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The best bit of football action in Saipan happens on a tennis court. The forthcoming movie about the schism between Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane that led to the latter departing the 2002 World Cup before it started does not attempt to recreate any of the action from the tournament. In fact, it largely takes place in a decrepit hotel. But we do get one exception: Keane, played by Éanna Hardwicke, practising alone in the grounds. At the back of a court, the sullen, spartan athlete stands as a ball is fired up and over the net towards him. He tracks it with his eyes, opens up his right foot, takes the ball on his instep and kills it dead. And with that, his sporting bona fides are confirmed.
Saipan is a movie about masculinity, about men and their egos. It’s also about an era in Irish history; the roaring of the Celtic tiger, where questions of national identity came to the fore. What it’s not, really, is a movie about football. Which might be a canny choice, because while the world’s most popular sport only continues to grow its audience, football’s track record on the big screen is, how shall we say, like Manchester United after Sir Alex.
“Ninety minutes is what we get in a game, give or take. Films are also 90 minutes. And the experience of the two things are fundamentally different”, says Paul Fraser, Saipan’s screenwriter. “I don’t think I’ve really felt some of the emotions that I feel at a game of football in a film. I get moved by films and profoundly shaken or invested in films, but there’s … the emotion that you get from going to a game which is insane, it’s insane. You know, sometimes I think I’m going to have a heart attack or whatever. And I guess that just doesn’t really transfer over too well.”
Fraser is a football enthusiast and believes there is no shortage of tales to be told from its world. He says he has had conversations over developing a biopic of Paul Gascoigne, is fascinated by the biography of Barcelona legend Andrés Iniesta, and briefly considers the Guardian’s suggestion that he should write a farce about Sepp Blatter’s Fifa. But he says the stories stand a much better chance of working when “you focus in on people.” The accounts of Gazza or Keane and McCarthy, he says, are “a different proposition to the sporting narrative: ‘it’s the 90th minute will they score the winner?’ That’s kind of the most boring, generalised kind of narrative that you can do. And that’s why maybe they fail.”
Fraser says this was a lesson he had to learn a long time ago. A day-one collaborator of Shane Meadows, their first film together was an abortive attempt at a football movie. TwentyFourSeven was originally a tale based on the pair’s experience in a grassroots football team. “Our best score was like 24-0 against a prison side and we lost,” Fraser says. “There were people getting stoned while the opposition were having a corner. It was just debauched.” But when it came to matching the tensions and passions off the field with the action on it, it just didn’t work. “We felt that football, for some reason, didn’t lend itself too well, visually, to cinema,” Fraser says. “Escape to Victory is a brilliant film, but there’s something about the football sequences in there that feels a bit flat.” So the location was moved from the football pitch to a boxing ring, Bob Hoskins was cast as the passionate outsider coach Alan Darcy, and a new chapter in British cinema began.
TwentyFourSeven came out in 1997, five years after the launch of the Premier League and the same year as the big screen adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. The years since, according to Stephen Glynn a lecturer in film at De Montfort University and author of The British Football Film, have been a boom time for football movies.
“There have been [many] more football films of late,” Glynn says, citing as a possible cause the same gentrifying trends that swept through football itself (captured in the coinage “the prawn sandwich brigade” devised by one Roy Keane). “Certainly before the second world war, professional football was really not seen by studio executives as appropriate for a cultural product. Postwar, you have football comedies that are largely working-class northern tales, Arthur Askey is in one for example. When you reach the 60s you start to get the pop star footballers like George Best and so on, but really it’s more in the last 30 years since people like Nick Hornby kickstarted a more middle-class interest in football that the interest in making movies has grown too. What did he call them? ‘The soccerati’, I think.”
Despite that expanding interest, the tracklist of 21st-century football films is largely one clanger after another. From Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001), to the Goal! trilogy (part 3 was released straight to video in 2009) to the 2014 non-farcical history of Fifa, United Passions (funded by Fifa, with Tim Roth playing Blatter), the list is gormless. Only Bend It Like Beckham from that era could be described as memorable entertainment and this was a story whose world was set at a counterpoint to the men’s professional game. At the same time, however, there was the arrival of compelling football documentaries, from Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, to Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona (or, alternatively, Maradona by Kusturica). These movies worked in the cinema, capturing the personalities of their protagonists effectively, but more importantly the action too.
“Most footballers can’t act. You know, hello, David Beckham in Goal! So any film with a claim to realism sort of falls down when it tries to do the match action,” says Glynn. “Fans know it’s fake because we expect full framing from football. A player I always really admired was [Arsenal and France striker] Thierry Henry and in part it was because of this notion that if ever you stopped the frame, he looked poised. He looked elegant. And I know that the exact same point has been made about, say, Fred Astaire. You watch his dance numbers, there’s minimum editing, what you see is what you get. You know you are watching a consummate artist. And football films struggle with anything like that.”
These movies, especially those set in the modern day, could be stuck in a bind. On the one hand unable to accurately replicate the on-field drama, on the other, attempts at telling stories off the pitch often come up against the expectations of supporters (they are, after all, a fandom). Saipan has met with favourable reviews in Ireland, but also been the subject of pushback from pundits and fans over a perceived looseness with the facts, particularly over the levels of drinking that pervaded the Irish camp in 2002. One scathing piece in the Irish Times by former international Kevin Kilbane begins: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
In explaining the process behind crafting Saipan, Fraser repeats precisely the same phrase with a very different emphasis. “I didn’t speak to any player or any actual person who was there, so it’s a story. It’s a made-up story,” he says. “What did Mark Twain say? Don’t let truth get in the way of a good story. If I was doing a project where I was talking to them and working with them, then that creates a different story and a different process. I think one of the players said something like five stars for the film, but no stars for the accuracy. And I think that would have been something that would start to bog me down. I might have got a few elements of truth from speaking to them, but I think it was certainly better not to engage.”
Fraser says that the intention was to write a football film that would speak to audiences that didn’t follow the sport, emphasising instead the humanity that lay underneath these two feuding athletes. “When the producers brought me the idea, I think they wanted someone who was slightly detached, because this has been described as being the most important unimportant event in Irish history. It’s hard not to have an opinion if you’re in any way engaged with football over there. But, for me, I just remember that moment when [Keane] was walking the dog in the country lane after coming home and that was my sort of in. When I started to look and talk about him, he’s from my world, Roy more than Mick but Mick as well. They’re both from a working-class background but they’re living their lives on a global stage and under a global spotlight. That I found really interesting.”
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