The Luis Su�rez affair has tested the judgment of a manager who is the embodiment of Liverpool FC
No wonder Liverpool people sometimes feel isolated and victimised. Only last week the release of government papers under the 30-year rule revealed that in 1981, in the wake of the Toxteth riots, the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, suggested to Margaret Thatcher and their cabinet colleagues that the troubled city was a hopeless case and should be allowed to fall into a state of "managed decline". Hardly surprising, then, that when a figurehead like Kenny Dalglish comes along, offering solidarity and the comfort of a certain kind of indisputable success to a section of Merseyside, they rally to his standard.
As he celebrates the first anniversary of his return to the manager's office at Liverpool Football Club this weekend, Dalglish can see himself as the living embodiment of his club to a degree perhaps achieved by no other figure in the history of the English game. The events of the last few days, and perhaps most of all his extraordinary statements after the defeat at Manchester City on Tuesday night, served only to cement his special place in the affections of Liverpool's supporters.
There have always been two ways of looking at the Luis Su�rez affair: Liverpool's way, which is also to say Dalglish's way, and the rest of the world's. Never has a football club chosen to estrange itself so thoroughly from the opinion of the rest of the nation. Outsiders simply cannot understand why the club should go on piling sandbags against the doorway even as the foundations of the bunker are being undermined, defending what an official judgment has now deemed to be the indefensible. On Wednesday Su�rez issued another brief statement that managed to express a form of regret without coming close to being a genuine apology.
Dalglish, a great player for the club from 1977 to 1985, its player-manager from 1985 to 1991, and its manager once again for the past 12 months, nailed his colours to the mast of Su�rez's defence from the outset and showed no signs of modifying his stance either when the guilty verdict was announced three weeks ago or when the 115 pages of the findings of the FA's independent commission of inquiry were published last week. Showing the kind of unconditional support for the player that might normally be expected from a parent, a close friend or even a team-mate, he seemed to be presenting the view from the dressing room rather than adopting the more reflective approach that might have been expected from someone at the head of a large organisation with an employee whose conduct had been subjected to the sporting equivalent of a police charge.
Given what we know of the Liverpool manager's nature, it is hard to suppress the feeling that this affair may be as much about Dalglish versus Sir Alex Ferguson, and Liverpool versus Manchester United, as Su�rez versus Evra and the FA. The rivalry between Anfield and Old Trafford exists at a special level of intensity, heightened last year when Manchester United finally fulfilled Ferguson's promise to eclipse Liverpool's record of 18 league titles, 12 of United's 19 having come with Sir Alex at the helm. Dalglish's readiness to stand up and defy the man at the other end of the East Lancs Road is among the factors that bind the supporters to his leadership.
His presence during virtually all the major dramas studding the club's history over the past three and a half decades ? all except the miracle in Istanbul, perhaps ? gives the 60-year-old Glaswegian a special place, perhaps a unique one, in the supporters' hearts, making him the only true heir to the kingdom established by Bill Shankly and consolidated by Bob Paisley. There was glory when he won three European Cups and five league championships as a player and then guided them to three more league titles as player-manager, including their last to date, in 1989-90. But he also played in the 1985 European Cup final at the Heysel stadium in Brussels, which took place while 39 Juventus supporters lay dead or dying, and was managing the side four years later when 96 of their own supporters perished in the Hillsborough disaster. The degree of pastoral care he displayed in the aftermath of the latter tragedy, attending many of the funerals with a sombre dignity that was found to be affecting far beyond the boundaries of the club and the city, set a standard for behaviour in such circumstances.
Yet he has not always been beyond reproach in his dealings with the outside world, where his surliness with strangers and a willingness to make others look foolish are not always seen as endearing, and in recent days he has struck a series of discordant notes. Indicating his support of Su�rez via Twitter after the verdict was announced, his paraphrase of the words of the club's famous hymn ? "Let's not let him walk alone," he tweeted ? seemed to outsiders to represent a cheap exploitation of the song's noble sentiment. He was criticised for allowing his players to warm up for a match in T-shirts proclaiming a collective belief in the player's innocence. And on Tuesday night his barefaced refusal to accept the commission's report appeared to fly in the face not just of a willingness to live by the law but of sheer common sense.
Asked to comment on the findings after the match in Manchester, he chose to reopen the dispute over what Su�rez had meant when he addressed Patrice Evra using the word "negro". When a reporter pointed out that the commission had noted that it was "simply incredible" to suggest that the word was not used in an offensive way when the two players were clearly arguing, Dalglish responded: "There's a lot of things we'd like to say and a lot we could say but we'd only get ourselves into trouble. But we know what has gone on. We know what's not in the report and that's important for us." Later he added: "It's unfortunate that we can't be more forthcoming." Surely if he felt that a procedural injustice had been committed, which was apparently the subtext of his words, he should have said so.
If he had read the entire report, he showed no signs of recognising the scrupulous care with which it had been put together by Paul Goulding QC, Brian Jones and Denis Smith. Producing their tour de force of forensic investigation after 40 hours of listening to and evaluating evidence, during which they paid equal attention to Evra's accusations and Liverpool's clumsily handled defence, the members of the commission went to great lengths to explain the nature of the burden of proof in a case such as this, and how it differed from that in a criminal trial; the work they had done, with the assistance of various experts in linguistics, to establish the varieties of nuance that may be contained in the use of the epithet "negro"; and the reasons why, having reached the conclusion that Su�rez's testimony was unreliable, they felt able to find him guilty.
By choosing simply to take Su�rez at his word, and ignoring the assembly of evidence in the case, Dalglish showed himself to be capable of an immaturity surprising in a man of such experience, making him appear a less substantial figure than the one who demonstrated such a sure touch as he placed a blanket of consolation over the victims following the tragic events of 15 April 1989.
Not that he has lost an iota of stature with his Liverpool constituency, whose outpourings of faith in Su�rez and diatribes against everyone outside the club have been considerably augmented in volume and intensity by the use of social media. Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere now allow the loudest ? or at least the most numerous ? voices to have the biggest say in many arenas, and nowhere more so than in football. And it should not be thought that he has been acting without the knowledge and approval of the club's owners, John W Henry, Tom Werner and the Fenway Sports Group, who are said to have been kept in touch at every stage.
Dalglish's own use of Twitter to communicate his feelings about the verdict exemplifies his ability to speak directly to supporters who feel that their idol is one of them. It was no surprise when he was welcomed back with such delirious joy last January. His return, combined with the arrival of new owners, seemed to blow away the miasma created by the toxic regime of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, which reached its nadir with the sacking of Rafael Ben�tez and the short, unhappy reign of Roy Hodgson. "Dal-glish! Dal-glish!" the Kop roared, convinced that he was the only man capable of putting an end to a period of humiliation and making them champions of England once again.
And so they stand together, drawn by even tighter bonds as they rage against the world, by no means unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the experience of fighting for justice, even if on this occasion it is a justice only they can perceive.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/jan/05/kenny-dalglish-luis-suarez-judgment
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