You think you’ve seen it all with Sir Kenny Dalglish and then another Knight of the Realm appears to provide something completely unexpected.
In the new feature-length documentary about Dalglish’s career, there is a surprise appearance from Sir Paul McCartney in the guise of an interview that had been done with him around the time the Great Scot had just started powering to stardom at Anfield, having left Celtic behind.
‘Have I got any idols in music? No, I haven’t,’ McCartney reveals. ‘I’d probably say my idol’s a footballer, actually. Kenny Dalglish. He’s revered as a Liverpudlian, even though he is a Scotsman – and so he should be.’
McCartney has never been one to voice big opinions about football – and his allegiances have always been towards the Blue half of Merseyside – but, in this simple statement, he captured it all with regards to Dalglish, as a player and a man.
Director Asif Kapadia, an Academy Award winner, is a master at piecing together cinematic experiences about huge figures, with his standout productions including Senna, Maradona, Amy and Oasis: Supersonic.
This one, undoubtedly, would have been a labour of love for Kapadia, a lifelong Liverpool fan. He’s 53, meaning he would have had stars in his eyes as Dalglish and Ian Rush played with a telepathic understanding in a team that collected trophies as easily for Bob Paisley like they were shelling peas.
For those of Kapadia’s generation, there is a chance to wallow in nostalgia and remind yourself of what a footballer Dalglish was, a man who could seemingly see pictures quicker on a football pitch 50 years ago than AI would now.
The gauge of how ahead of his time Dalglish actually was is at the beginning of the film, which is being shown in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on October 29 and 30 before its release on Amazon Prime in November: the section devoted to his career at Celtic is a gem.
We might obsess these days about coaches such as Pep Guardiola and how he has reinvented the game but when you have listened to old footage about Jock Stein talking about ‘the wee man’ and how he wanted to best deploy him in his team, you understand again who the visionaries really were.
Dalglish explains: ‘Jock says to me: “You see those three midfielders? They will be behind you. You see those two forwards? They’re ahead of you. Now you see this big space here between them? That’s where you’re going to be.’
There you have it. Dalglish was playing as false nine in the Scottish Premier League 35 years before Guardiola unleashed Lionel Messi in the same position during a Champions League semi-final for Barcelona against Real Madrid with the same devastating impact.
History, essentially, is at the heart of Kapadia’s production. There will, certainly, be viewers who will come away from watching it and think: ‘I knew that already’ – for there is a lot of footage that has been broadcast many times. Blackburn fans, too, will feel shortchanged that their title success in 1994-95 is not covered.
But, crucially, there will be a huge number of viewers aware of who Dalglish is, but don’t appreciate his remarkable story and what exactly he went through in the life-shaping events of Heysel and Hillsborough. Someone watching in 2025 will absolutely say: ‘I didn’t know that.’
And that is what matters. The darkness of 1985 and 1989 forms a huge swathe of the 100-minute production but it is vital that it does – these chapters cannot ever be closed and the need to explain the events around them to a fresh audience is critical.
Young or old, you will not be able to sit through the Hillsborough section without being consumed by emotion and outrage that something so appalling could be allowed to happen through human irresponsibility. Kapadia, absolutely, hammers that message home.
The input from Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen, the other members of Anfield’s ‘Jock Mafia’, is enlightening, in the same way as Lady Marina, Dalglish’s childhood sweetheart, shines a softer light on their relationship, which began with a trip to the cinema and a bag of fish and chips.
Such moments of lightness are crucial. Yes, tragedy forms a huge part of the Dalglish story but there has been so much more to it – how remarkable that he was the same age as Virgil van Dijk is now when being the Player-Manager who led Liverpool to the League and Cup double in 1986?
As he says himself: ‘I would nae change anything I did.’ Nor would anyone else.
