Roy Keane v Mick McCarthy. Real supporters v the Premiership Paddy Olé, Olé, Olé brigade. Cork v Dublin. Twenty years after Keane’s dramatic exit from Ireland’s 2002 World Cup squad, people are still taking sides in a sporting civil war that has been reduced to a single terrible word: Saipan.
Though far from definitive – neither of the principals is on hand – Saipan: Rebel without a Ball (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) is a gripping pop history of the controversy. Without coming down one way or the other, it conveys the hysteria that convulsed the country as the Ireland captain parted ways with the rest of the squad after a bust-up with the team’s manager on an accursed island in the western Pacific.
‘Roy Keane never started a match hoping for a draw,’ says one contributor. ‘His drive for success was limitless’
You can certainly empathise with Keane. Arriving from Manchester United, he was appalled at what he perceived as a lack of seriousness and self-belief within Irish international soccer.
There was also the matter of Keane, the Corkman, feeling throughout his career that he was treated as an outsider by the establishment. Was he justified to think so? Consider how much more understanding the Dublin media was of true-blue Paul McGrath and his demons. Had McGrath hailed from Mayfield rather than Crumlin, would he have similarly received the benefit of the doubt?
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If Keane and McCarthy are elsewhere engaged, the producers have nonetheless lined up a thoughtful cast of interviewees. They include the Ireland international Stephanie Roche and Keane’s former team-mates Jason McAteer and Clinton Morrison.
A nonsporting perspective is brought by the comedian Mario Rosenstock, who found success impersonating Keane on morning radio, and from Bertie Ahern. The former taoiseach says he offered to intervene between McCarthy and Keane. But not all the Keane’s horses nor all the Keane’s men could drag Roy back to Saipan.
“He was seeing the difference in standards in the Irish set-up” compared to his club, says RTÉ’s former Northern Ireland editor Tommie Gorman, who interviewed Keane after he arrived back in Ireland. “The frustrations were building in him.”
The volcanic side of Keane is acknowledged. “Roy Keane never started a match hoping for a draw,” says one contributor. “His drive for success was limitless.”
Roy Keane, Mick McCarthy and the pain of Saipan, 20 years on - part one
The film is less inquisitive about McCarthy, the second big personality in this smackdown between two leviathans of early-20th-century Irish sport. If Keane was a loner driven by the will to succeed, the Ireland manager cuts a more elusive figure. What sort of coach was he? Having himself excelled for club and country, was he blind to what Keane regarded as a lack of professionalism in the Ireland camp ahead of the World Cup? Or was Keane overreacting? How did Irish preparations compare to those of other teams at Korea/Japan 2002?
[ Kevin Kilbane: Twenty years ago, Ireland could have won the World CupOpens in new window ]
There are the inevitable what-ifs. Had Keane stayed, might Ireland have put one over Spain in the last 16 rather than crashing out on penalties? Keane’s former team-mate Jason McAteer reckons so. “We would have beaten Spain,” he says, suggesting the team could have created history by reaching the semi-finals. “We might have surpassed the 1990 achievement.”
His team-mate Kevin Kilbane went one step further last week, writing in The Irish Times that Ireland could have won the 2002 World Cup. Who’s to say if they’re right? But Rebel without a Ball has fun with the question. More impressively, it revisits a schism in Irish sporting history without obliging the viewer to pick sides. Given the emotiveness of the subject, that is its own kind of victory.
