I knew I’d be traumatised by Saipan and I was. I left this early screening of a film that will reopen old wounds for many people, feeling shaken and sad and weighed down by what might have been.
And what might have been would have been magical. It’s easy to forget it now, but the 2002 World Cup was our best – and perhaps only – chance to make a meaningful mark on the biggest footballing stage.
Some will laugh at the suggestion, but we could even have won the World Cup that year, or at least made it to the final, instead of losing a heartbreaking penalty shoot-out to Spain in the last 16.
We had the players – Given, Harte, Duff, Staunton, Quinn, Finnan, Robbie Keane – all playing at the highest level in England. And we had the best midfielder in the world – the world – in Roy Keane.
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Until suddenly we didn’t.
There is a moment three-quarters of the way through this epic film that, in a parallel universe, might have marked the end of a story in which we all lived happily ever after.
Tensions between Keane, portrayed amazingly by Éanna Hardwicke, and manager Mick McCarthy, played marvellously by Steve Coogan, over the training facilities and the absence of footballs and the stupidity of the FAI and the booziness of a players’ barbecue with the media have come to a head.
But, against all the odds, the issues have been resolved.
Keane is staying and the lightened mood allows his team-mates tease their captain with a plate of cheese sandwiches for breakfast. Everyone laughs to a soundtrack of This Is The One from the Stone Roses. But no amount of willing the credits to roll then can stop what everyone in the cinema knows is coming next.
And while Keane’s surgical evisceration of McCarthy in the ballroom of the Saipan hotel where they have unfortunately found themselves is fabled, the manner in which it plays out on screen is devastating. It is hard even for those of us who have spent the guts of a quarter of a century in Keane’s camp not to feel some sympathy for McCarthy.
There are certain licences taken with the story and I can’t help feeling relieved that the tiny, but not irrelevant, role played by The Irish Times website, where I worked at the time, is ignored.
The interview that ruined everything – the one in which Keane detailed his issues with the team’s World Cup preparations – appeared in two parts on our site just before lunch Saipan time.
Minutes after it did, at least one of those parts – the worst part – was being printed out at an internet cafe in Saipan and handed to a furious McCarthy. The printout does feature, but its source is hidden from view as is the journalist responsible.
That was former Irish Times sports writer Tom Humphries, who was subsequently jailed for the sexual abuse of a child. In the film the journalist is a woman who – for reasons best known to the scriptwriters – betrays Keane by publishing the piece the day before the team departs for Japan and not, as promised, when the tournament ends
The FAI characters are works of fiction, too, and cartoonishly idiotic while the booziness of the team in Saipan seems a bit over the top.
But such details aside, the story is as faithful to what happened as it can be and it is a quite brilliant retelling of a traumatic time in sporting history.
You won’t want to miss it, but as you leave the cinema serenaded by Scott Walker singing No Regrets, prepare to feel weighed down by many regrets and don’t be surprised if you are once more haunted by the ghosts of what might have been.
The film is released in Irish cinemas on New Year’s Day
