Sporting heroes: Pages 78-79
THE PEERLESS MAJESTY OF KING KENNY
THE celebrations after every goal were always the same. Arms aloft, fingers spread wide and his beaming face a picture of joy incarnate. No one who loved football, or played it, could fail to recognise the sheer thrill of the moment. Unless, of course, you were on the other side of the line. But for those of us who were Old Firm neutral, this was The Beautiful Game in its purest, timeless form.
And Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish was the embodiment of every joyous nuance that putting a ball into the back of a net symbolised. He brought a gilded grace to some of football’s greatest amphitheatres — Hampden, Parkhead, Anfield and Wembley, to name but a few.
Yet, the impression was he would easily have mustered up the same elation playing on Glasgow Green.
If football was a religion — and to millions it is — then Kenny Dalglish would be a saint, an apostle who saw the game as an article of faith between player and punter. He was blessed with audacious gifts. Right foot. Left foot. Diving headers. Cutting in from both flanks, bending the ball into the top corner from impossible angles.
The player’s player. Someone you wanted beside you in the trenches. And, even better, he was whip-smart Scottish, with all those trademark traits of nationhood hardwired into his psyche. Often dour, sometimes prickly, occasionally impish, funny, albeit humour laced with biting Glaswegian sarcasm.
What lay beneath, however, was always trumped by the sight of Dalglish the footballer. He was — and remains — the most peerless practitioner of his art that ever rolled off this country’s conveyor belt of talent. If all that sounds a trifle overcooked, consider the evidence, m’lud.
He is out of sight as this country’s most decorated player. His record of 102 appearances for the national team will likely stand in perpetuity; he is bracketed alongside Denis Law as having scored more goals than anyone else for Scotland, a benchmark that also may never be eclipsed; and his medal haul with Celtic and Liverpool, with whom he garnered three European Cup wins, provide another matchless measure of greatness.
North of the border, he wore the Hoops of Celtic 322 times, stacking up 167 goals for Jock Stein’s side. Winners’ medals accompanied four league titles, four Scottish Cups and one League Cup.
Forgotten was the fact he grew up in the shadow of Ibrox and, as a boy, waited for the call from Rangers that never came.
At Liverpool, he racked up 502 appearances, winning six league titles, one FA Cup and four League Cups. In 1983, he was pipped to the Ballon D’Or by Michel Platini. Among his supporters, there was a justifiable feeling of: ‘We wuz robbed.’
How could he then not be the venerated inspiration for a generation of pimplyfaced Scottish schoolboys during the seventies and eighties? He was a Roy of the Rovers figure, a comicbook hero made of flesh and blood. But those moments have been calcified by time. So it’s important that we occasionally flick through Dalglish’s scrapbook and relive those magic, sepia-tinged days.
Remember, for example, the bullet header in the 1977 World Cup qualifier against Wales at Anfield to ensure Scotland reached the finals for the second tournament in succession.
And then there was the sublime goal he scored to guarantee Liverpool the European Cup in 1978 against Club Brugge.
Less glamorous was the shot that nutmegged future Liverpool teammate Ray Clemence to send the Tartan Army into rapture — but it still gave us victory over Don Revie’s England in 1976 at Hampden.
More spectacular were the memorable goals against Belgium in Brussels and Spain, which lit up the national stadium, and are embedded in memory. A poke in the eye for those kilt-wearing conscripts who bizarrely complained Dalglish never brought his A-Game to
Scotland. Utter tosh. A century of caps proves the naysayers wrong.
But these are mere snapshots from a momentous 22-year playing career that would ultimately mix triumph with tragedy.
The years spent at Anfield provide a Technicolour bookend to the foggy black and white 1970s footage that survives of him playing for Celtic. But all the building blocks of greatness were already in place — the vision, the speed of thought and that God-given talent to do the impossible.
In that era, he was only a few rungs below Pele, Cruyff and Best.
Yes, he was good. When he left Celtic for Liverpool in 1977 as a replacement for Kevin Keegan, the gripes of wrath set in among the Parkhead faithful. Somehow his departure was viewed as some kind of betrayal, the self-centred notion fans cling to that the grass is never greener.
The £440,000 that swilled into the club’s coffers — then a British transfer record — was casually forgotten about. He was, though, a prophet too quickly forgotten in his own land. One book on Celtic cult heroes incredibly omits his name while outlandishly lauding the likes of Roy Aitken and Shunsuke Nakamura.
Conversely, though, his brief but ignominious return to Celtic as director of football in 1999 undoubtedly left a messy stain on his reputation. It didn’t end well. There was also a lingering resentment from some fans over a perceived friendship with former Rangers owner Sir David Murray.
At Liverpool, however, the appreciative roars from the Kop quickly crowned him King Kenny, an epithet that spoke warmly to a majestic footballer.
Anfield became his spiritual home. In teams that contained such luminaries as Souness, Hansen, Thompson, Grobbelaar and Rush, Dalglish’s star power outshone them all. His arrival on Merseyside helped to elevate Liverpool into one of the world’s finest teams. And Match of the Day only served to widen his audience. Souness, never one to throw compliments about like confetti, lauded him as world-class. Billy McNeill, a shrewd judge of player, ranked him as one of the finest ever to have played for Celtic. More pointedly, George Best said he would be the first name ringed on his teamsheet. Every time. For so long, it seemed Dalglish’s legacy would be that of a peerless player. Until the moment fate laid a chilling hand on his shoulder. It was always a cruel parallel that, alongside the magnificence of his playing achievements, Dalglish also bore
intimate witness to three of the worst tragedies seen in British football.
He was at Ibrox as a Rangers fan and Celtic junior when 66 people died after the crush at an exit stairway during an Old Firm game in 1971. He was on the pitch for Liverpool at Heysel in 1985 when 39 supporters died in rioting before the European Cup final against Juventus and on the touchline as Liverpool manager at Hillsborough, the moment that delineated the club’s entire future — and, sadly, Dalglish’s life.
Ninety six fans lost their lives amid the carnage on those overcrowded terracings — and Dalglish, as the face of the club, attended almost all the funerals with his wife Marina.
He may have made his name on the field, but the aftermath of Hillsborough revealed the true measure of the man. He tirelessly organised hospital visits and attended annual memorial services held at Anfield.
He didn’t do it for acclaim or some self-reward; he did it because it was the right thing to do. He became a crusader for justice, uniting the supporters of Liverpool and Everton and played a significant role in galvanising a city demarcated not just by football but by tragedy.
It was not what he would have wished on anyone. No one will ever forget the sight of Dalglish gazing out solemnly from the Kop at an Anfield pitch carpeted in flowers, trying — like all of us — to make some sense from it all.
Suddenly, he was reluctantly thrust into the frontline of a city’s grief in the same way as Sir Matt Busby was after Munich in 1958.
And he became a uniting force for good, summoning up public sympathy and empathy from the wells of a private space.
His response to his own anguish never deviated from the simple belief that whatever he suffered, it meant nothing compared with the victims’ families. He was only a football manager after all. Idolatory never sat well on his shoulders.
Hillsborough, in some cruel and macabre fashion, shaped Dalglish’s reputation more than anything.
There is a lingering sense he is still seeking closure, for himself and the city that has become his spiritual home. Mentally exhausted and pyhsically worn out, he eventually vacated the Anfield dugout in February 1991. But, within eight months, the powerful elixir of football had lured him back, this time at unfashionable Blackburn Rovers, then in the second division.
Within four years, Dalglish had led this provincial club out of football’s wilderness to the promised land of the title and Europe. But the magnetic pull of Anfield could not be resisted.
In 2009, the club’s prodigal son returned to oversee and develop Liverpool’s youth academy. When Rafa Benitez’s reign turned sour, there was only one popular choice to take over. But this time luck was not on his side, his second reign ending in a curt dismissal in 2012.
That is the circumstance that afflicts almost every manager at some point, no matter how much they are worshipped from afar. Dalglish, though, never uttered one word of criticism against his former employers, relying instead on his taciturn nature to express a kind of c’est la vie attitude.
More important than football was the family that kept him rooted. It was inevitable that one day the love affair between himself and Liverpool would be patched up, not that the link was ever truly broken.
The king became a knight in 2018, a Royal acknowledgment of his services to football, charity and the victims of the Hillsborough disaster.
These days, Dalglish can still be found at Anfield, at 69 the godfather of the club providing a Boot Room lineage that extends all the way back to Shankly. His familiar brogue provides a vital sounding board for Jurgen Klopp and the latest generation of Liverpool players seeking heroic prestige.
Abdication, for those of us who saw him in his glorious pomp, is not an option. King Kenny still rules and, in his autumnal years, that smile is never far away.
Hillsborough aftermath revealed the true measure of the man