‘[T]he best part of your footballing life, definitely, is playing. The managing side or the coaching side . . . is only a poor substitute.’
Kenny Dalglish, July 2001
‘After playing football, there’s nothing like it again. Management is a pale attempt to hang on to the excitement.’
Kevin Keegan to Stuart Jeffries, Guardian, 2011
There can be no hard and fast rule on the likelihood of ex-footballers succeeding as football managers in correlation to the standard they attained on the pitch – be that great, good or indifferent. Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer and Pep Guardiola, clearly, made the transition with aplomb; Bobby Charlton, Diego Maradona, Lothar Matthaus, very much less so. Conversely, Alex Ferguson, exemplar of the modern boss, only got so far as a player, albeit further than Arsene Wenger or Jose Mourinho.
The special luminosity of having been a supreme player means that Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish will always be greater footballing figures than Ferguson. Yet in the period of years when the three men vied with each other from the dugout and the technical area, there was no question that Ferguson had the upper hand – the steeliness to shape proceedings on the pitch to his will. In this respect, arguably no one in football has done it better than Ferguson. Keegan and Dalglish, driven winners and great haters of defeat, lasted long enough in the game both to be seen off by ‘Fergie’, who now writes books and delivers lectures at Harvard on ‘success and staying power’.
It does seem clear that in modern football the former player requires a drive to succeed equivalent to their playing days and also to be a properly hard thinker about the sport. Kevin Keegan’s proud public insistence – even on the very days when he was paraded as new manager of some top club – that he doesn’t especially study football or footballers in his spare time says nearly everything about his traditionally English managerial gifts (a horse sense for playing quality, and an ability to motivate) but also his signal deficit in key areas (the sharp edge of thinking on formation and tactics).
Kenny Dalglish’s football intelligence is of a different and slightly perplexing order. ‘He couldn’t really explain why he did what he did,’ is the view of Alan Irvine who worked under Dalglish at Blackburn and Newcastle. ‘He thought it was simple, but he was a genius. Kenny knew players. He knew the fine details about their habits. He was fascinating because his knowledge was almost unstructured.’ The net effect of this – tired clichés about Dalglish’s Glaswegian accent aside – was that as a manager he sometimes needed a sort of interpreter; as, perhaps, with the Liverpool system he inherited, or the orderly Ray Harford at Blackburn.
Restored to Liverpool in 2011 Dalglish got Liverpool playing again in varied ways, intelligently conscious of the opposition. But when results declined it seemed unhappily clear that some of Dalglish’s priciest buy-British purchases – Carroll and Downing spring to mind – put the team in a poorer shape when they started. And while in Luis Suarez Dalglish had the benefit of bossing another supreme player clad in a red number seven, he had no means of managing Suarez’s culpable volatility other than by resorting to a default position, rehearsed since Heysel, as defender and standard-bearer of Liverpool Football Club. He looked exposed, somehow out of time; and not because of his seniority per se (Ferguson, Wenger and Redknapp, managers who finished ahead of him that season, were also older) so much as the years spent out of the game, and the still-burning single-mindedness that had, allied to his genius, made him the player he was.
Nobody, surely, would have blamed Dalglish for harbouring a little bad blood towards the owners of Liverpool FC after his dismissal in 2012. Could he forgive them? Sooner ask if there was blood in his veins. In October of 2013 John Henry invited Dalglish onto Liverpool’s board of directors, restoring the dignities – non-executive and ambassadorial – he had enjoyed before taking charge again. This restitutive role had been keenly backed by the man who succeeded him, the assured Northern Irishman Brendan Rodgers. ‘When the call came,’ Dalglish made it known, ‘I had no hesitation.’
And so Dalglish was a face once more at Anfield, a living and very presentable link to still not-so-distant glories. Rodgers’ team thrived, and just before Christmas that year the TV cameras caught Dalglish’s delight from the stands when young Jon Flanagan – whom he nurtured during his second stint – scored Liverpool’s fourth in a battering of Spurs. At the annual commemoration of the Hillsborough disaster at Anfield the following April, the 25th such gathering, Rodgers made an elegant speech in tribute to his predecessor, whom he described as ‘an example to us all’. The attendees rose in a standing ovation, while Dalglish remained seated and looked to be keeping a close hold on his emotions. A few weeks later Rodgers’ Liverpool side damn near won the Premier League, coming so close they grazed it with their fingers; but down at the wire the crucial results just couldn’t be secured, and so it was second place. But then Liverpool FC was a club that over time had, in the words of Yeats, been ‘bred to a harder thing than triumph’.
The Hillsborough Family Support Group, led by businessman Trevor Hicks whose two daughters perished in the disaster, had long campaigned for a full re-examination of all documentation relevant to the day’s events. In 2009 the Labour government set up an independent panel to undertake this work, and the panel’s report in 2012 made plain not just the ‘failure of control’ by South Yorkshire Police, but also the long-standing inadequacy of response to safety issues at Hillsborough and the efforts by police to modify their official record of the day. The support group now called for new inquests, and the Attorney General agreed: the High Court quashed the original verdicts, and new hearings were convened, beginning at Warrington in late March 2014.
In the week before Christmas 2014 Dalglish gave evidence to the inquest. John Beggs QC, representing the South Yorkshire Police commanders, pursued him over certain observations made in his memoirs, such as references to the numbers of Liverpool fans who had sought ticketless admission to the all-Merseyside cup final of 1986. In a fractious atmosphere the coroner ruled that Dalglish should not be pressed over questions he couldn’t possibly answer (such as whether or not Liverpool fans on 15 April 1989 had tickets to the match or had drunk alcohol). Afterwards, Margaret Aspinall, another prominent Hillsborough campaigner who lost her 18-year-old son in the disaster, spoke in praise of the staunchness of Dalglish’s presentation: ‘Kenny’s always been there for the families and he didn’t in any way, shape or form let us down.’
Brendan Rodgers was unable to keep Liverpool pushing forward at the pitch of form seen in 2014, and in October 2015 he was replaced by Jurgen Klopp, the characterful and widely admired boss at Borussia Dortmund. Dalglish blessed the appointment and liked what he saw, most especially when Klopp’s side achieved a stunning comeback against Dortmund in a Europa League tie on 14 April 2016. Dalglish, visibly transported by the spirits of a big European night at Anfield, joined fellow fans in the singing of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. The following day was the 27th and final anniversary commemoration of Hillsborough at the stadium, where Dalglish gave a reading from the Gospel of John: ‘Let not your heart be troubled.’
This marking of the date was now felt to be at a fitting end in part because the second inquest was due to report; and on 26 April 2016 its jury ruled that Liverpool’s fans were unlawfully killed, victims of gross negligence, and had played no role in causing the disaster. It was a victory celebrated with solemnity, the word ‘bittersweet’ much used to describe the savour of it. That September, the 96 victims were awarded the Freedom of Liverpool, as were Kenny Dalglish and his wife. ‘I wish we weren’t getting the award,’ Marina Dalglish commented ruefully, ‘and everyone was still here.’ Kenny Dalglish observed his familiar low-key piety: ‘We only did for the families what they did for us, and that was support us.’
It was clear from his remarks that Dalglish still counted himself as a very lucky individual to whom football had given great things; who had also seen terrible things he had never expected, and had coped in the way he’d seen fit, just like he was raised to. Football had carried on, people caring about the game because they couldn’t do otherwise; and Dalglish remained a football man, finished with his real dealings in the game, but seemingly at peace with his legacy, which was considerable. In May 2017 Liverpool FC announced that from the following season the former Kemlyn Road stand at Anfield would be renamed The Kenny Dalglish Stand, a gesture to the club’s 125th anniversary and an honour surpassing even the gates named for Shankly and Paisley. Dalglish, inevitably, professed to be ‘extremely grateful’ if ‘a wee bit embarrassed’.
Kevin Keegan was also in attendance at Anfield in April 2016 when the tradition of Hillsborough commemorations closed. It was as natural for him to be paying his respects as any of the distinguished players past and present who came, and it signalled, perhaps, a revived connection to the club where he made his greatest achievements in football – a connection that had seemed more undernourished than it might have been over the years. The tenures of Rodgers and Klopp had got Keegan praising Liverpool consistently in his bouts of punditry, to the degree that their managerial virtues corresponded to his own: attacking football, passion, obvious enthusiasm from the fans.
Punditry had been Keegan’s most conspicuous activity since the acrimonious end at Newcastle in 2008. He had become the lead voice on satellite sports channel ESPN. At ease before the camera, his analyses and predictions were not consistently on the money, but he had plenty of stories and flashes of old fire about him. Asked during a 2010 broadcast to comment on Mike Ashley’s continued stewardship of Newcastle and the likelihood of success there, Keegan’s even tone made his contempt all the clearer: ‘Mike Ashley doesn’t know anything about football. That’s the first thing. The second thing is Derek Llambias knows even less than him.’
When the gig at ESPN ended Keegan moved to a role with Qatar-based network beIN Sports, alongside a travelling show of talking football heads made familiar in the Sky era. Keegan the entrepreneur remained in business, and wherever he went now he was pushing a new invention, another interactive football exercise: ‘Sokka’, a structure of hinged panels designed for a football workout, their surfaces sensitive to pressure and responsive by flashing lights and data display. ‘Interactive stuff is what kids want now,’ he told journalists, ‘not to see an old football shirt of Kevin Keegan’s.’ Really, the thing was all about trapping and controlling the rebound of a ball one had just smashed against a flat surface – a practice every ball-playing schoolboy learns to love as long as they grow up anywhere near a handy brick wall. It was easy to see Keegan as the small boy who battered a ball against the garden wall shared with Mrs Wild’s place back in Armthorpe, Doncaster. But the price tag for a full set of Sokka panels was an unsentimental £100,000, plus a new Mercedes van. From the outset of his career Keegan had been prodigious in coming up with ways to extract revenue out of ventures derived, however tenuously, from kicking a ball around. Stephen Wagg – whose pioneering social history The Football World, published in 1984, remains an authoritative work – described Keegan with acerbity as ‘English football’s first clone – a persona consciously fashioned with a huge audience of consumers in mind’. He had put money in his purse, and many who had come after had done likewise, in ever greater sums, their progress eased by the path that Keegan forged. But ‘clone’ was just unkind. He was his own man, and there was no one quite like him within football or without. ‘I did all the things I wanted to do, I made my own decisions,’ Keegan made plain in 2017 to an interviewer who suspected he must harbour certain regrets. ‘No, I enjoyed every minute of it,’ Keegan insisted, businesslike to the end. ‘And I don’t look back much.’