Saipan

Finally, someone has returned to The Damned United’s cunning formula for a good football movie: don’t show any football. 

Happily for co-directors Lisa Barros D’sa and Glenn Leyburn’s (Good Vibrations) sports flick, a psychological drama full of quirky touches and dry wit, not much of the Republic of Ireland’s pre-2002 World Cup prep on the Pacific island of Saipan made it as far as the pitch. As still-traumatised Irish fans will tell you, the reward for seeing their team qualify for the tournament in Japan and South Korea was to witness their star player and manager fall out in spectacular fashion.

The two antagonists were Manchester United’s superstar midfielder Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) – these days the furious face of dog walking and TV punditry; back then Ireland’s greatest player – and the team’s wry, Yorkshire-born manager Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan). 

Already minded to stay home, and nursing grievances against McCarthy, whom he considers a ‘plastic Paddy’, Keane is ready to explode when the squad touches down at its training base. Throw in a crappy hotel, rubbery cheese sandwiches, a bumpy training pitch and no practice balls and a full atomic meltdown is ensured. ‘Some people are unmanageable, aren’t they?’ McCarthy notes sanguinely to Mrs Mick (Alice Lowe), before the full horror unfolds. It’s a prophetic remark. 

Normal People’s Hardwicke is striking as the fierce, brooding and ultra-competitive Keane. Coogan’s McCarthy, 50 percent proper football man, 50 percent Alan Partridge, cuts an oddly (and unfairly?) cowed figure – especially for a 6’1” ex-centre back born to embody the phrase ‘no nonsense’.

Paul Fraser (Dead Man’s Shoes) delivers a screenplay of two halves. When Keane is glowering into the distance or stomping across the scrubby Pacific Island after storming out of training, the tone is closer to Takeshi Kitano’s existential gangster classic Sonatine than any Vinny Jones football caper. When it’s the rest of the squad on a banana boat or sinking pints, it’s more like The Inbetweeners in shinpads, with McCarthy as a hapless supply teacher counting everyone back onto the bus.

Whether this tallies with actual events is debatable – it’s hard to imagine the Irish team were treating the trip as a 18-30 holiday, not least because they had a storming tournament when they got there – but D’sa and Leyburn aren’t going for strict reconstruction so much as an exploration of the tensions within the Irish psyche. There’s Keane angrily striving to raise the standards within a sporting culture that’s happy just to be taking part, and the English-born McCarthy, an affable avatar for everything he hates. As the archival vox pops in the final reel show, they divided the country in two. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jan 23.