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Saipan 20 years on: The inside story of the World Cup row that divided a nation
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Parts 1 and 2: ‘How they ended up in Saipan is such an Irish story. Ray Treacy met an ex-pat Dub at an airport who was living out there’
about 7 hours ago
Roy Keane shakes hands with manager Mick McCarthy after the World Cup qualifier against Holland at Lansdowne Road on September 1st, 2001. Photograph: Lorraine O’Sullivan/Inpho
Fifty-eight years before Roy Keane called Mick McCarthy a ‘c**,’ and a ‘w**er,’ the Battle of Saipan claimed the lives of 50,000 soldiers and civilians, including thousands of mass suicides sparked by Japanese misinformation about the barbarity of the invading Americans.
Or so we’ve been told by the victors, who tend to write history.
This is an oral account of a phoney war, where nobody died and everybody lost, with the factual record diverging over the past two decades depending on each person’s perspective.
“We had a lovely day yesterday, we went up to Suicide Cliff and learned the history,” Roy Keane told The Irish Times on May 23rd, 2002. “I enjoyed that, that’s the nice side of it, but I keep saying to everybody we’re here to prepare for the World Cup.
“I was going to go back up there today to that cliff!” Keane laughed. “Add an Irishman to the list.”
Saipan – the actors
Mick McCarthy – Republic of Ireland manager
Roy Keane – Republic of Ireland captain
Malachy Logan – Irish Times sports editor
Paul Howard – Author of ‘The Gaffers’ and ‘Triggs’
Bertie Ahern – An Taoiseach
Johnny Fallon – Republic of Ireland kitman
Tommie Gorman – RTÉ news and current affairs
Liam Gaskin – McCarthy’s agent and friend
Jason McAteer – Right midfield (interview via LV Bet)
Kevin Kilbane – Left midfield
Chiedozie Ogbene – Age 5
Part I: “The whorehouse of the Western Pacific” – Fifa official, May 2002
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern meets Roy Keane and Jason McAteer prior to the team leaving for Saipan on May 17th, 2002. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho
“I’m banging my head against a brick wall regarding certain issues about this trip. This trip is the tip of the iceberg. From the training facilities to all sorts.” – Roy Keane
Bertie Ahern : The team left the airport the day of the general election (May 17th). I recall sitting with Roy Keane on the steps, of all places. I had a grand chat with him but he wasn’t exactly mixing with the others.
Tommie Gorman : It was like a busman’s holiday. We are all in this together. Saipan was done as a commercial deal. They got it at the right price.
Paul Howard : How they ended up there is such an Irish story. Ray Treacymet a fella at an airport called John White who was an ex-pat Dub living out there.
Bertie Ahern : I think Roy was in bad humour going out. As you would be after a long season. It was a pity some of the senior officials weren’t there at the time.
Kevin Kilbane : I don’t know what it was, but the night before, when Roy arrived in Dublin, he was pissed off. And he wasn’t happy on the plane either. Even by Roy’s standards, there was something wrong.
Johnny Fallon : I’m gonna get murdered for this, but Saipan was idyllic. If you are ever going on holiday, and you have money to spend, that’s where you go. Beaches to die for. Hyatt overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I’m a fella from Cabra so it was a bit out of my league. Two chefs on call any time of day. Then we get on a bus to go to a shit training ground.
Bertie Ahern : This whole thing should have been avoided.
Locals come out to see the Irish team train in Saipan on May 20th, 2002. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho
Johnny Fallon : The pitch was so simple to do and it wasn’t done. Even go up and cut the grass every day or find an American Football all-weather pitch because we may as well have been in the 51st state.
Paul Howard : There was a roaring sex trade on that island.
Liam Gaskin : Mick wanted to bring the journalists together. He wanted a good working relationship with them and the players. They had a BBQ one night and it was like gamekeepers turned poachers and yer man hated all that.
Bertie Ahern : The problem wasn’t that anyone forgot the footballs and the goals, that’s not correct. The problem was one group thought this was R&R and the others thought it was detailed preparation for the World Cup. Of course Roy flipped when he saw that was not what was on offer.
Jason McAteer : Would I go back and change anything? No, because I think the best intentions were always there. Would I go to Mick McCarthy and say don’t invite the press to this BBQ we are having? Well, no, because there was a relationship with the press back then – we weren’t enemies. There was no need to worry about what so and so was going to write because he was our mate. We were all in the same boat, all trying to strive towards the same thing. I could understand why Mick wanted to have that environment because we were all trying to be one big team, whether that’s the media or the team itself.
Paul Howard : Roy has committed himself to this ascetic lifestyle. He is not drinking, he is eating the right things, he is the ultimate professional. And the rest of the players are behaving like the early career Roy Keane, when he was carrying on and missing the bus. He was on a completely difference psychic plane to the rest of them going out there. And then when the gear doesn’t turn up and the pitch is bad, it’s just more of the same old ‘Paddy Irish’ thing that he absolutely hated.
Johnny Fallon : In hindsight Roy should have said he was injured and met up with us in Japan.
Paul Howard : The Sunday Tribune sent me to Saipan five years later to do a piece. The pitch was still awful but what struck me was it was a sex island. Any time I left the hotel for lunch I was joined at a table by a woman trying to chat me up. There were three US navy ships moored off the coast and on shore leave the sailors would come in and there was a very vibrant and lucrative prostitution scene. That was quite clear. I’d say Roy Keane got off that plane and sniffed exactly what I sniffed. This isn’t where you go to prepare a team for a World Cup.
Johnny Fallon : Roy wanted to go home on the Sunday, the Monday and the Tuesday. There is so much stuff buried in this.
Part II: Mick and Roy, a brief history
Q. But you were asked to write a piece for the Niall Quinn testimonial programme and declined?
A. “Yeah, with Cathal Dervan. No way. Not with Cathal Dervan. The same man who three or four years ago insisted the fans boo for me.”
Paul Howard : McCarthy was Jack Charlton’s head boy and Keane didn’t have any respect for Jack. Even from a playing point of view, we had that golden era for centre halves, but under Charlton it was Mick McCarthy and Kevin Moran while Mark Lawrenson and Paul McGrath were in the centre of midfield. I think Keane just looked on that as rank idiocy.
Liam Gaskin : Me and Roy did not get on. I didn’t talk to him and I made it quite clear I didn’t have any time for him. He was just a caustic character.
Paul Howard : At the 1994 World Cup Keane was asked to do a press conference and say he did not have a row with [assistant manager] Maurice Setters. I think Keane hated himself for going along with that, because it was not a very Roy Keane thing to do. Like John Lennon apologising for saying The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.
Liam Gaskin : I remember after the Steve Staunton and Tony Cascarinotestimonial [in 2000], which I sponsored for a client, I was heading to the jacks in Jury’s and just as I was going past the players I said ‘good game today’ and it wasn’t a good game, it was a shite game, and Roy said [Cork accent] ‘It was a shite fucking game.’ So I said ‘I wasn’t fucking talking to you, I was talking to Steve. You had a good game today Steve, well done.’ And I just walked on. From then on we didn’t have dialogue.
Kevin Kilbane : We had all heard the stories. There was a bust-up once on the floor of the team hotel and Mick came out of his room and Roy told him to get back into his room. The relationship was fractured, to say the least, but everyone needed Roy to play. You could never leave him out. He was our number one.
Paul Howard : It started with the very first match of that qualification campaign, where McCarthy was delighted with the 2-2 in Holland while Keane was furious that they let a lead slip. That was the theme of the whole campaign – McCarthy was carrot and Keane was stick. That was the book I was supposed to write.
Liam Gaskin : I personally feel when we played the Dutch and drew three-all [score was 2-2], and we were three-one [2-0] up at one stage, I was at the game, and I feel Keane was responsible for the draw because he kept coming into defence and causing confusion instead of playing up field. This was my personal opinion, watching it. There was one obvious incident where he went for the ball or Stephen Staunton [sic] was to go for the ball and between them they fucked it up and the Dutch got a goal.
Roy Keane looks on as Jeffrey Talan’s diving header beats Ireland goalkeeper Alan Kelly during the World Cup qualifier at the Amsterdam Arena on September 2nd, 2000. Photograph: Lorraine O’Sullivan/Inpho
September 2nd, 2000: On 71 minutes, Ireland lead 2-0 when a Dutch throw clears Keane’s leap, hitting Gary Breen’s chest and falling for Patrick Kluivert, who lays it off for Ronald de Boer to whip a cross to the back post where Jeffrey Talan’s diving header beats Alan Kelly to make it 2-1.
Kevin Kilbane : Roy was immense that night in the Amsterdam Arena. He set the tone for everything we did.
Paul Howard : I signed up to do ‘The Gaffers’ book after the second Holland match in 2001 but I thought it was going to be about this manager and this captain who didn’t like each other, yet somehow it worked. I had to start the book from scratch when I arrived in Japan.
Tommie Gorman : There was a great competitor in McCarthy. I don’t think it was ever the case of McCarthy not having a desire to win. It was a wider issue with the FAI and Keane knew he was running out of time.
Kevin Kilbane : I always played better when Roy was on the pitch. Portugal at home, we were absolutely outplayed and managed to scrap a draw because of him. The Cyprus game away, when we came away with a four-nil win because Roy was amazing. He was probably the best player in Europe at that time. World XI, he was first in the team. People talk about Scholes and Gerrard but Roy was better. Make no mistake about that.
Johnny Fallon : I think Roy’s biggest gripe was with Taff [McCarthy’s assistant coach Ian Evans] rather than Mick.
Paul Howard : There was that Lorraine O’Sullivan photograph of Keane and McCarthy after beating Holland match at Lansdowne Road, and the horrible body language between them. In real time it was exactly the same. She captured perfectly the relationship between the two of them; McCarthy’s eyes lowered almost in a subservient way and Keane can’t look at him.
Read Saipan 20 years on Part III on Saturday
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Interestingly Tom Humphries who did the interview that set the cat amongst the pigeons isn’t one of the actors
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I’d say his eyes lit up when he heard about the late night scene in Saipan 
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Sounds like you’re familiar enough with it yourself…
No. I’ve never been to Saipan.
I’ve never really had a side in the whole Saipan thing but from those excerpts, that Gaskin fella sounds like an awful fucking eejit.
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Have you todays one? That Gaskon lad comes across as a complete clown
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Saipan 20 years on - Part III: The interview, the meeting, the row, the departure
Subscriber only
‘How the meeting didn’t end in physical violence is the mystery of the thing for us now’
about 5 hours ago
Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane pass each other during training in Saipan on May 21st, 2002. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho
Fifty-eight years before Roy Keane called Mick McCarthy a ‘c**,’ and a ‘w**er,’ the Battle of Saipan claimed the lives of 50,000 soldiers and civilians, including thousands of mass suicides sparked by Japanese misinformation about the barbarity of the invading Americans.
Or so we’ve been told by the victors, who tend to write history.
This is an oral account of a phoney war, where nobody died and everybody lost, with the factual record diverging over the past two decades depending on each person’s perspective.
“We had a lovely day yesterday, we went up to Suicide Cliff and learned the history,” Roy Keane told The Irish Times on May 23rd, 2002. “I enjoyed that, that’s the nice side of it, but I keep saying to everybody we’re here to prepare for the World Cup.
“I was going to go back up there today to that cliff!” Keane laughed. “Add an Irishman to the list.”
Saipan – the actors
Mick McCarthy – Republic of Ireland manager
Roy Keane – Republic of Ireland captain
Malachy Logan – Irish Times sports editor
Paul Howard – Author of ‘The Gaffers’ and ‘Triggs’
Bertie Ahern – An Taoiseach
Johnny Fallon – Republic of Ireland kitman
Tommie Gorman – RTÉ news and current affairs
Liam Gaskin – McCarthy’s agent and friend
Jason McAteer – Right midfield (interview via LV Bet)
Kevin Kilbane – Left midfield
Chiedozie Ogbene – Age 5
Q . You hate the loveable Irish thing, don’t you?
A. I suppose so. I accept it, I’m as Irish as anybody, but this has been going on for years. Training facilities, travel arrangements. It’s easy to pass the buck. Everyone here does it. You got to prepare properly though, it’s hard enough as it is. If I opened my mouth every time there’s something wrong, I’d need my own newspaper .
Paul Howard : The relationship had gone bad probably from the time of Niall Quinn’s testimonial when Keane was a no show and McCarthy was asked where Roy was and he said, quite pointedly, ‘I’ve no idea.’
Mick McCarthy (text msg): Hi Gavin. Thanks for asking but no thanks. Regards, Mick.
Johnny Fallon : If we had the Aviva surface and all the kit arrived, I still think we would have had the same problem. All that added to it, but it wasn’t the reason.
Bertie Ahern : That famous interview was with your paper, wasn’t it?
On Wednesday, May 22nd Tom Humphries – a once-prominent sports writer who has not written for The Irish Times since 2011 and was let go in 2017 after pleading guilty to offences including the defilement of a child – filed a straight Q&A interview with Roy Keane .
Emmet Malone (Irish Times soccer correspondent): The piece was supposed to run on the Saturday but Paul Kimmage had also interviewed Keane for The Sunday Independent and I certainly thought that if the quotes he had were as strong then the Indo would want him to deliver early to get in first. Malachy Logan, the sports editor back in Dublin, clearly shared the same concerns when I mentioned it.
Malachy Logan : I realised that this stuff was dynamite. We could be sitting on the interview until Saturday and the Indo wipe our eye. So a decision needed to be made. I talked to the deputy editor of the paper, Pat O’Hara, and told him ‘I want to go tomorrow [Thursday].’ Not the following Saturday when the team would be in Japan. We did not want any spin on it whatsoever. It was Roy Keane in his own words. Not one intro line. Nothing. Interview, bang, so nobody could accuse The Irish Times of having a prejudiced view. The decision had to be made about how the story would be treated on page one of the paper and it was as close as you’ll ever see to The Irish Times ‘going big’. It was in the embryonic days of irishtimes.com and only the first half of the two-page spread went online.
Paul Howard : I don’t think Mick McCarthy would have read that first bit and thought, ‘Fucking bastard’ and then read the second page and gone ‘Well, he said a couple of kind things’. I think they were daring each other at this point.
Roy Keane chats to Mick McCarthy during squad training at the Adagym sportsgrounds in Saipan on May 20th, 2002. Photograph: David Maher/Sportsfile
Malachy Logan : By the time I got up the next morning yer man was thrown out of the squad and I was bombarded with calls from other media outlets. I remember the kids were fascinated when a German TV crew turned up to interview me in the back garden. Everyone was looking for a slice of the action. It was an extraordinary period.
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Johnny Fallon : We had a day off and we were on the beach and I remember putting cream on Roy’s back before his ramble with (physio/agony aunt) Mick Byrne. He seemed kinda okay. Maybe it is the great mask he wears.
Paul Howard : Mick felt really undermined by what Keane said about players, about his own team-mates, in the interview.
Johnny Fallon : I met Mick in this ‘Garden of Gethsemane’ outside the hotel and he asked ‘Did you see this article?’ I said ‘no’ but I had because I rang home.
Kevin Kilbane : Before it all kicked off we went to the see Spider-Man. Me, Jason, and Lee Carsley. We knew a piece had come out and that there was a shit-storm back home.
Johnny Fallon : You have to know Mick, he is very straight and sometimes that straightness overshadowed practicality. A more calculating fella would think ‘Leave it until we get to Japan’ but Mick was like ‘If it was Jason or Gary Kelly, I would pull them, why should I not pull Roy?’ He had asked the players not to speak to the press.
Paul Howard : It was totally calculated to end it. You don’t confront your captain in front of his team-mates, especially when it is Roy Keane, thinking he is going to back down. ‘You made some good points there Mick, I’ll watch that in future.’
Liam Gaskin : Mick is not a devious man. He is black and white. That’s why we are good pals. We see life for what it is, there is fuck all grey, you are right or you are wrong, you say it or you don’t. When that article appeared I didn’t understand the importance of it initially but I said to Mick, ‘He did that deliberately.’
Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy during a practice game in Saipan on May 23rd, 2002. Photograph: Kieran Doherty/Reuters
Kevin Kilbane : I remember the row clearly. I roomed with Niall, which means you are always a few minutes late for dinner. We thought we were the last two down but Stevie Finnan came in after us. Stevie sat on the other side of Niall and then Roy came in, and Roy is never late, so he sat down next to me. All the other lads were on two big tables, with us four on our own. We were just chewing the fat, talking about Spider-Man rather than the article, but then Roy said ‘It is going to go off tonight.’ And I said ‘What do you mean?’ but he cut me off.
Johnny Fallon : We were sitting around for about 10 minutes and the tension was building because we knew something was coming. We had our food and then the band came in singing and we couldn’t get rid of them.
Kevin Kilbane : There was a guy playing Hawaiian music on a Spanish guitar next door. He was great. So before the meeting Gary Kelly went out and got him into the room. Gary and a couple of lads were dancing on the tables. The room was going crazy when Mick walked in.
Johnny Fallon : Mick came in with Taff Evans and Packie Bonner and he had a big black notebook with the newspaper article.
Kevin Kilbane : Mick is just standing there waiting for the guy to stop playing, and he obviously knows what is about to happen, and Roy is just sitting there, waiting, because he also knows what is about to happen. But the room is buzzing until Mick says ‘thanks’ to the guitarist and in a split-second everyone goes dead silent.
Johnny Fallon : Mick didn’t get two words out of his mouth before it started.
Kevin Kilbane : Mick was on my right-hand side, so I had to slide around in my chair to see him, and with Roy over my left shoulder, it felt like Mick was looking at me but he was looking straight at Roy. He pulls out a few A4 sheets and says ‘Roy, I want to address this. I think you owe the players an apology for this piece.’ And Roy says ‘Apologise for what?’
Niall Quinn (autobiography 2002): “It is the most articulate, the most surgical slaughtering I’ve ever heard.”
Johnny Fallon : I was looking around at big names in the room thinking ‘come on lads, somebody say something’. Within a minute it was out of control. Everybody was shocked. Their jaws dropped.
Mick McCarthy (World Cup Diary 2002): “For about eight minutes I am every expletive imaginable from c*** to w***er. I have never seen any human being act like this before. He is delirious.”
Johnny Fallon : He was calm, he wasn’t shouting or screaming. He was Roy. Calculating. Mick hardly got a word in, seriously.
Roy Keane arrives at Saipan airport to return to Manchester on May 24th, 2002. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho
Kevin Kilbane : It went on and on and on. Roy took it that Mick accused him of feigning injury for the second leg in Iran. That wasn’t said. Mick said he went back to play for Man United the following Saturday, which he did. Roy did say, ‘You had an agreement with Alex Ferguson that I was only going to play one game.’
Mick McCarthy : “Eventually Roy starts to repeat one question. ‘You want me to piss off, don’t you?’ He has a point. I have had enough. He has crossed the line. I tell him to go. He tells me to ‘stick the World Cup up my f***ing arse.’”
Kevin Kilbane : Mick said ‘Roy, where are we going from here, because it is either you go or I go and I am going nowhere.’ Roy stood up and said ‘all the best’, shook hands with Stevie Finnan and then he walked.
Johnny Fallon : I’ve seen bigger rows in dressing-rooms where there was a shemozzle and players were pulled apart. My big problem was everyone else was like rabbits in the headlights.
Kevin Kilbane : Maybe I should have spoken up. I’m sure everyone in the room has had that feeling but – putting myself back in the situation after 20 years – it escalated so quickly. There was a bit of shock. Later in my career I would have done something. And I have, on several occasions, stepped in when a player and a manager are going for it.
Niall Quinn : “We look at Mick, who is still shaken and white. How the meeting didn’t end in physical violence is the mystery of the thing for us now.”
Liam Gaskin : I believe he needed a reason to get out. He knew you cannot criticise your team-mates or your manager. If Mick had stood back from that and not addressed it directly the Ireland team had no hope, Mick would have had no control, it would have been Roy’s team. Mick may as well have gone home on the next plane.
Johnny Fallon : I know Roy paid 20 grand for flights for his family. He didn’t want this to happen. It’s the World Cup.
Paul Howard : I think McCarthy wanted him gone. Absolutely. Keane was going, and then he changed his mind and he was staying. All that messing around, I think McCarthy just decided it would be better not to have this distraction.
Kevin Kilbane : Maybe the most experienced players – Stan, Alan Kelly and Quinny – felt they could have done more and should have done more but, really, it almost felt like we should not have been there. It should have been done privately. It might have still happened the way it happened, but do it in a room, with Mick Byrne maybe as the middle man.
Johnny Fallon : It was very fixable. But the problem was we were leaving the next morning. I knocked on Roy’s door later but he didn’t answer so I slipped a note under it.
Jason McAteer : I tried to talk Roy out of it. It was his decision.
Johnny Fallon : Once we left the island it became really difficult.
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Ask and ye shall receive…
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Gentleman.
Fifty-eight years before Roy Keane called Mick McCarthy a ‘c***,’ and a ‘w***er,’ the Battle of Saipan claimed the lives of 50,000 soldiers and civilians, including thousands of mass suicides sparked by Japanese misinformation about the barbarity of the invading Americans.
Or so we’ve been told by the victors, who tend to write history.
This is an oral account of a phoney war, where nobody died and everybody lost, with the factual record diverging over the past two decades depending on each person’s perspective.
“We had a lovely day yesterday, we went up to Suicide Cliff and learned the history,” Roy Keane told The Irish Times on May 23rd, 2002. “I enjoyed that, that’s the nice side of it, but I keep saying to everybody we’re here to prepare for the World Cup.
“I was going to go back up there today to that cliff!” Keane laughed. “Add an Irishman to the list.”
Saipan – the actors
Mick McCarthy – Republic of Ireland manager
Roy Keane – Republic of Ireland captain
Malachy Logan – Irish Times sports editor
Paul Howard – Author of ‘The Gaffers’ and ‘Triggs’
Bertie Ahern – An Taoiseach
Johnny Fallon – Republic of Ireland kitman
Tommie Gorman – RTÉ news and current affairs
Liam Gaskin – McCarthy’s agent and friend
Jason McAteer – Right midfield (interview via LV Bet)
Kevin Kilbane – Left midfield
Chiedozie Ogbene – Age 5
Roy Keane: “Cowards.”
At 7.30pm that same evening, McCarthy, FAI president Milo Corcoran and Brendan McKenna held a press conference in the Chinese restaurant off the Hyatt hotel lobby, which was also attended by new Ireland captain Steve Staunton, Niall Quinn and Alan Kelly.
Liam Gaskin: I would have let the whole thing settle down and I would have dissected it with Mick in absolute detail. Scrutinise every element of it so we knew what we were going to say and why we were going to say it. The FAI fucked it up completely.
Bertie Ahern: There’s always harsh words. I have been in rooms where people have said the most terrible things to each other and then the following morning we have to sit down and continue the discussion. In the heat of an argument people forget what the purpose is. I did [trade] union discussions for years, political discussions, Northern Ireland peace talks. When people forget what the argument is, it gets personal and animosity builds up. Unfortunately, I never got to mediate and neither did anyone else, which is the sad thing about it all.
Paul Howard: It really was one of those times where Ireland lost the run of itself. We thought we were going out there to write about football, and there we were ringing our contacts in Fianna Fáil back home to see if Bertie was getting involved to get Roy back to Japan.
Bertie Ahern: There was a period of about 48 hours where it seemed it might have been possible to try and arbitrate something and calm it down. We were trying to get an arrangement where I would talk to both Mick and Roy, as a soccer supporter, not as Taoiseach, to see if we could mediate. I said I would, if Roy agreed, but by the time the plan was cooked up the second confrontation happened and Roy was in the airport. I remember talking to [FAI chief executive] Brendan Menton and others at the time and there was this basic misunderstanding.
Paul Howard: Brendan Menton was struck dumb by the whole thing. When he got out there he was on the wrong side of the world to deal with it because Roy was back in Manchester.
Alan Kelly, Niall Quinn, manager Mick McCarthy, FAI general secretary Brendan Menton and Steve Staunton at a press conference in Saipan on May 23rd to announce that Roy Keane was leaving the World Cup squad, 2002. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho
Alan Kelly, Niall Quinn, manager Mick McCarthy, FAI general secretary Brendan Menton and Steve Staunton at a press conference in Saipan on May 23rd to announce that Roy Keane was leaving the World Cup squad, 2002. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho
Liam Gaskin: I asked Mick, ‘If he comes back, will you have him?’ and what he actually said was ‘As long as he apologies to the players, the staff and me, of course we’d have him back.’ And he asked me what I think and I said, ‘There is no fucking chance he is coming back.’ I was watching people trying to make contact with him, talk to him, talk around him.
Paul Howard: What completely undermined Mick was what was happening in the background to get Roy Keane back. If there was a question about Keane and McCarthy and who actually got Ireland to the World Cup, McCarthy was getting his answer from the FAI.
Liam Gaskin: I’ll tell you this, and this is an absolute fact, on the flight out to Tokyo I met [a player’s mother] on the plane. I knew her from before, and I asked her what she thought of all the shemozzle and she said, ‘Oh I am delighted.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Why do you say that?’ She said, ‘All the young players are afraid of him.’
Tommie Gorman: If only Des Casey had had a role for the FAI. His work as the Rights Commissioner would have made him very useful but manning the fort back in Dublin was a young man named John Delaney.
Paul Howard: This created John Delaney. He was so young and he went on Prime Time with Dunphy and handled it really well.
Prime Time – Thursday, May 23rd, 2002
Eamon Dunphy: Freddie Ljungberg today lunged at and punched another Swede on the training ground. No one is going to send Freddie Ljungberg home. Raúl, the great Spanish centre forward, is fighting with the Spanish manager, no one is going to send Raúl home. It is only the Irish who will send the greatest player, probably in the world at this time, home and cheat the fans and cheat the nation of the opportunity of enjoying something we have worked hard for, for four years. Now, I know you are a good guy John, you are one of the reformers in Merrion Square, but who is running Irish soccer, the FAI or Mick McCarthy?
John Delaney: Eamon, you know as well as I do, I am treasurer of the association, I am responsible for the financial part of the association. Mick McCarthy is our team manager. I will never cross the line in terms of picking a team. I think Alan Kelly made a very salient point today: ‘What’s the difference between one player going home and 22 players going home?’ There is a problem with team morale out there.
Mark Little: Is there no chance that Roy Keane will go with the team to Japan?
John Delaney: I can’t see any way. If you could wave a magic wand we’d all be delighted to do so, but I think it has just gone a bridge too far.
Liam Gaskin: I always thought John Delaney was a decent enough skin because he was very good to Mick, he kind of understood the manager was the manager, ‘whatever resources we can give we will give him and hopefully he will do the best job for us’. And Mick had a decent relationship with him. Some of us who did business with the FAI may have had a sense what was going on but Mick was gobsmacked when he heard. He literally couldn’t believe it.
Tommie and Roy interview – May 27th, 2002
Tommie Gorman: I went over to Manchester with a cameraman called Conor O’Brien from Belfast, and tried to make contact with people. I discovered pretty quickly that Michael Kennedy was Roy’s agent. This began a lifelong friendship. He was a sweetheart of a human being. Gorgeous man from the Cork-Kerry border or Kerry-Cork, depending on where one’s loyalties lie. He was just pure silk.
Michael Kennedy, who passed away in 2020 age 76, was a London-born solicitor, with parents from the Dingle peninsula, who acted as an agent for several Irish footballers, including Keane and Quinn. Roy Keane once said he would trust Kennedy “with his life”.
Tommie Gorman: We got to Keane’s house in Hale, a fancy area outside Manchester, like Dalkey. He arrived anyway, the excitement was like the arrival of the high king, and you could see the kids in the upstairs window waiting for Daddy to come home. A while later Keane marches out with Triggs. It was like the rumble in the jungle. Muhammad Ali stepping into the ring. Jaysus, fellas running after him and a girl throwing questions.
‘Any regrets Roy?’
‘Are you happy to be home?’
‘Do you have a message for Mick and the lads?’
‘What’s the dog called, Roy?’
Tommie Gorman: Keane had the baseball hat and Triggs beside him, it was such a defiant statement. Off they went into the woods.
Triggs: “Down Bankhall Lane we strode, until we reached our little stile. Roy went over it, I went under it and, for reasons I can’t explain, the crowd chose not to follow us down the narrow, muddy path that led to the Bollin.
“I tried to keep the conversation light. ‘Stick your World Cup up your bollocks?’”
Imaginary Roy: I meant to say, ‘Stick your World Cup up your arse, you bollicks’ but, well, I was on a bit of a roll!
Triggs: “It seemed to me that his anger with Mick had dissipated . . . and seemed to be directed at Niall Quinn and Steve Staunton, who’d sat alongside Mick at his press conference looking obligingly traumatisied.”
Imaginary Roy: Sitting there like two innocent children – ‘never hear the likes of it.’ Open your ears next time you’re taking a fucking corner kick.
Paul Howard: I remember watching those walks on Sky News from my laptop in Japan. I just thought it was so bizarre – Ireland’s greatest footballer walking down the road with a dog as the press pack shouts ‘what’s his name, Roy?’ I just started to imagine conversations between Roy and the dog and thought she would understand the whole nature of hierarchy.
Tommie Gorman: I heard Roy was doing a piece for the Mail on Sunday, giving his side of the story. Often these things would be paid, so I made the case to Kennedy that The Mail won’t reach an Irish audience. We are fair dealers. Martin Bashir had also been on. The deal was it would go out as recorded.
“If I felt for one second, for one second, I was a little bit out of order I would apologise and go back. I’d love to play in the World Cup. Not one person backed me up, not one.”
“What happened to me last week will live with me for a long time but I tell my kids what is right and what is wrong and what happened to me is wrong so the ball is in other people’s court.”
Tommie Gorman: I thought he had done enough to leave the door open. I think he thought that too. I know Keane stayed up to see what the reaction was like.
Liam Gaskin: I waited to fly out to watch the programme with Tommie Gorman. After, I rang Mick, it was about 6am down there, and I said, ‘Yer man is a fucking lunatic. Well, that’s my impression.’ Tommie asked him, everybody has asked him, he is not going to go back. Mick said, ‘Do you really think so?’ and I said, ‘I am telling you, he ain’t going back.’ He just said, ‘Aw fair enough.’ I was being flippant when I said he was a lunatic but I was watching this programme thinking the whole world wants you to do something and you are saying no, no, no . . . He was saying no to everybody.
Paul Howard: I didn’t buy Niall Quinn’s account. Nor did I buy that he was the man that was going to solve this. His classic thing to say is, ‘If I could have turned back the clock I should have done this, I could have done that.’ Niall Quinn shouting ‘stop!’ in the room would not have stopped Mick and Roy moving into the closing scene of the movie. They were heading towards the plot resolve and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to change that.
Liam Gaskin: By the time I arrived in Tokyo, Roy Keane had issued a statement saying he wasn’t going back.
Paul Howard: A lot of managers would have walked. Mick’s innate decency and professionalism is what kept him there because he was really badly undermined. The ham-fisted way that the statement was handled as well.
Emmet Malone: That was the incredible day of the Brendan McKenna press conference [10am], the player statement [10.30am], the Niall Quinn explanation of the player statement [5pm], the Mick McCarthy and Brendan Menton press conference [8pm]. Doors were being closed, it seemed, then reopened and we made what sense of it we could after getting back to the hotel that evening and happily heading to bed in the early hours.
Paul Howard: A complete and utter shambles.
Emmet Malone: Not too long after, the phone rang in my room. It was Declan Murray back in the office.
“Sorry, Emmet, but there’s been a development. Roy has issued a statement. He’s not coming back.”
“What time is it?” I asked, completely disoriented.
“Four o’clock.”
“Morning or afternoon?”
“Morning.”
“Here or there?”
“There.”
“Fuck . . . okay.”
Read Saipan 20 years on Part V and VI on Monday
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As previously mentioned, that Gaskin lad sounds like a prick
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They’re dragging the arse out of the story at this stage
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You dont say?
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Much ado about very little indeed.
The narcissism of the Irish nation played out in public.
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That could have been said 20 days after the incident too, let alone years
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Was the boy Roy in Páirc Uí Rinn on Saturday evening?
They could have made a podcast out of it. (A podder)
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