King Kenny to become Sir King Kenny?

If a group of MPs get their way, Liverpool boss Kenny Dalglish will soon join Sir Alex Ferguson as a knight of the realm. Thirteen members of parliament have now signed a House of Commons motion calling for Dalglish to be knighted.

Motion

The MP for Liverpool Walton, Steve Rotherham, raised the motion on the twenty-second anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, saying it would be a fitting tribute to the families of the ninety-six people who died in the tragic events of 1989.

If the motion achieves it’s objective, Dalglish would receive the award for an ‘outstanding contribution to British football’.

On that awful day, 15th April 1989, Dalglish was the Liverpool manager. The fans were crushed during the FA Cup semi-final and football and the city of Liverpool have never been the same since. In the following days and weeks Dalglish attended many of the funerals in person and ensured that the club was properly represented at all of them. He did a great deal to try to help to heal the wounds and earned a huge amount of respect for the way he conducted himself.

It was relatives of the deceased who asked the MP to request the honour for Dalglish.

Remarkable

The Liverpool boss, now sixty years old, has been in charge at the club since the sacking of Roy Hodgson and has overseen a remarkable turn around in attitude and performance. He is revered at Anfield by players and fans alike and not just because of what he did after the Hillsborough tragedy.

As one of the clubs finest ever players back in the seventies and eighties, Dalglish helped the team to five title wins and two runners-up spots. He also played a significant part in three League Cup wins, three European Cup wins and a European Super Cup. He played over five hundred games for Liverpool and scored over one hundred and sixty goals.

Dalglish then took on the role of player manager where he won a League title and an FA Cup before hanging up his boots and concentrating on management alone. As purely a manager, he won two League titles and an FA Cup.

It is hardly surprising that he is so highly thought of at the club!

Manage

Just to prove that Liverpool wasn’t the only side he could manage, he then went on to take Blackburn to a league title and a runners-up position, Newcastle to runners-up in the league and FA Cup and Celtic to a Scottish league cup win.

After leaving Celtic in the Summer of 2000, Dalglish stayed out of the game for a long time, but was always in the background at Liverpool. In 2009, at the request of then manager Rafa Benitez, Dalglish took up a role with club’s youth academy and also as an ambassador for the club.

When Benitez left at the end of last season many people thought Dalglish would get the job and most fans hoped he would. That was a large part of the reason that Roy Hodgson was never accepted. It was simply that he wasn’t Kenny Dalglish.

It has to be said that when you take into account all that Dalglish has achieved in the game, and let us not forget over three hundred games for Celtic with a strike rate of a goal every two games as well as thirty international goals and over one hundred caps, together with the dignified way he dealt with the horrors of Hillsborough, I don’t think too many people would object to hearing the words ‘arise Sir Kenny’.