Dethroning King Kenny?

It has been 3 months since the Liverpool-Man United game at Anfield. Unfortunately, the game will be remembered not for the football, but for other reasons.

Since then, it has been a very busy 3 months at Liverpool. Although Suarez has accepted his ban and served it, unfortunately, another incident happened in the game between the two sides at Old Trafford last weekend.

In my opinion, the best thing would be to just forget about what happened and move on. That’s why I won’t describe anything that happened there, we all know that already. What interests me is what happened after the game. To be more precise, the apologies from both Suarez and Kenny Dalglish for their reactions and the mishandling of the whole situation.

It is a tradition at Liverpool that the manager has a lot of control at the club. The best example of that is the power Rafa Benitez had, which was at that time almost unmatched in the whole of Europe. When Kenny Dalglish signed a permanent contract, everyone expected him to have the same amount of power too. He is the King, afterall.

But the apology, which he was obviously forced to make by the owners, shows that with the arrival of FSG that a new era has come to Liverpool. The Americans wasted no time to react and try to rebuild the crushed reputation of the club. By making Kenny apologise, they have shown that there will be no more manager despotism at Anfield.

Dalglish will not be able to simply run the ship as he sees fit and have total control over club affairs, he will have to run it according to the Americans agenda. This point is reinforced by Paul Hayward who, after last weeks apologies, wrote in the Guardian:

This was the first real moment in 13 months when he [Dalglish] could no longer present himself as the boss, the unchallengeable heartbeat of the club.

Question marks have started raising over whether Luis Suarez and Kenny Dalglish will survive the summer at Liverpool. The owners seemed to be furious at them for their handling of the whole situation, and media outlets such as the Mirror have suggested that Luis Suarez might be offloaded in the summer.

There were even murmurs that Kenny Dalglish himself could be in the firing line. If this really is true, then this apology is only the first step to dethroning the King.

Thanks to o-posts.net for submitting this guest post