A deity in the wings, Kenny Dalglish may be the man to cool fans' fury
There would be obvious appeal in hiring an Anfield legend as a human shield against the displeasure of the Kop
By Paul Hayward
Like Bill Shankly, Kenny Dalglish gave up the Liverpool job and soon regretted it. Plagued by stress-related blotches, and still haunted by the Hillsborough disaster, King Kenny resigned in 1991 and returned from a family holiday in Orlando a few weeks later dismayed that Graeme ÂSouness had taken over.
"Of course, I had no right to hope Liverpool would come back to me. Besides, at that time I thought Graeme was the right man for the job," Dalglish wrote in his memoirs. "But if Liverpool had waited until the summer, and then asked me, I would have gone back. Like a shot. Liverpool will always be in my family's heart."
The sense that Merseyside's most illustrious player has unfinished business in the Anfield dug-out is deepened by those echoes of nearly 20 years ago. Among senior figures in the red half of town there is a belief that Dalglish would answer Liverpool's distress flare in a caretaker capacity should the club's American owners decide that paying Rafael BenÃtez off would be cheaper than a further acceleration in the team's decline.
Not that the last Liverpool manager to win the league title (in 1990) is plotting behind the cracking edifice of BenÃtez's autocratic style. Dalglish returned in Anfield last summer as an academy director and club ambassador at BenÃtez's instigation and would not be part of any conspiracy against the manager. "For the boss to put his trust in me is a great compliment and I am coming back as a very lucky person," he said back in July. At 58, though, he is entitled to feel he's not too decrepit to test his faith that he could still mix it with Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, especially at a club where he is already a deity.
There would be no onerous (for the club) five-year contract to tempt Dalglish in from his ceremonial role and his work with the club's best youngsters. It would most likely be an emergency appointment. Yet there would be an obvious appeal to Tom Hicks and George Gillett in hiring a human shield against the mounting fury of the Kop. Shankly's premature departure was never corrected. This time, in the short term, the precipitous resignation of an adored leader might find a happier resolution.
Dalglish surrendered to the internal voice that was telling him to flee after a 4-4 fifth-round FA Cup draw with Everton. "Before the game, I lay on my hotel bed and decided I had to get out," he wrote. "The alternative was going mad." The next morning, "unwell and under strain", he told the directors: "I cannot go on. I am telling you now that I want to give up."
There is no change in the party line that BenÃtez is safe until at least the summer, but this policy was formulated in the autumn, when the team's Premier League challenge was starting to unravel and the Champions League campaign was ending at the group stage.
The latest indignity is Wednesday night's third-round FA Cup defeat at home to Reading. If the maelstrom around BenÃtez picks up further pace, the corporate need to calm the banks and potential "investors" (aka speculators) may override the board's reluctance to pay BenÃtez as much as £20m to go away.
Tomorrow, Liverpool fans have only to walk across Stanley Park, where their new stadium is meant to be, to examine the biggest threat to their hopes of finishing fourth in the league, a quest that now assumes holy grail proportions. Not to watch Everton, but their opponents, Manchester City, whose new manager, Roberto Mancini, has exploited the soft start engineered for him by City's owners to win his first four games.
To finish any lower than fourth would detonate the debt-to-income calculation on which the American leveraged buy-out of Liverpool was based. Stoke City's Britannia Stadium, tomorrow lunchtime, is the wrong place to seek compassion from the locals.
As bookmakers price up Liverpool's options (Dalglish is 5-2 joint favourite with Guus Hiddink to succeed "Agent" BenÃtez, as some Manchester United fans gleefully call him), neutrals will debate the ambassador for Kirkby's managerial credentials. His three league titles at Anfield are beyond disparagement, even if he was largely extending the work of Shankly, Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan. His triumph in the 1994-95 title race is often dismissed as the harvest of Jack Walker's money, yet Blackburn remain the only club outside of United, Chelsea and Arsenal to wear the Premier League tiara. Ewood Park, surely, was the stage for Dalglish's greatest phase of team-construction and strategic thinking.
In the Mike Ashley era, Newcastle fans would consider his second and 13th-place Premier League finishes from 1997-98 as glorious pageants, especially as they featured an immortal Champions League win over Barcelona at St James' Park. But then Dalglish's managerial career fizzled out, at Celtic, and he passed involuntarily into that realm where disappointed ex-managers reside: the golf course and the after-dinner speaking circuit.
To imagine him in charge of Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard would doubtless excite the Kop sufficiently for Liverpool's hardcore to ignore his 10 years out of management.
But many would doubtless hope to see a long-term appointment from further down the bookies' list. Here, though, a cringe kicks in. Romance alone is unlikely to persuade José Mourinho or Frank Rijkaard that they could topple Chelsea and United at a club where Andriy Voronin and Andrea Dossena need to be sold before Maxi RodrÃguez can be bought and where the acquisition of a desperately needed striker is contingent upon the sale of Ryan Babel.
The dark trinity of debt, boardroom chaos and a lack of funds is unlikely to prompt Europe's A-list coaches to order Shankly books on Amazon. In their current plight, Liverpool's best hope would be to pay over the odds for an expert problem solver (Hiddink, say), or pray that Martin O'Neill could be persuaded to imagine a more stable future in which the sons of the owners desisted from writing to supporters: "Blow me, fuck face."
With each defeat, and every boardroom fiasco, Liverpool's powerlessness increases, their capacity to attract new talent to the pitch and the dug-out decreases. This multiplier effect is the game's new Darwinian reality and will make no exception for Anfield and its traditions. There is already a precedent this season for a notable figure rejoining a club in an academy role and then finding his way to the first-team coaching zone. Whether by club directive, or on Mancini's orders (the former, almost certainly), Brian Kidd stepped into the gap left by the clear-out of Mark Hughes and his staff to become the City No2.
Dalglish's return from a blazer role would be far grander than Kidd's farewell to kids. Liverpool are out of everything – except the Europa League, "a tournament for losers", Ronnie Whelan scoffed yesterday – but they are never out of history to draw on, or past glories to invoke. The last major trophy BenÃtez won was the 2006 FA Cup. The last time Liverpool ribbons were on the English league trophy was 20 years ago, when distress was starting to grind away at Dalglish. Resignation, then regret, and maybe now redemption, however brief.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/jan/15/rafael-benitez-kenny-dalglish-liverpool
