Modest Dalglish dedicates his knighthood to familyandfriends
LIVERPOOL and Celtic great Kenny Dalglish dedicated his knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours to his family and everyone involved in his career after admitting it “doesn’t feel right” receiving the personal accolade.
‘King’ Kenny, as he is belovedly known by millions of football fans, has become, to give him his full, formal title, Sir Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish.
But the 67-year-old will not be signing himself as ‘Sir Kenny’ and is keen for the work which brought the recognition — rather than the recognition itself — to be the focus of attention.
And what a body of work it is. From extensive honours on the pitch — including winning three European Cups in seven years as a player — and lifting league titles with two different clubs as manager to off-field heroics in the wake of the Hillsborough Disaster, where 96 people died in 1989, and his charity work with wife Marina which had raised more than £10million.
“Obviously it takes everything you have done in your life into consideration,” said the Scot, who joked he thought the citation was a bill from the taxman when it dropped through his letterbox.
“Football was part of it and a very important part of it. So is the charity that we have in Marina’s name and obviously Hillsborough must have been part of it as well.
“Someone in their wisdom has thought it was deserving of some recognition. I am hugely proud to have accepted the accolade.
“You start off in your life just hoping to be a footballer. You become a footballer and have a bit of success and that seems to give you a platform to go on to other things.
“We only set out to do the best we possibly could, even through all the other stuff.
“The charity or Hillsborough; it was to help people because somebody helped us.”
Aim for the moon and you may hit a star...or so say the quasi-motivational posters attempting to inspire bleak classrooms and offices the world over.
It may well have been what Shane Logan was thinking when he first sat behind the big desk at Kingspan Stadium and outlined what his plans were to take Ulster Rugby forward.
“Whatever plan we put together has to deliver Ulster being top of the pile in Ireland, Europe and indeed the world,” said the new CEO in 2010 before doubling down. The northern province would, he added, become a “world-class organisation on and off the pitch.”
That was eight years ago now but by the time he walked away from Kingspan Stadium yesterday, if you’d heard the old ‘best team in the world? They might not even be the best team in Ulster’ joke once then you’d surely heard it 1,000 times.
His aggrandizing statements were used as a stick to beat him with when things turned sour, as they seemed to at every turn last year, and indeed it wasn’t just fans who aired their misgivings. Former stalwarts like Stephen Ferris, Neil Best and Paddy Wallace all made their feelings known too.
While there is nothing wrong with lofty goals, the bombast was only the start of a complicated relationship between Logan the CEO and Logan the public figure that reached an apparent nadir earlier this year.
With Director of Rugby Les Kiss gone in January, quickly followed by his supposed replacement Jono Gibbes, the radio silence from the supposed chief of the organisation was not a good look, there would be no meetings with the media and a once visible figure became conspicuous by his absence.
When he eventually emerged in March, the timing, tone and method of delivery were all wrong on an almost incalculable level. A self-managed YouTube statement on in-house media channels, released as Ireland were in the process of clinching a Six Nations title, and that made a tenuous link between a mere game and atrocities of war and ‘The Troubles’ left many instantly nostalgic for the time when things had gone oddly quiet.
If there was a feeling on more than one occasion last year that Ulster couldn’t get out of their own way, more often than not it seemed as if it was a problem coming from the top down. PR crises were 10 a penny and something had to give.
When put to him by this newspaper that his position had become untenable less than two months ago, he rejected the notion out of hand.
“My role is not in question. A CEO, in both good times and in difficult times, has to find the way to move forward. In my eight years, we’ve had six and a half years and we’ve had a very tough last year. What we have to do is keep moving on towards positive territory. No organisation goes through universally good times, it’s how we respond to the bad times that defines us,” he said.
“My role is to keep us moving on to the best possible territory. We will back our academy, we will back our investment. If we look at recruitment, we’ll have Jordi Murphy, Marty Moore and Will Addison, we might potentially have more and if we take Marcell Coetzee hopefully back next season, I think there is considerable reason for optimism. It won’t be easy but I think we’ll do the best that we possibly can.”