[quote author=Brendan link=topic=40476.msg1117054#msg1117054 date=1276166651]
There's a good article in today's Daily Mail written by Jamie Redknapp that has made me REALLY want King Kenny back.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1285407/Jamie-Redknapp-If-Liverpool-dont-appoint-King-Kenny-Dalglish-itll-crying-shame.html
Kenny Dalglish is the right man at the right time for Liverpool. He has the quality that
money cannot buy: respect. They should be crying out for his leadership now to
replace Rafa Benitez, who had to go.
I spent some time with Dalglish last week for the UNICEF game at Old Trafford and saw every day the passion and desire — and the knowledge — Kenny still has for football.
If the argument against his appointment is that he has been out of the game too long, you wouldn’t know it speaking to him — line-ups, formations, players. He’s been observing and building his knowledge. He’s ready to return to football.
Ready to return: Dalglish
I still see Liverpool as my club. I was captain and spent more than a decade playing for the club, after Kenny signed me at the age of 17 from Bournemouth.
I remember my first day up there, wondering how I would cope away from my mum and dad. He invited me to stay at his house, where his lovely wife, Marina, cooked chicken and pasta and we spoke about football. Then he told me I had to go to bed.
It was quite early and I was a bit surprised, but you don’t argue with the great Kenny Dalglish. So off I went.
I did as I was told, only to find out the next morning over breakfast that I was in the squad to face Wimbledon. I didn’t know until then, he didn’t tell me, but it was his way
of keeping me calm.
The day he left the club — about a month later — despite the thousands of people he needed to speak to and explain why, he called me and told me that I shouldn’t worry and that Liverpool was my club. I cried my eyes out.
Even last week, Kenny still had that aura about him. He is Liverpool’s Special One.
Benitez won the Champions League and the FA Cup, but it was time for him to go. I speak to some of the Liverpool players, but you don’t have to do that to see how unhappy they were last season. The manager had lost the dressing room. They almost downed tools.
The players were fed up and beaten. You can’t have Liverpool players like that! It reflected in their performances and their final league position. Whoever takes the job has a huge task rebuilding morale and standards.
He will inherit some good players — but not enough. He will have to take on the responsibility of keeping Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres. I just think Kenny, with all his Liverpool history, will have a better chance of achieving that, as well as attracting fresh blood.
I’m not pushing him as a candidate for sentimental reasons. He will need good coaches around him and he will need a budget to improve the playing staff, but there will be no compensation package.
That gives him another advantage over Roy Hodgson and Martin O’Neill, who will both be expensive as they are under contract with rival Barclays Premier League clubs.
Liverpool supporters also hold him close to their heart forever. When he departed Anfield in 1991, he moved on to Blackburn and won the title there, finishing ahead of Manchester United on the last day of the 1994-95 season.
I was in the Liverpool team at Anfield that day — I scored the winning goal in the game against Blackburn which might have taken the title away from Kenny — but you could still feel the emotion from the Kop, once the title was confirmed by West Ham’s 1-1 draw with United.
The modern Liverpool don’t need just a figurehead, but a leader. Kenny can be that man.
Christian Purslow, the new managing director, has been bold with his decision to sack Benitez and now he faces a challenging period searching for the right man. The
right man, in my opinion, is under his nose.
I’ll finish with a story that sums up Kenny. A couple of years ago, he took on the role of manager for the Rest of the World team against England, managed by my dad, Harry Redknapp.
It’s a game where a lot of people give up their time for free, but there is still a lot of competition between the coaches. We won, Kenny’s team lost, but he called it on with my dad, claiming he made a substitution that had broken the rules.
Dad sent on a player who had already been on, but it was a charity game! Kenny wasn’t having it and they had strong words.
This year, when Kenny’s team won, he was delighted with the victory. ‘I see you’re not crying now,’ I said to him at the end. It’s the behaviour of a winner. Kenny Dalglish is a winner. Liverpool need a bit of that right now.
[/quote]
