Whose side were you on during the Civil War? I’m not talking about the 1922 one caused by the rift between Dev and Michael Collins. I mean the one that impassioned maybe even more people in 2002.
Yes, my friends, that was the year Mick McCarthy sent Ireland’s best player home from the World Cup. By doing so, he guillotined any chance we had of progressing in the competition.
He felt he had to. Roy Keane savaged him verbally in front of the team at a press conference. His pride was at stake. But why didn’t he wait until after the matches were played to sanction him? That was the problem.
Would Manchester United have done as well on the world’s stage if Matt Busby red-carded George Best for drunkenness? Would the team have been as successful as they were if he sidelined him for lack of fitness caused by his wild lifestyle?
Of course not. Genius is often accompanied by bad behaviour. I met Mick McCarthy once and said that to him. He took the point but it was too late. We were out.
The feud between Plastic Paddy realpolitik and Red Misted Cork tempestuousness is captured bril-liantly in Saipan (15), opening in cinemas soon. It stars Eanna Hardwicke (Roy) and Steve Coogan (Mick). Roy’s outburst is the central scene, and the best one. It’s flawlessly written and brilliantly act-ed.
Neither actor looks that much like the character they play. They make up for this with expressions and gestures – and impeccable Mayfield and Barnsley accents.
Their set-to was inevitable even without the catalyst of Roy’s explosive interview with the now-disgraced Tom Humphries in The Irish Times, or Mick’s accusation that Roy faked an injury in a previ-ous match.
This is an amazing film. It excellently captures the buzz surrounding the lead-up to the epitomic match. This eclipsed the match itself. Everyone had an opinion on it, from Bertie Ahern down to the guy who took out your bins. 23 years later, we’re still talking about it – and making films about it.
It was a watershed moment in Irish soccer. The moment, one might say, when we were forced to out-grow our acceptance of “noble defeats” in favour of Roy’s classic mantra of “Fail to prepare,
prepare to fail.”
Up until Troy Parrott’s recent heroics, we’ve been back in the doldrums in international soccer. Jack Charlton’s “Hail Mary” passes didn’t find any more favour with Roy than McCarthy’s cavalier attitude to World Cup qualification. These are buttressed here by Mrs McCarthy’s advisory apothegms, her hints about painting the garden fence.
But Jack got us to the business end of the tourney in those unforgettable summers of 1990 and 1994. Let’s not forget that. Would we have fared any better if Roy was managing us? At times he appears to be in “Saipan.”
His increasingly beleaguered boss looks as if he’d gladly pass the chalice to the would-be messiah of the astroturf.
