Review of Kenny Dalglish – the Liverpool football hero who took the city’s problems on his shoulders | film

ASaif Kapadia has curated a stunning portrait of Kenny Dalglish, the legendary Liverpool player and then manager, using a collection of archival clips with audio commentary. The film takes us through his childhood in Glasgow and his glittering Celtic career, at a time when stars were no better off financially than fans, before Dalglish arrived at Liverpool, effectively taking over for Kevin Keegan. Kapadia makes his primary focus on the mysterious domestic trial, and perhaps Dalglish’s hidden plight, that took place between 1985 and 1989; From Hessle to Hillsborough.

Dalglish was a simple, sober man, and it was his destiny to take the woes of the city upon his shoulders. He became a player-manager after the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, when there were 39 deaths as a result of riots at the dilapidated Belgian stadium before the European Cup final between Juventus and Liverpool. It was a day of infamy for Liverpool, whose fans were held responsible – although subsequent analysis of the stadium design, crowd control and policing revealed a situation not too far removed from the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989, which killed 97 Liverpool fans – largely because of the fencing which was, as Kapadia shows, a disaster in waiting. occurrence.

All the while, Dalglish was a stoic figure, constantly visiting hospitals and attending funerals with his players. Kapadia shows the bleak scene of Margaret Thatcher appearing at Hillsborough two days after the disaster, demonstrating her distaste for football and its teeming fans; For her, football was the recreational activity dimension of unionism. Did she see Hillsborough as being very different from Orgreave? Her government had given the green light to the Sun’s hideous “truth” headline which led to the collapse of that newspaper’s circulation on Merseyside. Newspaper editor Kelvin MacKenzie timidly asked Dalglish how he could set the record straight, and Dalglish pointedly suggested a new headline: “We’ve Lied.” He resigned as manager shortly afterwards, apparently exhausted by the pressure. Although the burden was exhausting, he returned to management seemingly without lasting mental scars.

Kapadia could have included a larger discussion of hooliganism which was a broader phenomenon than you might imagine from this film. But this discussion needs to show how the riots were partly a response to how working-class supporters are often treated with contempt. Kapadia did not mention it, but Dalglish was well aware of Glasgow’s terrible Ibrox disasters of 1971 and 1902: disasters at Rangers’ ground caused 66 and 25 deaths respectively, deaths that were almost never neglected by the authorities.

There is another historical echo that Kapadia allows us to notice without explicit comment: that vast field of flowers at Anfield in 1989 was a precursor to the outpouring of grief over the death of Princess Diana in 1997, a new language of public grief that carried a clear message to those in charge. As for Dalglish himself, he comes off as a straightforward character without the painful complexity of the other characters Kapadia has covered, like Diego Maradona or Amy Winehouse, and this film doesn’t have that deranged menace and wonder. But perhaps it was his ingenious simplicity that allowed Dalglish to survive.