Roy Keane’s World Cup walkout brought to life in a drama that cannot quite pick a side

Saipan review.

The long-running debate over Roy Keane’s abrupt exit from the 2002 World Cup squad is reopened with a drama that is confident in atmosphere but far less certain in its conclusions. Screening at the Irish Film Festival London 2025, the film steps back into the heat and humidity of that now-infamous training camp on the Pacific island, where tension between Ireland’s captain and manager Mick McCarthy finally boiled over.

Directed by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa from a script by Paul Fraser, Saipan mixes newly shot scenes with bursts of early-2000s archive footage, reminding audiences just how loudly the saga reverberated beyond sport. Éanna Hardwicke plays Keane with a furtive, coiled energy, giving him the look of a player constantly taking the squad’s pulse and finding it dangerously slow. Opposite him, Steve Coogan turns in a measured performance as McCarthy, a manager caught between the careful diplomacy required in tournament football and a captain unwilling to soften a single edge.

The film’s recreation of the Saipan base is striking. The hotel feels slightly shabby, the training pitch looks like an afterthought, and the routines appear loose. Keane’s growing irritation is shown in a series of sharp, almost claustrophobic moments: the rusted air-conditioning unit that coughs rather than cools, the limp sandwiches served at breakfast, the teammates drifting between pool and bar as though on a package holiday rather than preparing for a World Cup. These details do more than set a scene; they give weight to the sense of frustration that fuelled Roy Keane’s walkout.

Where Saipan wavers is in its perspective. For much of the running time, the film leans gently towards Keane, presenting him as someone ahead of his time, a professional hungry for standards that the infrastructure around him simply could not meet. Yet in the final stretch the story tilts back towards the old caricature of Keane as a volatile disrupter, echoing the headlines of 2002 without fully interrogating their fairness. The result is a climax that feels knowingly tense but not entirely convincing, as though the filmmakers stepped back from the very question they set out to explore.

Hardwicke and Coogan are compelling whenever they share the frame. Hardwicke conveys Keane’s intelligence and dry humour alongside the simmering dissatisfaction, while Coogan gives McCarthy a stubbornness that feels grounded rather than comic. Their characters spark against one another, but just when a deeper conversation seems possible, the script retreats, leaving the larger questions of leadership, pressure and responsibility only lightly sketched.

The film also assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge. Those who lived through the original Saipan dispute will recognise the beats instantly. Newer audiences may find themselves wanting a clearer explanation of why this story mattered so deeply, and why it still does.

There is no denying Saipan’s ambition. It captures the atmosphere, the personalities and the national weight that hung over Ireland in 2002. What it never quite manages is a settled view of its central figure. Keane remains a man onto whom everyone projects their own version of right and wrong. The film mirrors that uncertainty. It entertains, provokes and rekindles old arguments, but it ends with the debate still running, much like the real story itself.

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[Image Credit | Irish Examiner]

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