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. He became player-manager just after the Heysel stadium disaster in 1985, when there were 39 deaths as a result of a riot at the dilapidated Belgian ground before the Juventus v Liverpool European Cup final. 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.
