‘When Kenny Dalglish, one of the greatest, and most driven, of footballers ever to come out of Scotland, went to receive his medal from the Queen his morning suit and top hat were immaculate. He even wore grey gloves.
‘Look decent... it was the fiercely applied code of conduct of one of those characters who can keep their version of decorum in a riot.
‘But then whatever happened to Kenny Dalglish's sense of propriety? Where did his judgement go that he was named, however innocently, in last week's court case brought by Paul Stretford, the agent of Wayne Rooney, in which a notorious gangster featured?
‘Dalglish's admirers will need a lot more hard proof of any wrong-doing. They will not be in a hurry to remove him from the pantheon of superbly gifted footballers who knew how to behave, who brought to the game something far more than native skill, and in Dalglish's case more than a nodding acquaintance with genius.
‘Dalglish's connection with the Stretford case has maybe carried the most devastating effect of all of football's recent troubles.
‘Whether he is, deep down inside, good or bad isn't so much the point in football's desperate plight. He was inviolate, he had created his own place in the world and it was as a representative of football at its best, its most most committed, its most passionate.
‘Dalglish, who refused to give a signed statement to the police and who was said in court to have arranged for the presence of a convicted criminal at a taut meeting between his friend and former employer, Stretford, and associates of another agent, had never before been so careless of his reputation. But, for some time now nor has football.
‘The game threshes along answerable only to itself, and some of the questioning could hardly be less focused. Outrage, if it ever existed in Blairite Britain, has been overtaken by torpor. Shocked at reports that players light cigars with £50 notes and spray Cristal champagne around their favourite watering holes? Hardly. How else can they move their cash flow; you can only park so many Porsches and Ferraris in one mansion's driveway.
‘The Football Association saw no need for action when a posse of leading managers took out shares in the public flotation of Stretford's business. No one imagined - or perhaps had reason to - a sinister purpose. It was based, it was reasonable to assume, on the sound conclusion that no branch of the game appeared to offer such sure-fire profit. Conflict of interest? No one, at least initially, was exercised about that possibility.
‘When Pete Rose, the record-hitting baseball star, was found to have been betting on baseball games he was denied his place in the game's Hall of Fame. He swore that he had never bet against his own team, was never guilty of anything that any upstanding member of society might not have done. But it was pointed out that Pete Rose was a ballplayer and that the game had an image to consider, one that was made by men like him.
‘Here the image is made by men like Dalglish - and, from an earlier generation, Sir Geoff Hurst. Last week Hurst said that Beckham had let down his game and his country when he talked publicly of how he had subverted the laws of football. In some quarters the reward for the hero of England's 1966 World Cup victory was disdain; somebody even pointed out that Hurst had sold his own winner's medal.
‘But then what is in a piece of gold for a modestly rewarded man who brought such honour - and joy - to his country?
‘Dalglish, the most private of men, will maybe one day tell us the story behind the sinister headlines. The hope is that it will be an innocent one. No, make that more than a hope; make it a prayer for what is left of the good name of English football.’