By Chris Rowland.

It was a tough act to follow. After all, Kevin Keegan was our hero, our talisman. Since he’d arrived we’d won three league titles, two UEFA Cups, an FA Cup against Newcastle when he scored two of the three goals and, most unforgettably of all, our first European Cup in 1977.

But by then he’d already announced he was leaving. Rome would be his last game for the club – talk about going out at the top.

How could we replace him? Who was there who could play that sort of role, and do that that well? Bob Paisley thought he knew someone who might. He’d cost a bit less than the £500,000 we got for Keegan. £60,000 less, eventually. That’s what a reluctant Jock Stein at Celtic finally accepted for one Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish.

I saw Kenny Dalglish make his debut for the club, at Wembley, against the Mancs in the Charity Shield. It finished 0-0. He looked OK, quite promising, a few turnings of a defender here, a few threaded passes and a bit of vision there. We sang that song to the mancs:

‘Daylight robbery, daylight robbery, give us back our FA Cup.’

The one they stole four days before Rome, with the freakiest winning goal in FA Cup Final history, having been outclassed for pretty much 90 minutes, when a throw-in bound shot hit another Utd player on the chest and looped over Clemence. Without that, we’d have done Utd’s 1999 treble 22 years earlier. They are indeed a pestilence on the face of our planet, but that’s for another day …

Oh and this song also got its first airing; we would get to hear it a lot over the coming years:

‘Kenny oh Kenny

We’ll walk a million miles

for one of your goals

Oh Kenny’

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