Kenny Dalglish review – Liverpool’s everyman football hero who took the city’s woes on his shoulders

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Asif Kapadia has curated an absorbing portrait of footballer Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool’s legendary player and then player-manager, using a quilt of archive clips with voiceovers. It takes us through his childhood in Glasgow and his sparkling career at Celtic, at a time when the stars were hardly financially better off than the fans, before Dalglish arrived at Liverpool, effectively taking over Kevin Keegan’s position.

Kapadia makes his central focus the mysterious inner trial, perhaps Dalglish’s hidden ordeal, that took place between 1985 to 1989; from Heysel to Hillsborough.Dalglish was the easygoing, level-headed everyman whose destiny it was to take the city’s woes on his shoulders. It was a day of shame for Liverpool, whose fans were held to be responsible – although subsequent analysis of the stadium design, crowd control and policing revealed a situation not too far from the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans – largely due to the fencing that, as Kapadia shows, was a catastrophe waiting to happen.Throughout, Dalglish was a stoic figure, consistently visiting hospitals and attending funerals with his players.

The paper’s editor Kelvin MacKenzie cravenly asked Dalglish how he could put things right and Dalglish crisply suggested a new headline: “We Lied.” He quit as manager soon afterwards, apparently worn down by the stress; even though the burden was onerous, he returned to management apparently without permanent mental scarring.Kapadia could have included a larger discussion of hooliganism which was a wider phenomenon than you might guess from this film. Kapadia doesn’t mention it, but Dalglish would have been well aware of Glasgow’s terrible Ibrox disasters of 1971 and 1902: the catastrophes at Rangers’ ground causing 66 and 25 deaths respectively, fatalities which were almost shrugged at by the authorities.And there is another historical echo which Kapadia simply allows us to notice without explicit comment: that vast field of flowers at Anfield in 1989 prefigured the outpouring of grief at Princess Diana’s death in 1997, a new language of public grief which has a pointed message for those in charge.