It used to be so much easier. Footballers would stay in their boxes while they were still playing and run pubs and grow fat once they’d stopped. Now Gary Lineker has insisted once again on being a sentient, thoughtful human being and locked horns with Des Lynam, his predecessor as presenter of Match of the Day.
The older of the two smoothies said Lineker should stick to presenting football, which for someone who used to adore Des Lynam but who tends to agree with Lineker’s opinions, puts me in a tricky position.
The problem, of course, is that Britain is now horribly tribal. With the exception of the big ideological and doctrinal divides (pro- or anti-capital, religious or secular, jam or cream on first, et cetera) it used to be possible to judge an issue on its merits. It was called liberalism. You could express a view on Bazball or on Holly Willoughby’s next move. It was what Twitter was designed for – or at least should be for. The language of “one of us”, cancel culture and troll mobs was a million miles away.
But now we are required to take sides. So if someone we haven’t heard of says something we agree with, and we then discover that they are, say, a flat-earther, it is worrying. They are not in our camp. They go against our grain. So we don’t bother to think it through and maybe, unfairly, we forget what it was we agreed with them about. We leave them floundering in the flat earth camp and move on to more literally agreeable pastures.
I tend to be, by instinct, on Gary Lineker’s side, as I suspect a lot of people are. He dislikes racism, he is appalled by global warming, he loathes xenophobia and the exclusion from our shores of those with darker skin than his. In short, he seems entirely decent, liberal and public-spirited. Those are values I aspire to hold, so I regard him as part of my tribe. If he chooses to sound off (within BBC regulations, whatever those turn out to be), I generally flap my fins in approval.
I used to feel roughly the same way about Des Lynam, though for years – decades, even – he said nothing about his politics. That didn’t stop me trying to infer from his sphinx-like inflections what sort of bloke he might be, beyond, obviously, being a superlative, economical, acute and droll presenter. Even at his most downbeat, he could convey the tribulations of 56 million people with an eyebrow. (Was his chairing of the Italia ’90 coverage not one of the BBC’s best-ever moments?) But it turns out that in 2013 he declared himself a Ukipper and supporter of Nigel Farage.
If a friend had done the same, I would express sympathy and ask if they’d had counselling. It would threaten our friendship, as taking opposite sides on Brexit has done for so many. Des, how could you?
In telling Lineker to stick to the football, he is putting himself on the other side of the divide – with the Arron Bankses and those mysterious hedge funders and… Boris Johnson. Des won’t care about little me, but there are an awful lot of us, and like it or not, he is now irredeemably on the other side of a divide which used not to exist.
Yet all he is doing is expressing a view with which I suspect, tribal loyalty apart, many Lineker admirers agree. In principle, football presenters should stick to football. Des is right, but I’m not going to admit that from my side of the trenches.
Does Lineker feel the need because our politicians aren’t delivering for us, or because he’s an uppity Leicester City fan with too much taxpayers’ money in his wallet? Now there’s another watershed issue.
