When Saturday Comes

[patch]

Football on Film: When Saturday Comes (1996)

This is a new series on The Set Pieces in which Adam Hurrey casts his eye over the numerous attempts to depict football in films. We kick off with When Saturday Comes, starring 90s heartthrob Sean Bean…

 A modern classic? Well, in the grand scheme of the rather chequered genre of the football film, you shouldn’t rule it out.

Sean Bean – gaining some vital experience for his next role in Anna Karenina – remembers the nightclub scene particularly fondly:

“That were one of the highlights of the film for a lot of the people involved. We were in a nightclub at ten o’clock in the morning, with suits on, and there were all these gorgeous birds dancing about with nowt on in front of us. It were a good day.”
 

Bean’s no stranger to the rough and tumble of it all, though, as he told the Mirror while promoting the film:

“Football is a man’s game,” he says [although the film was written and directed by Maria Giese]. “Though women are getting more interested in it now, and they enjoy the matches just as much as we do, but it’s a man’s game for all that. I hope it stays that way – otherwise it will get like American football, where they bring their families and have hamburgers and everything, and that would spoil it for me

The football choreography is refreshingly unspectacular – there are no impractical flying volleys here – and that works to the film’s credit. Bean himself recognises the problems directors have always faced with trying to depict the game on the big screen:

“I like films about football. It’s notoriously hard to shoot and a lot of directors won’t touch it, they just think that you can’t capture it. But I think we did to an extent, because we didn’t concentrate on any fancy moves. We just got the spirit of the game. You know, the thuds and the lugs and the like.”
 

While the fictional Jimmy gathers himself and his senses to slam home the script-completing winner, thus neatly mending all his personal relationships in the process, the very real Sean Bean wasn’t quite as calm at the time.

“I were shitting me’self. I could see the clock ticking [at half time] and I thought, bloody hell. Once I got on I were OK, it felt good.”
 

http://thesetpieces.com/features/football-film-saturday-comes-1996/