A Guardian piece was the standout story of the weekend for me. It was written by Sean Luckett – a creative director and senior copywriter in his mid-50s – who recently had the chance to meet his hero, Kenny Dalglish, at a film premiere.
Nothing to see here, you might think. Kenny has been shaking hands and posing for photos like this for decades.
Except Sean was the ‘miracle of Hillsborough’ – the young man who woke from a coma days after the disaster, opening his eyes and saying ‘Kenny Dalglish’ moments after the man himself had spoken a few words of encouragement at his bedside.
And I strongly suspect that meeting again, 36 years on, meant as much to Kenny as it did to Sean.
Dalglish wasn’t just leading a football club in 1989; he was absorbing grief on behalf of a city. And when you’re doing that, you don’t get closure in the normal way. You don’t get to stop, process, or even properly feel. You carry on. You perform steadiness. You become the container.
So the ‘miracle’ isn’t just Sean waking from a coma – it’s that Dalglish was allowed, however briefly, to experience something good that cut through the horror. A proof point that not everything ended in darkness. That matters profoundly to someone at the front, even if they never say so.
Sean says that at the end of the night Kenny made a beeline for him, grabbed his hand and said, “Great to fucking see you again, by the way.”
I bet it was.
(Pic credit.. Sean Luckett/The Guardian.)
Andrew Greenhalgh 