England hero Jonny’s secret romance with Dalglish girl
STILL celebrating England’s historic World Cup win last weekend, Jonny Bairstow seems to have bowled a maiden over.
I hear the flame-haired Yorkshire batsman, 29, has enjoyed a secret romance with Lauren Dalglish, the beautiful daughter of football legend Sir Kenny Dalglish.
‘They quietly went out for several months,’ a mutual friend tells me. ‘But they are both very private so have been keen to keep the romance low-key. They made a good, sporty team.’
Lauren, a 31-year-old English graduate from Newcastle University, is the youngest of four children of the Liverpool and Scotland striker who went on to become a multiple trophy-winning manager at Anfield.
A contemporary of Princess Eugenie at £39,000-a-year boarding school Marlborough College, Lauren is such a determined character that she is said to have decided which school she would attend.
‘She arranged to go to Marlborough herself,’ claims the friend. ‘Kenny knew very little about it.’
In his most recent blast of glory, Bairstow became the first England batsman to score two successive
World Cup centuries. He, too, was privately educated, at St Peter’s School, York.
His spokesman confirms that Bairstow courted Lauren, but bowls a googly by suggesting the romance has been consigned to the past.
Curiously, however, a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Lauren was pictured leaving the England team’s hotel with the cricketer last week. She was covering her face in an apparent attempt to avoid being recognised.
Let’s hope Bairstow is not on a sticky wicket, as his spokesman tells me the mystery blonde is a different woman entirely.
Lauren was employed by sports agency Pitch International, which produced the cinema biopic Kenny, about her celebrated father, but is now said to be working for her mother’s charity, the Marina Dalglish Appeal. Marina established the charity in 2004 after surviving a battle with breast cancer the previous year.
Bairstow concentrates his own charitable efforts on Chance To Shine, a grassroots cricket cause dedicated to introducing children to the game.
Lauren declines to comment.