When I first met Gary Lineker I remember quite clearly, word for word, what I said.
I said: “Two pounds of Granny Smiths please.” Because back then, despite a prodigious talent for knocking a ball about from a ridiculously young age, Lineker’s eminently sensible parents seemed keen that he still put a shift in at the family’s fruit and veg stall on Leicester market.
And today, generations later, the would-be fruit and veg man is set to leave Match of the Day after 26 years - one national institution leaving another.
He’s Marmite is our Gary - but you’d have to be a more churlish man than me not to accept, indeed celebrate, his immense contribution to our national game.
At Leicester, Everton, Spurs, Barca, and even the oddball Japanese Grampas 8, Lineker had a truly gilded ability to find the back of the net which not only won him a mantlepiece-full of international awards but the heart of every soccer fan who loves the beautiful game at its most beautiful.
But it was with England Lineker started showing the hallmarks of a potential future national treasure - a fabulous hat trick against Poland at the 1986 Mexico World Cup, his equaliser against the Germans at Italia 90, and the legendary “‘have a word” moment as he took a tearful Paul "Gazza" Gascoigne under his fatherly wing.
I know, I’m writing about him like he’s dead.
He’s not. He’s still the same pathologically annoying, sick-makingly pious, self-righteous prat he always was. Still the same self-appointed, grandstanding political pundit with that spectacularly misguided belief his opinions are as unchallengeable as Mosaic Law.
(And those with a healthy grasp of irony will no doubt be a few steps ahead of me right now… )
And yes we’ve had a pop at the lad over the years, for his seemingly pathological inability to respect BBC guidelines and keep his opinions to himself. We reckon, as perhaps you do, that it is no business of a TV soccer pundit to tell the people who pay his millions in BBC wages that they are basically bigots.
Neither is it his job, you may think, to take a virtue-signalling social media stance on, well, everything - and in so-doing risk besmirching the BBC’s hard-earned and now crumbling reputation for impartiality.
In 2021 Gary famously, and nastily, tweeted a Daily Express front page which saw us celebrating new tennis sensation Emma Raducanu while also running a headline about illegal migrants being returned to France.
As if Ms Raducanu had just arrived in Britain clinging to an upturned dinghy provided by Albanian people traffickers. Emma is actually technically Canadian, having been born in Toronto.. A detail lost on the Match of the Day presenter.
But he hates the press does our Gary. Not enough to turn down not one, but two, lucrative newspaper columns obviously, but tsk, those tabloids!
He’s like one of those apples you sometimes bite into (not from Lineker’s Fruit and Veg obviously) which are all shiny and delicious on the outside but full of rot on the inside.
His social media contributions are utterly charmless and, to these eyes, often semi-crazed, yet as a presenter he is brilliant - charming, informed, impossibly experienced, and clearly in love with the game he is talking about.
Also, despite Gary’s desperate desire to publicly display achingly “lefty” credentials (as per the unwritten BBC code…) it is one of the few joys left on the Beeb that Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards present basically a football version of Top Gear. When it is just those three MOTD is blokey, funny, warm, expert, and unabashedly male - football TV at its very finest.
And without wishing to delve too deeply into the psychology, I think the reason for this is that Lineker, Richards and Shearer are, er, male. And this isn’t quite yet something to be ashamed of.
So it is with a heavy heart that I have to report new MOTD supremo Alex Kay-Jelski apparently wants to “freshen the corporation’s Saturday night football coverage.”
A more crass commentator than this one suggested this meant one-legged lesbians who’ve never played football in their lives should be forming an orderly queue.
Harsh I agree, but the vast majority of those with their hat in the ring for Lineker’s job are indeed women.
Even the decent ones, Gabby Yorath and Sky’s Kelly Kates say, are basically just the jobbing offspring of actual soccer legends Terry Yorath and Kenny Dalgleish - now THAT would be a presenting team!
If it was up to me MOTD would be a safe space for men. But it’s not so it’ll be a woman, and we’ll have to like it - not because she’ll necessarily be the best person for the job but because it’ll be another blow against the male hegemony.
And you thought it was just some witty ex-players talking about footy.
