Carling Cup Final: A rare cup of cheer for Kenny Dalglish

IF KENNY Dalglish were a trophy, he would be the Carling Cup: loved by those to whom it belongs, proud of its past, but a bit lacking in charisma, and if truth be told, a little out of sync with the demands of the modern game. He will be a fitting winner if his Liverpool team beat Cardiff City in today’s final at Wembley.

Dalglish says that the clubs who fielded weakened teams in the earlier rounds will be jealous of Liverpool this afternoon. They beat understrength Chelsea and understrength Manchester City on their way to this afternoon’s climax, where they have avoided Manchester United, understrength victims of Crystal Palace in the quarter-finals.

When you have not won one for six years, a trophy is a trophy. While England’s other behemoths have focused instead on finishing in the top four, Liverpool have been decent enough to take advantage, which is more than they were under Dalglish’s hapless predecessor, Roy Hodgson. This will be their first final since they were beaten by AC Milan in the Champions League five years ago.

The League Cup figured prominently in Dalglish’s success as a player. He won it in four consecutive seasons between 1981 and 1984. Although it eluded him in his first spell as Liverpool manager – a Charlie Nicholas double made sure of that in 1987 – he won its Scottish equivalent in an otherwise calamitous spell with Celtic.

Walking out at Wembley, where he won 13 trophies as a player, will also roll back the years. He made his Liverpool debut there in the 1977 Charity Shield. At the end of that season, he was back at the London venue, scoring the winner in the European Cup final against Brugge. His goal also helped Scotland to beat England on their own turf.

This, he says, could be the start of something big for Liverpool, a signal that the ship he has steadied since taking charge just over a year ago is headed in the right direction. With an FA Cup sixth-round tie against Stoke City on the horizon, there are about this time shades of 2001, when Gerard Houllier’s rebuilding programme secured a treble of trophies that also included the UEFA Cup. The Liverpool fans wouldn’t mind a taste of that again, or better still, a flavour of the days when Dalglish was a manager and a player. The older of them romanticise about the swaying Kop, the club’s respect for its community and its unerring ability to produce its own managers.

The trouble is that football has moved on since then. The Kop no longer sways, the big decisions are no longer taken in the “boot room”, and the club must look beyond the confines of its local support if it is to remain competitive. These days, the market is global, as is the media exposure, a relentless, unforgiving spotlight in which public relations are vital.

Which is where Dalglish comes up short. “Public relations” is a concept that he ridiculed in his autobiography, arguing that the only public he was interested in relating to were the club and its fans. In Dalglish’s mind, his is a noble stance, one that will always be appreciated by the Anfield regulars, but what about the wider world? The defensive, sometimes sneering, default position he adopts after even the most harmless media question is not as clever as he thinks.

Football is bigger than that now. We might dislike what the Henrys, the Glazers, the Kroenkes stand for, we might abhor the way they have distanced their clubs from the people who made them, but by transforming them into international brands, they have at least made them more transparent, more accountable to the global community. With blue-chip companies ploughing in money, they cannot afford to be otherwise. It is not enough to say, “the club is all that matters”, and to hell with everyone else. As Dalglish discovered in his shambolic handling of the Luis Suarez affair, it is not as simple as to cure all ills with the promise that you will never walk alone.

It could be that he cares too much about the club. Every time Dalglish was asked about Suarez, the directors, not just of Liverpool, but of their far-flung sponsors – with one eye on the Asian market – must have held their breath. From the T-shirts Dalglish sanctioned in support of the Uruguayan striker to the television interview he conducted after the player refused Patrice Evra’s hand, Dalglish got it wrong. Even last week, after all that had happened, including Sir Alex Ferguson’s claim that Suarez should be disowned by Liverpool, Dalglish was at it again, ordering his team to let the player take a penalty against Brighton & Hove Albion because the lad needed some confidence.

For those of us who grew up idolising King Kenny, it has all been a bit sad, especially in the context of his reputation among peers. Cardiff manager Malky Mackay spoke in glowing terms last week about the time he spent with Dalglish on a coaching course, a two-and-half hour chat that he described as one of the most valuable of his professional life.

He is loved by the fans, and by the players, whose description of him bears no resemblance to the surly, sometimes childish interviewee. The way he handled the aftermath of Hillsborough will never be forgotten on Merseyside. Maybe the way that disaster was reported is the root of his gripe with the media, although he admits in his book to being suspicious of the press before then. Maybe, given the contrast between his private and public personalities, we are the problem, not him.

Either way, it does not help Liverpool. Rightly or wrongly, it is not about how it is, but about how it seems, and at the moment, Dalglish seems to be an anachronism, out of date, and out of touch with the times.

At least he is not out of a job, although it will take more than a victory in the Carling Cup final to repair the damage that has been done to Liverpool’s image this season. It will take more than a win against Cardiff City, of the Npower Championship, to persuade the club’s American powerbrokers that the man who helped them to dominate football three decades back is adaptable enough to do the same now.