Goals, pots and leadership made the Scot a hero at two clubs
It takes something special to become Liverpool’s greatest ever player. Dalglish was on the path to immortality within a year of arriving at Anfield.
The game was 64 minutes old at Wembley in 1978 when Graeme Souness sent his fellow Scot clear on goal against Club Brugge in the European Cup final, at the end of Dalglish’s first season in English football. The angle was tight, the goalkeeper advancing, the pressure intense, the opportunities to panic plentiful. Dalglish did nothing of the sort, showing the ingenuity and invention to exquisitely dink the ball over Birger Jensen into the far corner, to make Liverpool kings of Europe for a second year running.
It was a goal that summed up a career. Dalglish wasn’t the quickest – he was just smarter than everyone else. “The first yard is in his head,” Bob Paisley once noted, as Dalglish terrorised defences in England and on the continent with his guile, then his feet.
Before he established himself as the Reds’ finest ever footballer – a status that later European Cup-winning stars such as Steven Gerrard and Mohamed Salah have been unable to take from him – Dalglish was a club legend at Celtic, too, despite growing up as a Rangers supporter. He actually had trials with Liverpool and West Ham but preferred to stay in Scotland, and when Celtic came calling he wasn’t going to say no – even if it wasn’t Rangers. A total of 173 goals were plundered for the Bhoys, accompanying four league titles and two European Cup semis.
Liverpool paid a British record £440,000 to take him to Anfield in 1977 as a replacement
