When Kenny Dalglish was Liverpool manager at the time of Hillsborough in April 1989, he suddenly found himself trying to help a football club and an entire city deal with something far bigger than football. Liverpool players and staff visited hospitals, attended funerals and spent time with the families who had lost people. Dalglish went to as many funerals as he possibly could. And while all of that was happening, another battle was beginning. The day after the disaster, Margaret Thatcher travelled to Hillsborough with Home Secretary Douglas Hurd. She was shown the Leppings Lane end and met people involved in the response to what had happened. Three days later, The Sun published its front page. “THE TRUTH.” It accused Liverpool supporters of stealing from victims, urinating on police officers and attacking people who were trying to help. For Dalglish, the newspaper coverage after Hillsborough had already become almost impossible to look at. One photograph showed two young girls crushed against the Leppings Lane fence. Dalglish recognised them. They were Liverpool supporters who came to Melwood every day looking for autographs, and although both of them survived Hillsborough, seeing two familiar faces trapped in the crush was enough for him. “Nobody knows how they escaped.” “They used to come to Melwood every day, looking for autographs.” “After seeing that I couldn’t look at the papers again.” Then he was made aware of what The Sun had published. The reaction across Merseyside was immediate. Newsagents stopped stocking it. People burned copies. Supporters stopped even referring to the newspaper by its name. The Daily Star had also published allegations about Liverpool supporters, but apologised the following day. The Sun did not. Its editor Kelvin MacKenzie eventually phoned Dalglish. “Kenny, we have a bit of a problem.” “Aye.” MacKenzie wanted to know how they could put things right. Dalglish knew exactly what he thought they should do. “See the headline that you put in, ‘THE TRUTH’?” “Just have another one, as big: ‘WE LIED. SORRY.’” MacKenzie would not do it. “I can’t help you then.” Dalglish put the phone down. Only a few minutes later, another phone call came in. This one was from the governor of Walton Prison. The inmates had been reading the stories being published about Hillsborough and were becoming increasingly angry. The governor wanted Dalglish to come in and speak to them. So the next morning, he did. He walked through the prison hearing doors closing behind him and keys rattling as he was taken towards the chapel. The prisoners were waiting in almost complete silence. Then they applauded him. Dalglish had been asked to reassure them. So he told them not to be upset by what they had read in the newspapers. Because it was not true. Liverpool eventually returned to play and went on to win the FA Cup. But the argument over what had happened at Hillsborough, and what had subsequently been written about Liverpool supporters, continued for years. The boycott of The Sun across Merseyside continued. Dalglish never changed his position on what the newspaper needed to do. It took another 23 years before the Hillsborough Independent Panel published its findings. After examining more than 400,000 pages of documents, the panel found that Liverpool supporters were not responsible for the disaster and that the main cause had been a failure of police control. It also revealed what had happened to the police accounts afterwards. 164 police statements had been significantly amended. In 116 of them, comments unfavourable to the policing operation had been removed or changed. The panel also traced the false allegations about Liverpool supporters that had reached the newspapers back through a Sheffield news agency to conversations involving South Yorkshire Police and Sheffield MP Irvine Patnick. On the same day the findings were released, Kelvin MacKenzie finally apologised. “Today I offer my profuse apologies to the people of Liverpool for that headline.” He said he had been misled and that, knowing what he now knew, the front page should have carried a very different headline. “The Lies rather than The Truth.” Twenty-three years earlier, Dalglish had already told him what it should have said. “WE LIED. SORRY.” #football

When Kevin Keegan lined up for the first ever Great North Run in June 1981, he was not just another bloke having a go at a new race around the North East. He was England captain. A two-time European Footballer of the Year. And although he was playing for Southampton at the time, Keegan already had a strong connection with the area through his family. So when Brendan Foster launched a new run from Newcastle to South Shields, Keegan agreed to take part and raise money for the Charlie Bear Appeal, which was trying to fund the North East’s first whole-body scanner for cancer patients. Newcastle and Sunderland supporters would both be lining the route. Keegan did not want to pick a side. “I got this kit design where I was half Newcastle and half Sunderland.” One side was Newcastle’s black and white. The other was Sunderland’s red and white. For one afternoon at least, Kevin Keegan was going to represent both of them. More than 12,000 people turned up for that first race. And Keegan decided to make things slightly more expensive for himself before he had even started. He promised money to the scanner appeal for everybody who finished ahead of him. 50p for every man. £1 for every woman. He ran in his England Patrick football trainers. They were perfectly good for football. They were considerably less useful for running all the way from Newcastle to South Shields. “I’d got some new shoes.” “I got about four miles into the run, and they were killing me.” So he looked towards the side of the road. Standing there was a young lad with his dad. He stopped running and looked at the boy. “Will you swap?” The lad said yes. So the England captain took off his own trainers, swapped them with a child standing at the side of the Great North Run and carried on towards South Shields wearing the boy’s shoes. “I took this kid’s shoes.” “And I ran the rest of it in comfort in his shoes.” Somehow, Keegan still finished 490th out of more than 12,000 runners. Which brought him back to the promise he had made before the race. Hundreds of people had beaten him. So Keegan had to put his hand in his pocket as well. The run ended up costing him roughly £250 for the Charlie Bear Appeal. But that was why he had agreed to do it in the first place. “The people up here have been wonderful to me, but the person I really did it for was Charlie Bear.” “I’m just glad to be able to help such a good cause.” “Running in this race means I am helping people with cancer and that can only be good.” The Great North Run went on to become the biggest half marathon in the world. And one of the images from its very first year was England captain Kevin Keegan running through the North East in a shirt that was half Newcastle and half Sunderland. Wearing a little lad’s trainers. #football