On demand: "Saipan"

The directorial pairing of Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn continue their useful project of revisiting leftfield but revealing moments in recent Irish history. After breaking through with 2012's Good Vibrations, their film on Terri Hooley and the Troubles, the pair's latest heads south of the border to dramatise a very different shade of Celtic strife. Saipan concerns the conflict that gripped the nation - and, indeed, no small part of the wider footballing world - in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup: the increasingly noisy discord that broke out between then Republic of Ireland boss Mick McCarthy and the team's captain and star player Roy Keane. A prologue sets the scene - covering the Republic's scrappy progress to the finals via a play-off against Iran, with an agonised Keane watching on from home, injured - before it's seconds out for a surprisingly heavyhitting clash of personalities and leadership styles. This McCarthy (Steve Coogan) is a clubbably bluff relic of the old up-and-under, run-it-off, kick-it-into-Row-Z 20th century game, worshipping at the altar of his erstwhile Republic manager "Big" Jack Charlton. (Like McCarthy, Charlton was himself an Englishman, and the film invites us to wonder whether or not that very Englishness is at least partially responsible for getting Keane's goat so.) Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) is the hotheaded visionary of the game to come (a vision he may have first witnessed on the mainland in his time at the all-conquering Manchester United): professional, driven, determined to seize this moment to win, not just to enjoy a kickaround and a few weeks off. Their rumbles and grumbles come to a head at a pre-tournament training camp on the titular Pacific isle - a key WW2 location - which proves a notable shambles. No footballs were available to train with for the first few days, while the local goats had colonised a pitch that was more rocks than grass, leading FAI officials to distract the players with offers of beer and banana boats. What washes up on these shores is, in short, a perfect storm: while the backdrop inevitably recalls the moneyed farawaylands of TV's The White Lotus, this Keane and this McCarthy begin to eye one another up like Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune in Hell in the Pacific.

The script is by Paul Fraser, who wrote several of Shane Meadows' early features (TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man's Shoes). Fraser's trick here is to feint as if he's merely writing up footballing gossip, but then go another way and write - as he did in those first, breakthrough scripts - about men, and a certain type of man in particular. The movie's Keane and McCarthy aren't toxic in the 21st century sense of the word, but they are tough and tricky nevertheless: hung up on an idea of strength, hotwired to butt heads, pick sides, hold grudges, they're actually fairly similar in some respects, not least in their altogether aggravating refusal to back down and concede a point. (As McCarthy observes of Keane: "What makes him a great player on the pitch makes him a pain in the arse off it.") Early scenes featuring the men's wives (Alice Lowe and Harriet Cains) serve to flag how difficult championship-winning egos like these must be to have to live with - but also the advantages of having the husband-and-wife team who previously made 2019's very touching Ordinary Love behind the camera. Throughout this roiling back-and-forth, Barros D'Sa and Leyburn demonstrate a sharp shared eye for what might be missing and what might better balance this picture out; around Keane and McCarthy's more intense interactions, they wisely pull back a little, allowing us the distance and perspective their petty squabbler antagonists - locked up together in a hotel that may as well be a prison camp - rarely allow themselves. Just on the fringes of Saipan, in the judicious use of archive news clips and vox pops, we also begin to see a film about Ireland itself, found here with one foot in the past and one foot in the here-and-now, with money in its pockets - a result of the fabled Tiger economy - but differing ideas on how best to spend it. Piss it away overnight on leisure and chasing the craic, as World Cups permit, or play the far smarter game and invest in longer-term advancement?

The abstemious Keane, the moderniser in the camp, represents self-determination: weigh his subsequent, stellar career as a TV analyst against the diminishing returns of the McCarthy managerial career, and damn it if he wasn't right nine times out of ten, but - fuck me - is he abrasive about it, flying into even minor misunderstandings with the verbal equivalent of a two-footed challenge. And yet impatience is the moderniser's curse: Fraser gives him a very modern, very relatable anger at the institution (the Irish FA, in this case), and the failure of his appointed caregivers to provide the appropriate level of care. (Cruelly so, during the perceived slight Keane unearths from wounded memory late on.) Here, then, are a pair who might equally have sustained a compelling stage two-hander: the Republic's own Marat and Sade or Danton and Robespierre or Clough and Revie. Coogan obviously has form when it comes to throwback roles: he makes his McCarthy identifiably a "gaffer" rather than one of these newfangled, designer-clad head coaches or directors of football, a weary old duffer whose primary concern in Saipan is what colour to paint his fenceposts back home. And though Hardwicke doesn't look much like Keane, he absolutely nails that electric combination of attitude, drive and prickliness one saw in the player's MOTD era. (Oddly, it's he who lands the film's most Partridgean moment: stomping away from one training session in his stockinged feet, clutching a lonely kitbag.) But Saipan is well cast all round, its supporting players pinning down the personalities of everyone from a pacifist Niall Quinn (Jack Hickey) to a young FAI lackey, visibly elated to be called upon by Keano. In its closing movement, Saipan assumes an unusual shape: the inevitable confrontation is followed by archival fallout that reveals the divisions within the Ireland of 2002 (were you Team Roy or Team Mick?), then a genuinely meaningful ending as both men rue what they've lost to the strains of the Walker Brothers' "No Regrets". (It won't just be Irish viewers who will want to bash their heads together, or at least give them a wobble.) I'm not Irish, but if I were, I think I'd be delighted that these two filmmakers were turning such a thoughtful and imaginative eye to our collective history - and in the modern game, Jeff, it takes real skill to get all of the above into a film that runs to exactly ninety minutes, plus stoppage time.

Saipan is now available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD and Blu-ray through Vertigo Releasing.