A corner just outside the hospital room.
Dean followed Dalglish.
When Dalglish stopped, Dean came to a halt facing him.
“You probably don’t know me, but I know you.
Bishop John Catholic School.” Dalglish spoke.
“Always fighting, in and out of school grounds.
The school’s come to me about it more than a few times.
I’ve spoken up for you—kids’ fights should be sorted out between the kids themselves, and it’s never the one who got provoked who’s really at fault.”
Dean looked up at Dalglish.
He’d always known that his troubles at school kept getting quietly smoothed over.
So, it had been Dalglish, working behind the scenes, all along.
Dalglish smiled slightly, looking the boy over.
“I also watched you go from taking beating after beating to gradually training yourself up until no one could get near you easily anymore.
Including all that running you do, and the striking practice—I know about that too.”
Dean reached up and scratched the back of his head, the tips of his ears were going faintly warm.
“How do you know all that?”
Dalglish gave a soft laugh, his gaze drifted out the window toward the sweep of old Liverpool rooftops in the distance.
“Because of Liverpool.
Because of Anfield.”
Then his eyes lowered.
“Your grandfather, John, was a diehard Red.
I had a photo taken with him, years back.”
Dean shook his head slowly.
“I’ve never seen a photo of him.”
“I’d imagine Mrs.
Mason threw every last one of them away.” Dalglish’s voice grew heavier.
“April 15th, 1989.
The Hillsborough disaster.
I was there.
I lived through every moment of that darkness, and everyone’s grief tearing them apart.”
Dean’s body went still.
“Marina and I, and the club as well—we’ve spent years supporting the families of the victims, hoping they could find their way through the pain.
Other families found some comfort by leaning back into football.
Mrs.
Mason was the only one who shut herself off completely—refused every offer of help, burned every last thing in the house connected to football, and stayed trapped in that catastrophe for the rest of her life.
I’ve kept an eye on how your family’s been doing, all this time.
Your own situation, naturally, hasn’t escaped my notice.”
Dean pressed his lips together and bowed to Dalglish.
“Thank you.”
“Hey, kid, what are you doing.” Dalglish pulled Dean back up.
“You know this—we did all this because we wanted to.
I’ve always thought of Liverpool as home.
All of you are my family.”
He went on.
“You’re a good kid…
but football isn’t what Mrs.
Mason says it is.
It doesn’t only bring people pain.”
Dean straightened up and nodded slightly.
He understood this city’s obsession with football.
He also understood his grandmother’s hatred of it.
And himself?
Now it was his turn to seriously consider the question: how did he see football?
Dalglish looked at Dean, saw in his eyes a maturity that didn’t belong to a boy his age, and let out a sigh, before speaking about a past he himself would rather not have to face.
“I don’t know how clearly you understand what happened at Hillsborough, and I don’t know how you feel about football, but what I want to tell you is this—the sight of that day, I will never forget it as long as I live.
So many ordinary people who loved the game, who only wanted to go watch a match, and instead never left that ground again.
Everyone was in pain.
Every family that lost someone was shattered.
Mrs.
Mason’s pain is real.
Her shutting herself away, her hatred of football—that’s real too.
Because the Leppings Lane terrace became a nightmare she could never walk out of for the rest of her life.
After the disaster, half the city of Liverpool collapsed.
Grief, rage, despair—it hung over everyone.
So many families, just like Mrs.
Mason, lost the people closest to them, and were left with nothing but an empty house and a scar that would last a lifetime.
I saw so many people that day, heard so many stories that broke my heart.
One father, Trevor Hicks, was sobbing, unable to make a choice—should he ride in the ambulance with the daughter who was injured?
Or stay behind with the other daughter, who would never wake up, who was going to be laid to rest here?”
The police wouldn’t let anyone take the bodies away.
So, they were laid out in a row, all of them, in the gymnasium at the ground.
Do you know what that kind of despair feels like?
At the hospital in Sheffield, I also saw a boy named Lee Nicol.
He was only fourteen.
There wasn’t a mark on his body, but the doctors had already pronounced him dead.
I didn’t understand it—they told me it was oxygen starvation, that his brain had already stopped working.
When they pulled him out, he was unconscious, but still alive.
In the end, though, he still became the 95th person to die.”
By this point, Dalglish could barely go on, as though just as he’d said himself—those images he could never forget as long as he lived were still tangled around him at every moment, like a waking nightmare.
Dean stayed silent.
Dalglish let out a sigh and patted Dean’s shoulder.
“But you need to understand—football was never the wound itself.
People came to Anfield afterward to remember them, and Anfield became a place of comfort for the victims’ families, because there was a whole community there who understood, who cared, who felt it alongside them.
They could talk it out there, let their grief out there.
They were strong, all of them.
They took the love their lost family members had for Liverpool and turned it into bittersweet jokes.
Someone once said, ‘Hey, poor sod—at least he gets to watch Liverpool matches from heaven for free now, that ought to cheer him up a bit,’ and things like that.
What held this city up, what got it back on its feet, slowly—that was football, of all things.
The fans never gave up on the ground.
The club never gave up on what it believed in.
Countless people in Liverpool swallowed their grief and poured their longing into every chant, every match.
Other people think football’s only about winning and losing.
Only we know that it’s the thing carrying our regrets, easing our wounds, holding us together.
That’s the power of football.
It doesn’t create suffering.
It carries it.
Bill Shankly spent from 1966 onward trying to talk me into coming down from Scotland to Liverpool, but it wasn’t until 1977 that Bob Paisley finally signed me.
I never played under Bill myself, but that line of his always made sense to me: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death.
I’m very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.'”
In that moment, Dean raised his head.
The confusion in his eyes had thinned, just slightly.
He looked at Dalglish—these were things no one had ever said to him before.
For his whole life, everything he knew about football had come from his grandmother’s tears, her trembling, her fear.
He’d always believed football was a disaster.
A curse.
Everything this family had forbidden.
But—every time he saw the excitement on Ethan’s face; it told him otherwise.
The look on the faces of the boys at school when they talked about Gerrard’s goals told him otherwise too.
And now, Dalglish was telling him otherwise as well.
Kenny looked at him and went on gently.
“Mrs.
Mason has been trapped in that nightmare her whole life.
She chose to stay away from football, to protect herself and her family.
I don’t blame her for it.
No one has the right to blame someone who’s suffered through pain like that.
But you’re different.
You’re the one who has to carry this family now—who has to earn money, who has to look after your grandmother and Ethan.
The road ahead of you is hard.
A hundred times harder than it is for an ordinary boy your age.
So how are you planning to pay it all back?”
Dean fell silent.
Talking about earning money for a thirteen-year-old boy was a cruel thing to have to do.
Dalglish gave him the answer himself.
“I saw David Coleman a couple of days ago.
He’s a good scout.
I’m good friends with his father, and I know how sharp that boy’s eye is.
I tried to bring him to Liverpool once, but he’s an Everton supporter through and through.
He told me about you—said you’ve got real talent for the game, but that if you don’t start training soon, that talent’s going to slip away.”
‘David Coleman?’
Dean answered without quite thinking.
“I’ve never played football.”
“Then go and play.
I believe David Coleman wouldn’t lie to me.
He’s someone with a good eye for this.
He says you can do it.
I think so too.
Liverpool kids never get crushed by hardship.
Back then, we managed to stand back up out of the rubble.
You can too.
Your life’s fallen apart, no money, no one to lean on, no way back—none of that matters.
If fate’s determined to make you suffer, then use football to fight your own way out.
Football was never meant to be your cage.
It can be your backbone.”