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Liverpool’s defeat in the FA Cup at Old Trafford pointed to the weaknesses their new manager will need to set right

The sound rolled off the ranks of visiting fans like a ghostly mist. The ominous staccato hand-claps, then a low, rumbling “Dal-glish! Dal-glish!”. Here was a war chant from Liverpool’s vast archive of treasured memories, disinterred in order to revive the present and secure the future.

Hearing the salute as he made his way along the Old Trafford touchline before the start of the match today, Kenny Dalglish broke into a broad grin and raised both fists in acknowledgement. From a distance, he looks virtually unaltered from the deceptively sturdy and magically gifted little inside-forward who scored 118 goals in 355 league matches in the Liverpool strip before leading the club to three league championships as their manager, between 1986 and 1991. The face, however, is that of a man a few weeks from his 60th birthday who has known authentic tragedy as well as triumph upon triumph.

God willing, Dalglish will never again have to face a challenge remotely as harrowing as the one that confronted him after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. The exemplary devotion with which he consoled the hundreds of bereaved and tens of thousands of mourners on that occasion went so far above and beyond any possible expectation that nothing can jeopardise his standing at the club. And after that experience, not much in football can seem so serious.

There must, however, be a concern over whether John W Henry and Tom Werner have placed Liverpool in the hands of the Dalglish of the glory years at Anfield and Ewood Park or the one whose subsequent stewardship of Newcastle United and Celtic proved far less satisfactory. There is no doubt that he has spent the past decade observing the game with undiminished interest, but the true effect of so prolonged a hiatus will emerge only in the coming weeks.

“Now the Premier League goes on the back burner as we welcome Roy Hodgson and his Liverpool team,” Ferguson wrote in his programme notes for today’s match. You would think the United manager had been in the game long enough not to get caught like that. No serving manager has seen so many of his rivals come and go, his own resilience a standing reproach to those directors of other clubs who lose their nerve and cave in to pressure from discontented fans, as Henry and Werner did when they sacked Hodgson after 29 matches in charge.

Some managers, like José Mourinho and Sven-Goran Eriksson, make a difference straight away, imposing rational structures on dishevelled teams. Hodgson, however, was one who needed the sort of time that he was given at Fulham in which to bring his more conservative and gradual methods of rebuilding to bear. Given that scope at Liverpool, he might have shown the Kop that there was more to him than a safety-first approach.

But impatience and an instinctive dislike – not least of his southern origins – among the fans proved his downfall, along with the distrust exhibited by some senior players for his coaching methods. What looked a fine appointment last summer turned into an episode that should not be allowed to define Hodgson’s generally admirable career.

Dalglish could hardly have got off to a worse resumption, given the award of a penalty against his team after 31 seconds and a red card for his captain and talisman after 31 minutes. From his perspective, today’s defeat will have underlined what he already knew, which is that Rafael Benítez bequeathed Hodgson a seriously inadequate squad and that the latter’s efforts to strengthen it were at best ineffective. There was no sign on the pitch today of Paul Konchesky (dropped), Christian Poulsen (unused on the bench) or Joe Cole (injured), while the withdrawal of Raul Meireles on the hour, along with that of Maxi Rodríguez, prefaced Liverpool’s most threatening passage of play.

For the next 20 minutes the match had the atmosphere of a genuine cup tie rather that of a weird post-mortem on the Hodgson era. Jonjo Shelvey, who will be 19 next month, replaced Meireles and injected some badly needed dynamism into Liverpool’s midfield with Ryan Babel coming on simultaneously and adding weight to an underpowered attack. Suddenly the home side were being reminded that, thanks to their own profligacy, their advantage was only a single goal.

Shelvey robbed Anderson, who then chased and fouled Fernando Torres five yards outside the United penalty area, giving Fábio Aurélio the chance to hit a fine free-kick that brought a marvellous flying save from Tomasz Kuszczak. Shelvey then robbed Rafael Da Silva in the corner and played the ball back to Babel, who just failed to connect. Martin Kelly broke down the right and dinked in a good cross to the near post, from where Babel sent a glancing header into the side netting. Only when Shelvey tried to surprise Kuszczak with a quick free-kick from 45 yards and saw his effort float well wide was the pressure relieved.

Dalglish was kind to the 18-year-old afterwards. “He was a bit ambitious with his free-kick,” he said, “but he’d looked up and noticed something.” In addition to waking up the underperforming seniors, the Scot must employ his intimate knowledge of Liverpool’s academy to infuse his squad with the unspoilt optimism of such as Kelly and Shelvey. The mere reflection of an aura, even one so devoutly worshipped, will not be enough.

Kenny DalglishRoy HodgsonLiverpoolSir Alex FergusonManchester UnitedFA CupRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk

The new owners have played a smart card in turning to an old hero to replace their unpopular manager

The last thing Sir Alex Ferguson could have anticipated when sending out vain messages of support to Roy Hodgson on Friday was that he would be facing a Liverpool side led by Kenny Dalglish by the time today’s FA Cup tie came around.

The Manchester United manager was aware, like everyone else, that Hodgson’s time was almost up following the midweek defeat at Blackburn, yet he could not have imagined Liverpool would act so swiftly and place his old adversary in charge for the rest of the season.

So a third-round tie that was hitherto struggling to capture the imagination is now groaning with significance and historical resonance. The last time Dalglish took a Liverpool side to Old Trafford, nearly 20 years ago, he was still racking up titles – he contributed three to what then seemed an unassailable Liverpool record of 18 – while Ferguson was still waiting to win his first one.

The pair were not the best of pals in those tense years before Ferguson relaxed into the job he still holds and Dalglish succumbed to the various pressures of leading Liverpool and coping with two dreadful disasters, at Heysel and Hillsborough. Ferguson, who has every respect for what Dalglish achieved in his short spell at Blackburn, where he won the title in 1995, will be as surprised as anybody that Liverpool have turned to a man who was has been out of management for a decade.

Liverpool’s principal owner, John W Henry, said it was “in the best interests of the club” to remove Hodgson yesterday morning and take a gamble on Dalglish, whose last game as manager was at Celtic, where he took a caretaker role after John Barnes’s departure, in 2000.

“We are grateful for Roy’s efforts over the past six months, we wish him all the best for the future,” said Henry. “We are delighted that Dalglish has agreed to step in and manage the team for the remainder of the season. Kenny was not just a legendary footballer, he was the third of our three most successful managers – three giants. We are extraordinarily fortunate and grateful that he has decided to step in during the middle of this season.”

Hodgson, who signed a three-year contract when he took charge at Anfield last July, admitted that he had found the past few months “some of the most challenging of my career”, and added: “I am very sad not to have been able to put my stamp on the squad, to be given the time to bring new players into the club in this transfer window and to have been able to be part of the rebuilding process.”

The chairman, Tom Werner, reflecting on a dismal season that has featured home defeats to Northampton Town in the Carling Cup and to Blackpool and Wolves in the Premier League, added: “No one who cares for this great club has been happy with the way this season has unfolded. Kenny will bring considerable experience to the position and provide management and leadership for the rest of the season.”

Gérard Houllier, the former Anfield manager now in charge at Aston Villa, said: “Roy was manager of the year last season and he’s still a great manager and a fantastic person. But this world has become brutal. I feel for him, though obviously Kenny is a friend too.”

The simple pragmatic consideration is that Liverpool cannot afford to see another manager undermined by their own supporters. Just as Hodgson had to go once the Kop turned on him and he began digging deeper holes for himself by questioning the nature of Liverpool’s support, so Dalglish had to be tried rather than left looking on from the sidelines to form a focus, intentionally or otherwise, for terrace dissent. It could be argued Liverpool have caved in to fan power and given the objectors what they want: it could also be said the club’s owners have called the supporters’ bluff.

Dalglish will either sink or swim, the supporters will be proved right or wrong, and by the end of the season, one way or another, Liverpool ought to be in a position to move on. Friends and supporters of the new manager insist he has not really been away from the game these past 10 years, he has been attending almost every Liverpool match and taking the keenest interest in developments, though these same supporters tend to gloss over Dalglish’s past couple of appointments, the less-than-happy experiences at Newcastle and Celtic.

Liverpool’s owners have played a smart card. If nothing else, Liverpool will be playing to full crowds again for the foreseeable future. Dalglish applied for the job in the summer, or at least let it be known he was interested, only for the old owners to reject him in favour of Hodgson. The new owners have gone for the unashamedly populist option.

Dalglish has Ferguson this afternoon, Ian Holloway on Wednesday and David Moyes next weekend. By the end of his first week he, and everybody else, will have a much clearer idea of how this most dramatic of comebacks will work out.

Kenny DalglishLiverpoolRoy HodgsonPaul Wilsonguardian.co.uk

Even if Liverpool’s decline continues, Kenny Dalglish is unlikely to ever find himself, like Roy Hodgson did, walking alone

Here’s a thing about Roy Hodgson. An intelligent man, one of the few football types who knows which way up to hold a book, Hodgson’s favourite novelist is JP Donleavy. A grand choice, is that; the Irish-American is one of the 20th century’s greatest writers. But Roy’s pick from the Donleavy canon – defined by the bona fide 1955 classic The Ginger Man – is a throwaway 1979 effort called Schultz, a novel the author himself would struggle to recall. This is like saying your favourite Shakespeare play is Timon of Athens, or that your favourite Beatles song is PS I Love You. Or that the most dependable left-back in the world is Paul Konchesky.

It’s not a particularly relevant point, granted. But it is an instructive one. The man’s judgement is shot to bits. Anyway, it’s less brutal to raise the subject this way, instead of picking on poor old Christian Poulsen again.

No doubt there will soon be paeans published to Hodgson’s abilities, bemoaning the old boy’s luck. And indeed it wasn’t his fault that his reign was doomed from the start, tarnished as he was for being appointed by reviled former owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and the club’s erstwhile CEO, confused real-life Championship Manager addict Christian Purslow. Hodgson also replaced the sainted Rafael Benítez, who had probably run his course at Anfield – his ill-fated tilt at the title in 2009 always looked more like the bittersweet denouement of a glorious golden age, rather than the first blossoming of a bright new era – but nevertheless had deservedly cemented his status as an Anfield legend after a series of giddy successes.

So yes, Hodgson’s task was always nigh-on impossible. But for a man so feted by his peers, he went about his business in a remarkably cack-handed way. Konchesky and Poulsen were, it hardly needs pointing out, laughably bad signings. On the other hand, Raul Mereiles was an inspired purchase, yet sticking him out on the wing was akin to splashing out on a Bentley then taking it to Sainsbury’s car park to spin a few doughnuts.

His interviews, designed to keep the Sir Alexes of this world happy, were excruciating for fans brought up on rallying

cries. The tactics were not quite route one, but lumpen and regressive enough to be dismissed as route zero. (Brief tactical aside: whenever Liverpool conceded, Benitez copped regular flak from pundits for employing a zonal marking system; Andy Gray has kept very quiet about Hodgson’s less successful man-to-man deployment.) And the manager’s repeated attempts to keep Steven Gerrard happy by stationing him in the middle, where the player simply has no clue, pleased nobody other than the deluded captain, who should stick to what he is good at.

And there’s the rub. Hodgson is at heart a politician, a nice industry man, saying and doing the right thing in order to keep everyone happy and get along. His modest achievements were, as a result, talked up by other nice industry men – is anybody outside the media bubble seriously impressed by a 35-year gadfly career untainted by success outside Scandinavia? – and like all good company men who keep ploughing their furrow, Hodgson was eventually rewarded with the keys to the executive bathroom. Promoted to a level above his competence, he soon flooded it, a comedy tail of toilet paper found sticking out the back of his trousers.

So to the future. Is King Kenny a wise appointment? Possibly not – Dalglish’s stints at Newcastle and Celtic were pretty poor, and he’s not worked at the top level of the game since then, a decade away from the heat of the kitchen. Yet his achievements are strangely underplayed: the man has won four English titles, for goodness sake, and fashioned arguably the greatest pure footballing side the league has ever seen. (Liverpool’s 1987-88 team could teach modern-day Arsenal a thing or two about trying to walk the ball into the net.)

Though the sideline snipers will doubtless try to argue otherwise, the denizens of the Kop aren’t stupid. Despite joyfully throwing their arms open to greet a loved one finally coming home, they know deep down that Dalglish isn’t the long-term solution to Liverpool’s travails. Big decisions will be made down the line. But Dalglish understands the club, and at the moment that’s all the fans ask. His presence should be enough to steady a rocking ship, though FA Cup defeat followed by mid-table anonymity is the likeliest outcome. But even if the worst happens – if the team’s decline continues inexorably, and a shocked Liverpool find themselves in the Championship next season – Dalglish is unlikely to ever find himself, like Hodgson did, walking alone.

LiverpoolRoy HodgsonKenny DalglishScott Murrayguardian.co.uk