Dalglish fails to relive the glory years

SOCCER:THE SOUND rolled off the ranks of visiting fans like a ghostly mist. The ominous staccato hand-claps, then a low, rumbling "Dal-glish! Dal-glish!". Here was a war chant from Liverpool's vast archive of treasured memories, disinterred in order to revive the present and secure the future.

Hearing the salute as he made his way along the Old Trafford touchline before the start of the match yesterday, Kenny Dalglish broke into a broad grin and raised both fists in acknowledgement.

From a distance, he looks virtually unaltered from the deceptively sturdy and magically gifted little inside-forward who scored 118 goals in 355 league matches in the Liverpool strip before leading the club to three league championships as their manager, between 1986 and 1991. The face, however, is that of a man a few weeks from his 60th birthday who has known authentic tragedy as well as triumph upon triumph.

God willing, Dalglish will never again have to face a challenge remotely as harrowing as the one that confronted him after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. The exemplary devotion with which he consoled the bereaved and mourners on that occasion went so far above and beyond any possible expectation that nothing can jeopardise his standing at the club.

And after that experience, not much in football can seem so serious.

There must, however, be a concern over whether John W Henry and Tom Werner have placed Liverpool in the hands of the Dalglish of the glory years or the one whose subsequent stewardship of Newcastle United and Celtic proved far less satisfactory. There is no doubt that he has spent the past decade observing the game with undiminished interest, but the true effect of so prolonged a hiatus will emerge only in the coming weeks.

“Now the Premier League goes on the back burner as we welcome Roy Hodgson and his Liverpool team,” Ferguson wrote in his programme notes for yesterday’s match. You would think the United manager had been in the game long enough not to get caught like that. No serving manager has seen so many of his rivals come and go, his own resilience a standing reproach to those directors of other clubs who lose their nerve and cave in to pressure from discontented fans, as Henry and Werner did when they sacked Hodgson after 29 matches in charge.

Some managers make a difference straight away, imposing rational structures on dishevelled teams. Hodgson, however, was one who needed the sort of time that he was given at Fulham. Given that scope at Liverpool, he might have shown the Kop that there was more to him than a safety-first approach.

But impatience and an instinctive dislike – not least of his southern origins – among the fans proved his downfall, along with the distrust exhibited by some senior players for his coaching methods. What looked a fine appointment last summer turned into an episode that should not be allowed to define Hodgson’s generally admirable career.

Dalglish could hardly have got off to a worse resumption, given the award of a penalty against his team after 31 seconds and a red card for his captain and talisman after 31 minutes. From his perspective, yesterday’s defeat will have underlined what he already knew, which is that Rafael Benitez bequeathed Hodgson a seriously inadequate squad and that the latter’s efforts to strengthen it were at best ineffective. There was no sign on the pitch yesterday of Paul Konchesky (dropped), Christian Poulsen (unused on the bench) or Joe Cole (injured), while the withdrawal of Raul Meireles on the hour, along with that of Maxi Rodriguez, prefaced Liverpool’s most threatening passage of play.

For the next 20 minutes the match had the atmosphere of a genuine cup tie rather that of a weird post-mortem on the Hodgson era. Jonjo Shelvey, 19 next month, replaced Meireles and injected some badly needed dynamism into Liverpool’s midfield with Ryan Babel coming on simultaneously and adding weight to an underpowered attack. Suddenly the home side were being reminded that, thanks to their own profligacy, their advantage was only a single goal.

Shelvey robbed Anderson, who then chased and fouled Fernando Torres five yards outside the United penalty area, giving Fabio Aurelio the chance to hit a fine free-kick that brought a flying save from Tomasz Kuszczak. Shelvey robbed Rafael Da Silva in the corner and played the ball back to Babel, who just failed to connect. Martin Kelly broke down the right and dinked in a good cross to the near post, from where Babel sent a glancing header into the side netting. Only when Shelvey tried to surprise Kuszczak with a quick free-kick from 45 yards and saw his effort float wide was the pressure relieved.Dalglish was kind to the 18-year-old afterwards.

“He was a bit ambitious with his free-kick,” he said, “but he’d looked up and noticed something.”