It took Kenny Dalglish 20 years to return to a job he wished he had never surrendered in the first place, and now Liverpool face a new dilemma – or will do, in the summer. One warm day, if progress is slow, King Kenny will lose the post for a second time and another manager will arrive to find Anfield febrile again.
By the letter of the statement that confirmed Roy Hodgson's removal by popular revolt, Dalglish is the world's most eminent caretaker. But not in his own mind. Liverpool's greatest player craved the role vacated by Rafa Benítez but was overlooked in favour of Hodgson, the recently anointed manager of the year. To say Dalglish has unfinished business in the boot room only hints at the regret he felt after walking out on his second home, suffering from stress, in 1991.
John W Henry and his team may not consider Dalglish a viable long-term appointment. The previous owners obviously did not endorse this quest when Benítez left. If they had, they would have handed him the keys back in July. More fool them, Dalglish's supporters would say. Their man experienced the deep pain of rejection but elected to stay on anyway as an academy fixer while becoming an unwilling focus for anti-Hodgson unrest.
Calling an icon from the back office of ambassadorial duties gets the Kop off the owners' backs and arrests the slide into the kind of unpopularity that saw off Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Once Hodgson was abandoned, it made sense to seek emergency cover from the last Liverpool manager to bring the league title to Anfield, in 1990, and to support his apparent wish to have Ian Rush alongside him in a dug-out that will double up as a mini hall of fame.
For Dalglish, though, this is a chance to join Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger in the ranks of elder statesmen. His mission will be to manage a declining team so well that it becomes impossible for Henry to send him back to the academy. The prospects are surprisingly bright.
Dalglish starts from Liverpool's lowest base since 1953-54, when Don Welsh's side were relegated. A Champions League place looks unreachable but any rise in the league could be sold to the board as the first signs of rebirth.
Rancour and depression have settled over Anfield. Nostalgia alone will clear that suffocating fog as Dalglish finds himself lining up against Ferguson at Old Trafford in the FA Cup less than 24 hours into his first managerial appointment since Celtic 10 years ago. With the future darkly clouded, Liverpool raided a clear past. Dalglish and Rush unpicked countless teams together but they must do so now in an industry unrecognisable from the one they dominated as players.
"Good luck King Kenny," tweeted Xabi Alonso, who, with Javier Mascherano, formed the defensive shield in a Liverpool side who, two seasons ago, assembled 86 points and finished second before going on the slide. Alonso always had a sharp sense of Liverpool's cultural heritage and Dalglish will need to recruit more players of his calibre if he is to clear out the underachieving passengers in a sprawling squad.
But first let us marvel at the circle Dalglish has travelled from stress-related illness to the commanding role he first inherited from the greats: Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan. Here, a rebuke is in order for Henry, who wrote in his statement: "Kenny was not just a legendary footballer, he was the third of our three most successful managers – three giants." Fagan, presumably, is missing from that homage.
Where the Shankly and Dalglish stories intertwine most poignantly is in the regret both men felt at walking away prematurely. Assailed by demons, each thought escape from the strain of management was the only solution: proof, if it were needed, of the unhappiness that can afflict even the most illustrious and capable football men when perspective breaks down.
Troubled by stress-related blotches and still haunted by the Hillsborough disaster, Dalglish resigned as Liverpool manager in 1991 but returned from a family holiday in Orlando a few weeks later horrified that Graeme Souness had taken over. In his autobiography he wrote: "Of course, I had no right to hope Liverpool would come back to me. Besides, at that time I thought Graeme was the right man for the job. But if Liverpool had waited until the summer, and then asked me, I would have gone back. Like a shot. Liverpool will always be in my family's heart."
Dalglish recalls the 4-4 fourth-round FA Cup draw with Everton that prompted his resignation. "Before the game, I lay on my hotel bed and decided I had to get out. The alternative was going mad." The next day, "unwell and under strain", he told the club: "I cannot go on. I am telling you now that I want to give up."
This sorrow has coloured his professional life ever since. Although his judgment seemed to be fraying in his final months at Liverpool he recovered to become the only manager outside of United, Arsenal and Chelsea to win the Premier League – with Blackburn Rovers in 1995. Even with Jack Walker's money, Blackburn winning the title remains a monument to clever team-building.
Newcastle United is often assumed to be the place where Dalglish's managerial career crunched to a halt but his second and 13th place finishes from 1997-98 would be snatched at now by the club's supporters. After St James' Park the caravan stopped at Celtic for a while but then Dalglish disappeared into shadow. Unbroken, though, was his belief that he was a manager in exile, rather than a has-been: hence the earnestness of his application to succeed Benítez.
When people dismiss the idea of him saving Liverpool they point to his decade "out of the game" as an insurmountable handicap. This is the most fascinating aspect of his recall, because it will tell us whether managerial skill withers like an unused muscle.
His eyes and instincts will be stronger than ever because he has never stopped watching the elite game, as Kevin Keegan sometimes did. He will still spot a good player and a shirker. The complications fall in other areas. Liverpool's squad is substantially more cosmopolitan than 20 years ago, young multimillionaire players are more powerful, agents more pervasive and the transfer market wholly altered from when scouting and recruitment were confined more or less to the English leagues.
It helps, of course, that he is a living deity who knows the precise state of the academy and its starlets. This should not be underestimated. If Liverpool are serious about Moneyball – the clever use of baseball statistics in order to obtain value-for-money-players that was the title of a book by Michael Lewis – and self-regeneration it helps to have a manager who knows which of the reserves and under-18s might step up to help Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher. One unknown is how Fernando Torres and Pepe Reina will regard the news: as evidence of panic or the start of a renaissance.
While Liverpool have been changing owners, not building a new stadium and dispensing with Benítez and Hodgson, Manchester City and Tottenham have pushed into the challenging places behind United, Chelsea and Arsenal. With no £50m budget to buy from the A-list (and reassure Torres and Reina), Dalglish confronts a daunting task.
To see him auditioning for a full-time job the then owners were reluctant to give him back in the summer, 21 years after the club's last league title, and 10 years after he last picked a team, is emblematic of Liverpool's descent, yet this is no creaking geriatric they have pulled in from a golf course. Dalglish is only 59. His 10-year absence distorts our sense of how old he is, and while American owners and foreign players may struggle from time to time with his Glaswegian accent it was no barrier to him winning three league titles as Liverpool manager from 1986, 1988 and 1990.
Since the losing Champions League final of 2007, Liverpool have been a club in convulsion. Factions have formed, stability has become elusive and many fans have grown venomously angry. Those who say Fenway Sports Group should have picked a full-time successor to Hodgson off an unconvincing list perhaps understate the need for Liverpool to recover their poise and identity as a community club.
Dalglish returns as a kind of revered patriarch, opening the front door to restore order in a house gone wrong. He has his own agenda too. We usually call it redemption.
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