TAKING ON ROLE OF FOOTBALL ICON

Eanna Hardwicke on huge film about Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy's 2002 World Cup fallout

- BY LYNN RUSK

THE summer of 2002 conjures many memories, but in Ireland it will always be remembered as the time Roy Keane pulled out of the World Cup in Saipan.

The country was left deeply divided following Keane's fallout with then-Boys in Green boss Mick McCarthy in the buildup to the tournament.

The team captain ultimately left the camp before the World Cup in Japan and South Korea after a very public falling-out with McCarthy, leaving the manager to hold together a crumbling situation without his talisman, amid intense negativity from both the press and fans.

A new film starring Eanna Hardwicke as Keane and Steve Coogan as McCarthy explores the intense and complex rivalry between captain and manager.

Directed by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa, Saipan recounts one of the most fractious fallouts in the history of sport.

Hardwicke, 29, a Cork native, says he feels a special connection to playing Keane, having grown up just "down the road" from him.

"It's not just an Irish story," Hardwicke says. "There's something very emblematic about Cork city that I love and adore and, like most Cork people, I probably think it's the centre of the universe. Roy typifies so much of what I love about that city.

"There are broad strokes, of course, those clichés about place and where you're from, but I feel very lucky to have grown up there. To get to play someone who lived just down the road, barely a mile from where I grew up in Glanmire, is bizarre. You don't get to do that very often, and it was really cool.

"And it was nice, too, because Steve played Mick, who's second-generation Irish from the north of England, that's a very specific regional identity as well. So we both got to bring something personal to it."

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