KENNY'S FROM HEAVEN Dalglish was a celestial presence at Liverpool as player and manager but, as a new film reminds us, his extraordinary talent was very much forged in Glasgow with Celtic

We're back at Wembley in 1986. Liverpool have just beaten Everton to win the FA Cup and seal a double which seemed unthinkable at the turn of the year.

Appointed player-manager the previous summer, Kenny Dalglish is reflecting on a week which began with him clinching the title with a goal at Stamford Bridge - and culminated in him masterminding a 3-1 win over Howard Kendall’s men.

There’s a banner in the background as he does a flash TV interview at full-time: ‘Kenny’s from heaven.’

The interviewer asks Dalglish if that feels like where he’s been for the past week.

‘I think so, yes,’ comes the reply. ‘But I was born in Glasgow.’

It’s now 48 years since Dalglish last called the city his home, but his love for it and how it forged him are recurring themes in the latest film to capture a life less ordinary.

Known for his works including Senna, Maradona and Amy Winehouse, Academy Award-winning director Asif Kapadia’s feature length ‘Kenny Dalglish’ leans heavily on the legendary figure’s formative years.

Using archive footage which is narrated by the man himself, it provides extraordinary insight and context into what followed when he moved to Liverpool in 1977.

Such was the genius of Dalglish that you suspect his talent would have taken him to the peak of the game no matter who or what he encountered.

And yet, there’s a revealing piece early on when Dalglish underscores the importance of Jock Stein in his development as he was trying to push his way into the Celtic side in the late 1960s.

‘Jock says to me: “You see those three midfielders? They will be behind you. You see those two forwards? They’re ahead of you. Now you see this big space here between them? That’s where you’re going to be”.’

This was in the days where midfielders were midfielders and forwards were forwards. Stein knew what a false nine was decades before anyone had heard of it. It’s entirely conceivable, though, that no player with the requisite talent to play the position had crossed his path until Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish came along.

The realities of life in the 1950s in the west of Scotland are laid bare in the 100-minute film. Born on Glasgow’s south side, Dalglish moved with his family to Milton in the north. When the local catholic secondary school was given a new football pitch, he expressed a desire to attend it.

‘My mum told me I couldn’t because I was the wrong religion,’ he explained.

When the family moved near Ibrox when Dalglish was around 14, his dad Bill took him to Rangers matches.

He left school at 15 and was looking to start as an apprentice joiner when Stein saw him play for Glasgow United against Celtic Young Boys.

With an offer to sign at Parkhead, he approached the subject with his dad cautiously only to be told: ‘The best place for you is Celtic.’

This was May 1967. Within days, Dalglish was rubbing shoulders with the first British team to win the European Cup, the Lisbon Lions.

‘It was brilliant,’ he recalled. ‘It was everything I had dreamed of. At 17, I was training with the European champions. Big Billy (McNeill) offered to pick me up in the morning.’

McNeill evidently shared his manager’s faith in the young Dalglish. This comes through in the latter’s recollection of his Old Firm derby at Ibrox in August, 1971.

Leading by a goal, Celtic won a penalty. McNeill picked the ball up and placed it in Dalglish’s hands.

‘I’m nervous,’ Dalglish recalls in the film. ‘I tied my lace even though it wasn’t loose. I was shaking. I knew their keeper tended to go to his right, so I thought: “Take the chance”.

‘It was the big one. Not because it was a great goal. It set your life up for you. We played them (Rangers) three times in a month and I scored in every one of them.’

It’s easy to forget the lasting impact Dalglish had at Celtic Park. He made his debut in a League Cup quarter-final against Hamilton in September 1968 and signed off by lifting the 1977 Scottish Cup as skipper against Rangers. He won four titles, four Scottish Cups and a League Cup.

The parting of the ways might have come sooner had it not been for the serious car crash in which Stein was involved in 1975.

The previous year, after the infamous defeat to a brutal Atletico Madrid side in the European Cup semi-final, Dalglish convinced himself that he would have to move on to have a better chance of winning the competition. Stein’s accident made him withdraw his transfer request.

‘With everything he’d done for me, he didn’t deserve for me to be leaving,’ he reflected. ‘I said; “Forget that”.’

The volume and variety of goals Kapadia’s film catches when Dalglish was clad in green and white is staggering. The viewer is reminded that he could finish in all ways from all angles. We realise exactly why Stein saw him as more than a goalscorer. His ability to shield the ball and link the game made him a truly extraordinary team player, world class, without a shadow of a doubt.

Evidence of Dalglish’s principles as a committed family man punctuate the feature. He recalls meeting his future wife, Marina (nee Harkins) who was working as a barmaid in The Beechwood in Glasgow, where Stein’s squad often went for dinner.

‘She was intelligent and family-oriented,’ he recalled. ‘That did for me.’

A first date comprised of a trip to the cinema and fish and chips. They married on a Tuesday in 1974. ‘Jock said: “I’ll see you Thursday”,’ Dalglish recalled. ‘We had a one-day honeymoon. She was the best signing I ever made.’

While the opening Celtic section is superb, the bulk of the film naturally focuses on Dalglish’s time at Liverpool as a player and manager.

On the struggles to replace ‘King’ Kevin Keegan at Anfield on the back of Bob Paisley’s side winning the European Cup, he drily states: ‘He’s gone now. I’ll be my own man.’ Within a year, he had chipped the Club Brugge keeper at Wembley to retain the trophy.

There’s a great insight into the camaraderie of three Scots in that dressing room - Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen. Dalglish used to buy chocolate biscuits for the ‘Jock Mafia’ while dishing out plain ones to their English team-mates.

Hansen recalls trips to Che Dalglish on a Sunday where Marina would cook ‘steak pie, potatoes and beans, then apple pie and custard’.

Souness, who joined from Middlesbrough at the start of 1978, admits: ‘His influence made me a far better professional. He had a brain that operated on a different level. He was the biggest star in the team, but it wasn’t about personal glory.’

Even in a side littered with outstanding footballers, Dalglish was in a league of his own.

‘Kenny is on a par with Alfredo de Stefano,’ said the late George Best. ‘He was three or four moves ahead of everyone else.’

‘In terms of all-round ability and knowledge, Kenny was the best player we had,’ added Paisley.

On their telepathic on-field understanding, former Anfield great Ian Rush said: ‘He just doesn’t look. He just puts the ball into a space.’

The success of the film is to tell a life story encompassing sporting triumph and human tragedy with profound sensitivity.

There’s no hiding from the impact Heysel and Hillsborough had on Dalglish. He succeeded Joe Fagan two days after that ill-fated European Cup final in Belgium in which 39 fans died. Four years later, he looked on in horror as 96 supporters lost their lives at the Leppings Lane end.

The haunted look on his face as he emerged from visiting the survivors of the 1989 disaster in hospital says more than any words can.

He and Marina attended as many funerals as they could. In the words of one observer, he became the father of the city of Liverpool.

‘It was our turn to be supporters,’ he recalled. ‘It was the way we were brought up in Glasgow - to help people.’

* Kenny Dalglish is being shown in cinemas on October 29 and 30 before its release on Amazon Prime in November.