Review: Kenny Dalglish: Amazon Prime: eloquent portrait of footballer

Five stars 

Of all the telephone calls Kenny Dalglish received after the Hillsborough disaster, this one was remarkable for its brevity. 

Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of the Sun, was being hit hard by a boycott of his paper after it published false claims about Liverpool supporters under the headline: “The truth”. 

What can we do to make it better, MacKenzie asked.

Dalglish told him he could start by running the headline “WE LIED” in tomorrow’s paper. 

MacKenzie said he couldn’t do that; Dalglish replied he couldn’t help him, then. The boycott stands to this day. 

“He tried to put the blame on us,” Dalglish recalls in a new documentary about the Celtic and Liverpool legend, airing on Amazon Prime Video from today.

Director Asif Kapadia, the Oscar-winning chronicler of the lives of Amy Winehouse, Roger Federer, and Ayrton Senna, generally does without narrators in his films, instead allowing the footage—much of it previously unseen—to tell the story. But in Kenny Dalglish, the man himself does the job, aided by contributions from wife Marina and friends, including Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen. 

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The result is one of the most eloquent and moving portraits of Dalglish to date.  

Dalglish begins in his home city of Glasgow. Dad, a diesel engine fitter, was a “decent” footballer and young Kenny followed. When it came time to go to school, Kenny said he wanted to go to the Catholic one because it had a new football pitch. Mum told him he couldn’t - “Wrong religion”.

After school, he tried his hand at being an apprentice joiner, with little success. Jock Stein rescued him from a life of hammered thumbs, and Dalglish was on his way. Marriage to Marina, a Catholic, followed. “In those days, that was quite a big thing,” she says in voiceover. 

Celtic couldn’t hold the ambitious Dalglish, so it was off to Liverpool on a £440,000 transfer. A reporter asked if he was worth all that money. He replied: “I never paid it, I don’t know.” The famous Dalglish eloquence that gave the world “mibbes aye, mibbes naw” was up and running. 

At Liverpool, he was head of the “Jock Mafia” with Souness and Hansen. All three would find fame, but Dalglish most of all. In one of many must-see clips, Paul McCartney, yes that one, calls the “pretty good” Dalglish his “hero”. 

If he wasn’t a hero already to the people of Liverpool, Hillsborough made him so. There was no question that he would go to the funerals. “Being around people and supporting them as much as you possibly can - that’s the way we were brought up in Glasgow,” he explains. 

There was a price to be paid for shouldering such pain, and it falls to Marina to describe it. “In his heart, he didn’t want to leave, but he felt he had to,” she says. 

If there is a fault with the film it is the way the story ends rather abruptly, with little but captions and photos to show what came next. Mibbes that matters, mibbes not. Or mibbes this particular viewer just didn’t want the story of King Kenny to end at all.