Then he raised the stakes by paying £5m to Norwich City for Chris Sutton and at the same time out-bid Manchester United, who must have realised that sooner rather than later they were going to have to take a Blackburn championship challenge seriously.Interestingly, it was not Dalglish who did the talking to Sutton, but the club's greatest supporter, Walker, who took the striker to a Blackpool hotel for a meal starting, as Sutton recalls, with a chilled melon costing £1.85 and finishing with Monopoly money offers. Like all of the other newcomers, Shearer had to displace someone, in his case the popular David Speedie, who had scored 23 goals in the season Rovers won promotion. "I didn't make any promises about how many goals I would score," Shearer said, but he knew it had to be more than a few.Dalglish becomes irritated when people forget that the team he guided to promotion was not suddenly acquired with Walker's money. "I felt that I was putting myself under pressure by not joining United or Liverpool." But it went deeper than that.

Dalglish saw in Batty a maligned player whose creative ability had become submerged in a reputation for abrasiveness.Batty himself recoils from the suggestion of Blackburn, being merely dull and tough: "I came here because they play good football, on the ground. People say money buys success but you have to buy shrewdly and fit the players into the system."Shearer recalls that while he knew the deal he struck with Rovers would "set me up for life" he was a bit concerned that he was joining a club everyone knew had huge resources but no real tradition. Squaring Dalglish's solemn approach with a desire to play the game attractively is quite a task. David Batty, whose long absence this season has been a considerable blow, is Dalglish's sort of footballer but not necessarily because of his spiky determination. It takes some believing unless you happen to be privy to his wicked grin when he still skins defenders years his junior.

Why Blackburn? "They were the only ones who offered me a job." Ask Walker why he chose Dalglish and you get an equally terse answer: "We needed the best man for the job and a hard one."Alan Shearer speaks for many of the players when he says that we, the media and television viewers, never see the lighter side of Dalglish because he only really enjoys himself when joining in training. But with him as manager, Blackburn will always struggle to win hearts.Ask him why he chose to resume his management career after "retiring" from Liverpool and he is hardly likely to say he needed the money He realised that more than anything he needed football. What Dalglish knows is that only by getting Rovers into the European Cup can he begin to create the perception of a truly big club in world terms. Dalglish has had almost £30m to spend on players while at the same time vast amounts have been invested in a stadium that has risen out of the back-to-backs and is nowready to receive clubs like Milan without feeling all fingers and thumbs. I'm not here to squander Jack Walker's money."But there is no getting away from the benefits of Walker's deep pockets. They have a conviction that the whole country outside their corner of Lancashire wants Manchester United to retain the title.

Dalglish himself seems to be convinced that people want Rovers to fail because they have an unfair advantage - the Walker millions. "All that's happened at Blackburn," he said, "was that while other clubs were spending money, we were spending it more quickly." As he reflected on the envy that other clubs had barely concealed, his muttering descended into revealing self-defence "It's a matter of what you do with the money It's no good having it and not spending it wisely. Outside the club, that isn't too many people." The "no one loves us" attitude is strong at Ewood Park but the difference between the defiant Millwall chant and Dalglish's outlook, is that he would never add "we don't care". He wants to build a team that succeeds and wins approval.Recent weeks have seen Dalglish and his team getting ever more defensive, and not just on the field. He said: "The players are disappointed for everyone who wants them to succeed. Asked about his own expensive team's failure to beat one so modest, Dalglish replied: "I'm not concerned about them.