HERE’S a bit of advice to the BBC “insiders” who are trying to get football fans excited about who may take the reins at Match of the Day.
We don’t care. By the time MOTD goes out, late Saturday night, the majority of us have seen the games, goals and controversies that interest us, and only record the show, to be watched the next day, if our team has won or our rivals have been defeated.
Due to the endless supply of streamed content elsewhere, MOTD is today a different programme entirely to the one we watched religiously when growing up.
As for Gary, there will be no shortage of broadcasters willing to double his BBC contract to front their sports shows. So, for the people who really matter, licence fee-paying football fans, Lineker leaving is no big deal.
But the way a loyal presenter of 25 years, who is still at the top of his game, has been driven out, very much is. Mainly because it offers further evidence that the BBC, under its Tory donor boss Tim Davie, is petrified of upsetting Conservative MPs and right-wing media in case its funding is pulled.
The undiminished joy on GB News and in Tory-backing papers this week over the sacking of a man they disparage as a woke, bleeding-heart champagne socialist, implies that Davie received many thanks for seeing off the man the Daily Mail calls The Righteous One.
For years they have despised how Lineker was free to offer his left-of-centre takes on social media and remain in the pay of the BBC.
Despite the fact he is a freelance worker who points out that his political views are his own.
His every refugee-supporting, injustice-hating post was met with rage. After a tweet last year criticising the government’s asylum policy, dozens of Tory MPs signed letters calling for his removal from our screens.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Clarkson can call for Meghan Markle to be paraded naked through streets having turds thrown at her, and there are no calls for his TV paymasters to remove him. Just admiration for “telling it like it is”. Can you imagine the screams for ITV to sack Lineker from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? if he was its host, and had written, as Clarkson has, that the government plans to “ethnically cleanse” our farmland to build “new towns for immigrants”?
I wrote here, eight years ago, that post-Brexit Britain had become divided into two tribes: Tribe Katie Hopkins and Tribe Gary Lineker. One that is contemptuous of people’s suffering, another who thinks it’s inhumane not to help them.
Since then, with the rise of the hard-right Reform Party and the increased toxicity of the Tories, the division has become more stark.
Throw in the return of Donald Trump with an administration rammed with fascist nutjobs, the emboldening effect this will have on right-wing extremists in Israel, plus the takeover of social media’s biggest platform by Elon Musk, and the world needs all the Gary Linekers it can get.
This cowardly sacking of the best football presenter of his generation does not equate to a loss for us fans. Just the BBC.
As for Lineker, we should welcome the fact that he’s been given the chance to spend more time with his “woke” opinions.
Now that you’re free to do so, Gary, tell us what you really think.