (This isn’t true—when the “fisticuffs” intensifies, his teen-ager paperboy has a comical role guarding those gates from the assembled photo-journalists.) One of the many skilfully illustrated themes of “Saipan” (Vertigo), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is that the media always wins. Numerous snappily edited audio- and video-montages of radio, newspaper, and television are masterclasses of filmmaking, and invariably settle on one clear shot, of Roy on a rowing machine at his gym, say, and cutting the noise altogether, as if a whistle for a penalty has been blown. At the bad-tempered close of a live radio interview, furious Mick slams down the old-style hotel telephone when the questioning turns yet again to Roy. It is the heyday of the phone-in—“Let’s go straight to the lines”—and everybody wants to weigh in. And when Mick gets a phone call, “It’s Alex Ferguson,” who says, “Roy’s not playing. I’ve sent him home,” the media are front-and-centre in his mind; “That’s my backside in the bacon sizzler,” Mick says. “The press are going to have a field day.”
Roy flies to Saipan with the team (there’s an excellent scene in the airplane’s toilet), but the “will he, won’t he play” melodrama after they land irks the oily head of the national football association, who looks like he enjoys the gustatory pleasures of life rather too much, played by Jamie Beamish. “You need to manage this,” he tells Mick. “Roy Keane is not going home.” The pride of both men is too powerful but eventually short-tempered, snarling Mick is summoned to Roy’s hotel room. “You’re unmanageable, he tells Roy. “No,” Roy shoots back, “it’s you that can’t manage.”
The outstanding actor Éanna Hardwicke, who plays Roy, has the body of a footballer and the timing of Danny Dyer and the jumpiness of a kitten. Every time someone laughs at his (surprisingly funny) remarks, he responds with rip-roaring fury. But there is range to Mr Hardwicke’s depiction too. Take another media interview outside the hotel: he speaks incomprehensibly fast, sniffs, and taps the side of his nostrils with his index finger.
One question posed by Jeremy Paxman is the driving force for the design of the breathtaking set-piece bust up at the end. His interviewee from the football association slips up and uses the word “cabaret.” A huge mistake. Paxo jumps. “But all [Roy’s] ensured is that you are the cabaret.” A hotel conference room is set up as a cabaret venue; crude stage and spotlight for Mick, round tables for the players, who should have brought a large popcorn.
When the whistle blows at the end of the ninety minutes, it feels as if a plump lime has been pulped in a workshop vise. It is the superb editing of the radio collages which linger: pundits, bores, blowhards; interviews, news headlines, talk shows; contributors talking over each other, raising the stakes, uncontrolled hyperbole. The whole decade proved an excellent testing kitchen for social media. “Saipan” is a film of a million details; it’s always moving, like the passing of a football on the pitch. On the whole we like Roy Keane, even though he hasn’t the first idea how to get along with people. “Good to be going home,” Roy says. “What’s your plan from here?” an interviewer asks. “Getting my flight,” Roy replies.
Adam Poole
26th January 2026
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