A nice sense of timing

Gary Lineker did his best work in the box. Now he does it on the box. Tom Humphries visits the ‘Match of the Day’ studio to which former England striker has transferred so seamlessly

MEMO
Re profile interviews with Mr Gary Lineker. Journalistic Advisory Notes:
When approaching the subject in print it is customary to begin by feigning an almost exasperated dislike of Mr Lineker and all his saintly deeds. Deride his industrial strength niceness. Mention that he was never put in the bold corner at school, that he ate all his greens at home and that he never received the admonishment of a yellow card in all his years playing footer with the rough boys.

These things make you suspicious if not a little hostile.

Announce portentously that you are setting out on a voyage to discover "the other side" of Gary Lineker. The shores of Gary Badass, as it were.

When developing the piece express your surprise at his intelligence, his wit and his easy self-deprecation. You had expected intellectual mutton dressed up as lamb, but why sir, this is just like real conversation.

Concede eventually that you have failed in your mission to find somebody with a bad word to say about Mr Lineker. Effect a bah, humbug tone.

Finally confirm for the readers that Mr Lineker is indeed as nice as everybody says he is. He is the tops. He is the Colosseum.

Ask thoughtfully if there is any harm in that, if the problem doesn't lie with us for seeking unpleasantness in even the lavender-scented vaults of goodness.

Wish him luck with the whole niceness thing. Let your parting shot be the enormous condescension of your approval.

Necessary Words: Shoes. Goody. Two Genial. Urbane. Slender. Butter. Mouth. Melt. Would. Not. In. His.

It's like football, he says. It's timing. You get into the right place, you make your run at the right time and . . . bang.

Bang. Perhaps the only piece of timing that Gary Lineker has got wrong in his career is that he didn't die young, he didn't go out with a bang. Had some air crash or road smash left us with nothing but memories and Gary's handsome remains we would have made a fetish of his goodness until such time as he was fast tracked to sainthood.

He would have been the mouldering symbol of a more decent era, a golden period of football history when the game could still be distinguished from the modern Babylon of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, a time when football aspired to be a living, vital thing, not the carrion which tabloid vultures feed off.

He's the perfect man to be sentimental about. Except Gary Lineker hasn't gone anywhere.

Instead he is still with us, still eminent, his decency and perfection a quiet reproach to the world of dogging and roasting and clubbing. His decency is oddly under-appreciated though in a world disfigured by its own barbed ironies and edgy sarcasms. If Niall Quinn is our Mother Teresa, well Gary Lineker is his nation's Queen Mum. Bless.

He should be an icon. Those goals he scored were such a perfect expression of the striker's trade that students should be parsing them and analysing them still. He scored lots and he scored usually at the perfect time.

Oh, and bang isn't the right word. Not for a stiletto blade. Not for a man whose every goal carried the simple finality of a grand master moving a piece onto a new square and whispering the word: checkmate. If you liked winning Lineker gave value for your money, but he never gave bang for your buck. He's more subtle than that.

Subtlety and finesse come with a price in these gaudy times. Today Lineker is known to people with similar hair colour as the guy who used to play football once upon a time, to kids who stay up late he's the man from Match of the Day. And universally he is the star of the Walkers Crisps advertisements.

Twenty years ago he had a World Cup summer which changed his life. This summer he will convey the World Cup to a new generation, with scarcely a look back or a mention of his previous incarnation. He's still there, doing something he is good at, something which makes him relevant. That's enough, he reckons.

It's timing really. From beginning to end. Once Harold Lineker, a zippy winger for the army back in the war years, was watching Elston Boys play and he spotted an old friend Ray Shaw taking the game in too. Ray was a scout for Leicester City by then.

"Watching anyone out there, Ray?" asked Harold.

"Little lad up front," said Ray.

"That's my grandson," said Harold.

That was the season that Gary scored 161 goals in 40 games. That ratio of celebrations to appearances was bound to attract scouts, but when he was a nipper Gary's dad Barry (yes it's a lineage of Harry, Barry and Gary) and his grandad had brought him to Filbert Street and he had fallen in love. Timing. The first game he remembers is the Foxes playing Manchester United on a day when Charlton and Best played. The first big upset of life: Leicester losing the FA Cup final to Manchester City in 1969.

If Gary Lineker was to have closed his eyes and made a wish for a scout to have arrived and to have spotted him first it would have been Ray Shaw of Leicester. Right then.

Timing. He had eight happy years at Leicester and moved to Everton and played for a season (in the best team he ever played with, he says). Enough to make him a legend at Goodison. At the end of that season he went to the World Cup as a decent striker and came home as the tournament's top scorer and became a Barcelona player. He scored in the second minute of his first league game and put away a hat-trick first time out against Real Madrid.

His career unspooled like that as if every moment had been scripted and rehearsed. When he left football and joined the media it was no different. He chose the right places from which to make his runs. He wrote his own column in the Observer. He enjoyed broadcasting. he spotted that since Jimmy Hill and Bob Wilson no footballer had made it at presenting. Soon after Lineker began at the BBC, Bob Wilson moved to ITV and Lineker was handed Football Focus.

Fast forward a few years. Lineker is coming into the BBC studios at Shepherd's Bush one morning when the doorman says:

"Well 'ave you 'eard?

"No? What?"

"About Des. He's only orf to ITV."

Lineker's friendship with his old mentor Des Lynam is solid enough that he doesn't mind admitting that he clenched his fist and a gave a little skip of joy as he headed towards the lifts.

"I was the only person in the whole building not desperately disappointed. I thought they'd give me the Match of the Day job and a few hours later they called me in and said it was mine."

Not bad for a man who began his TV career with a pre-match report from pitch-side with the immortal line: "It's quite firm down here, all the guys will be wearing rubbers tonight."

Or for a man who excitedly welcomed BBC viewers to Race Boat Day.

It's.

Timing.

So Gary Lineker has a Saturday job.

He always worked Saturdays and by the appearance of things he always will do. Back in the day his Saturday job was scoring goals, a task he performed with the dispassionate expertise of an assassin. Now he presents Match of the Day.

It’s the flagship channel’s flagship programme for Britain’s flagship sport. He’s good at it. Very good.

It is Saturday afternoon now and the Match of the Day office looks like any workplace from here to David Brent Land, except for the 14” flat-screened TVs which hang from one wall. Arranged in poses of decorative languor on two functional leather couches are three of the greatest footballers these islands have produced.

Mark Lawrenson is the chattiest, throwing back a constant stream of jokes and comments to the office staff behind him who sit on the swivel chairs and scan the sportswires for incoming quotes and news.

Alan Hansen, in a green sweat shirt and mahogany tan, passes the odd acerbic comment. Consistent with his screen persona these words are usually directed at flailing centre halves.

And Gary Lineker, more slender, more tanned, more bespoke than either of his colleagues, lounges between them with his expensive leather boots resting on a stool. On the peripheral screens in the array sport from other channels filters in. Cricket from the West Indies. Snooker from Sheffield.

Gary Lineker is the only person in the room who could have been a pro at any of the sports now showing.

He won’t ever tell you that, though. He has a few sheets of paper in one hand. A pen in the other. One side of each sheet is filled with type written words in which he has no interest. The other side he uses for scribbling bits and pieces of his script for tonight’s show.

Occasionally as the afternoon develops, texts arrive on his mobile phone and he manipulates his lips according to his response. After the full times, when one arrives from Alan Shearer concerning Michael Owen’s foot, Lineker’s lips arc down at the corners into a cartoon portrait of misery.

“Shearer says Michael may be cattletrucked. Blimey. Bad day.”

It is a bad day but perhaps nobody in the office knows quite how bad. Earlier Wayne Rooney has been stretchered off the field at Stamford Bridge. That’s public news.

Lineker’s brother Wayne is just beginning a stretch in Brixton prison. That’s everybody’s gossip. Tomorrow the tabloids of whose scourge Lineker has steered free with immense dignity over his decades in the public eye, will announce that his marriage to “childhood sweetheart” Michelle is over.

Oh, and they’ve just remembered. The Beeb chose artworked images of Wayne Rooney, Thierry Henry and Ronaldhino for its opening credits for World Cup broadcasts. Doh!

It is a bad day on either side of the camera but at 10.20 this evening the reliably jaunty Match of the Day music will strike up and when it fades away Gary Lineker will have a live show to do. If he works in a world where a centre forward getting cattletrucked passes as tragedy well then he will present the news as tragedy, with just the right twist of perspective regardless of what is happening in his own life.

All afternoon the little fragments which will make Match of the Day into a cohesive programme assemble themselves in this office. When they scribbled their first notes for tonight, Chelsea’s coronation in front of Manchester United looked as if it would be the story of the day.

Then Rooney’s metatarsal went doolally. Michael Owen’s metatarsal announced that it was vying for equal coverage. Harry Redknapp performed the sort of miracle with Portsmouth that entitles him to change his surname to Houdini. Alan Curbishly announced he was resigning.

The BBC made Match of the Day a live programme precisely to cope with a day like this. Right up till the last minute the team can wait if necessary on news to be broadcast from right inside Wayne Rooney’s flimsy little football boot. That gives Match of the Day the platform to establish the tone of the footballing weekend. And “live” is also the style of broadcasting Lineker most enjoys.

“That’s something Des taught me. People don’t mind if I say something wrong or stutter on a word. Just so long as I don’t visibly panic. I just have to invite them in on the joke. Let the lads take the mickey. When you take a penalty in a World Cup semi-final your mistakes matter. People care. It’s important to remember the difference.”

When all the results are in and the news stories look to have settled themselves into some order of priority Lineker begins to write his own script for the evening broadcast.

Lineker says that if there is one broadcast style he has sought to emulate it is that of Lynam. He has succeeded. Lineker’s pieces to camera have just enough sardonic wit to make one think that the same person must have penned the words first for Lynam and then for Lineker. The tone is perfect: just the right weight. Maybe football is tragedy. But mostly it’s funny too.

The programme editor Paul Armstrong buzzes about the place consulting on this item and that. The three former footballers have a surprising amount of editorial input to the show and on an afternoon when Portsmouth have stayed up and Birmingham have gone down, agreement is reached virtually by consensus as how best to interweave the footage in order to squeeze the most drama out of it all.

Once or twice Lineker looks up and hollers to his editor. “Armo? Got a minute? Could you take a look at this? Going the right way?” Armstrong takes a look at the words scribbled. “Yeah, that’s it.” Gary Lineker goes back to his Saturday job.

In a distinct way Lineker embodies the besetting problem of English football. Had he been born Gerrets Van der Linekeren and reared by a tulip seller from Amsterdam to wear the brilliant orange of Holland he would be revered for the cerebral, detached genius of his timing, his cold-blooded, clinical poaching.

In England, though, he has left no traces of his passion. He is loved but not revered. There are no photos of him with blood pouring down his white shirt like Butcher, there are no Gazza tears, no valiant exits lying wounded like Robbo on a stretcher. He’s not remembered as a barrel-chested yeoman like Shearer or even a bleached showboater like Beckham. He didn’t do the tabloids. He was neither a dogger or a roaster. He wasn’t a boozer or a pill popper.

When he went abroad he thrived in a most un-English way. He learned Spanish quickly in Barcelona and revelled in the way of life there. His career contained the curious appendix of two years in Japan as a player (and metatarsal victim) with Grampus Eight. He loved the vast differences in culture which football permitted him to explore.

“It was fabulous to play abroad. The madness , the excitement. Barcelona was a great place to live. Huge club, massive pressures on the players. I got off to a good start, plenty of goals. Japan was fascinating.

The culture is so different and where we lived very few people spoke English. A great experience.” All of which makes him, well, one weird footballer.

Even about his unblemished disciplinary record there is suspicion. While he sits on the sofa in the Match of the Day office two young boys are ushered towards him for autographs and photographs. He is grace itself as he deals with them and after the photos the younger of the two is prompted to ask if it’s true that in a 16-year career Gary Lineker never received a yellow card let alone a red one.

“Well,” he says, rolling his eyes because he knows what’s coming, “well . . .” “He never tackled,” says half the office. “Gary. Never. Tackled!”

And Lineker permits himself a small private smile. Same old rapsheet. Everywhere he goes he’s followed by the same limping witticism. “Any crisps? Got any crisps?” And he smiles the same polite smile. Any crisps? Very good.

Being known for the crisps and for the ever so gentle way the adverts (he’s done 60 in the space of nine years) mock his goody-two-shoes image doesn’t bother him. He’s good at that too. So good that Walkers have come from a downtable position to not just knock Golden Wonder out of the business but to become the second biggest brand in Britain after Coca-Cola.

Britons eat more crisps than anyone, 150 bags per man, woman and child per year. Since Lineker began working with Walkers, their sales have risen from £1.34 billion per annum to £2.75 billion. Little wonder that a few years ago they gave him a £1.5 million golden handcuffs deal just to prevent him endorsing anything else.

When he talks about why he never tried management he explains that he is not a tablebeater, not a fist clencher, not a firebreather. His only contribution in dressingrooms as a player was to be a human air conditioner, the player to drive the temperature down when everyone got too excited.

He speaks like a man who sat in a lot of overheated dressingrooms listening to the dumb percussion of clenched fists beating on tables. Gerrets Van der Linekeren would have managed Ajax. When Lineker signed for Barcelona, the manager, Terry Venables, wanted Lineker but the men upstairs wanted Marco van Basten, who had the same style but a more modest price tag. Van Basten manages the Netherlands now.

A Walkers press release a few years ago revealed the odd fact that since Lineker had begun his evangelism on behalf of their crisps Walkers had sold enough product to cover the whole of the Netherlands.

A career of excellence and decency produced an image of mildness and intelligence, qualities which English football struggles to absorb. Somehow Lineker as a manager is only unimaginable against the backdrop of English soccer culture.

The year that changed his life demonstrates that well. When Everton wrestled him away from Leicester for the rather quaint sum of £800,000, he joined a wonderful side and excelled, scoring 30 goals in 41 league games to win the first of his two Footballer of the Year awards.

He travelled to Mexico in the summer of 1986 as part of an England squad plagued by doubts. They had a bad start, failing to score in their opening two games, a defeat to Portugal and a draw with Morocco.

Finally, Bobby Robson relented and provided Lineker with the services of Peter Beardsley. Lineker scored a hat-trick against Poland. England crept through on goal difference.

When he was a 17-year-old player with Leicester Gary Lineker had enjoyed a bit of luck. He met a man called Jon Holmes who was at the time working in pensions and insurance.

“Jon did my pension. A little while later he was starting agency work with Tony Woodcock, Peter Shilton and David Gower. He advised me a little bit. Our relationship grew. No contract. We’re just best friends now. He’s looked after everything all the way.”

In 1986 before the World Cup began Holmes’ phone had been ringing off the hook with offers. Lineker travelled to Mexico not wanting anything to intrude in the cocooned existence that World Cup players live in during the tournament. However, after the third game, against Poland, Holmes rang.

“Barca were trying to get me as soon as I started scoring goals in Mexico. They were interested late in the season before and then it all went quiet after the first couple of games in the World Cup. Jon came on. He said that he knew what we had agreed but Barca were on again and were saying that if I didn’t sign terms there and then I could forget it. I said tell them to forget it then. That was that.”

Except it wasn’t. Lineker scored two goals against Paraguay in the second round. England moved on to face the old foe from the Malvinas, Argentina, in the World Cup quarter-final.

The game is remembered of course for two goals by Diego Maradona, the first a glorious con job the second a moment to redeem it all.

It would be Maradona’s World Cup, figuratively and literally, yet Lineker (who scored England’s only goal in that quarterfinal) outscored him and the unfolding of that infamous game left Maradona and Lineker representing two poles of the footballing earth.

“That game, that goal. It was a piece of cheek really. He made up for it with the piece of brilliance.”

Lineker recently travelled to Argentina to meet with Maradona and to talk , among other things, about that goal. Maradona’s casual admission to having fooled the referee and linesman and to having made sure to put on a good show of celebrating just so they would entertain no doubts, clearly caught Lineker by surprise. He understands more now, though.

“The ref missed it and the linesman missed it and there was nothing that could be done. The second goal was the best I have ever seen. You have to judge it in terms of their football culture, though. Pulling one over on the referee is considered a smart move. It’s good to get away with things.”

Out of interest you ask him what he would have done had he risen for a header in a World Cup quarter-final and the ball had gone in off his fist. He shrugs.

“Funny enough, in the last few seconds John Barnes put a ball across and I dived and couldn’t quite get to it. I ended up in the net and the ball went past. All I can say is that it never crossed my mind to do that. Even though I knew then that Diego had punched it in earlier. If you look at it I was in the perfect position to maybe put it in with a fist and get away with it. It never struck me. I’m not holier than thou about it, it’s just not something we’re brought up with.”

England returned home as soon as they were knocked out. Lineker got married, went on his honeymoon and then straight to Barcelona. The more goals he scored the more willing Barca had been to wait. From that moment his career was on a new level. In Spain he was Leeeeeneker! Or Gary Gol!

The following World Cup, Italia 90 brought more evidence of astonishing coldbloodedness. On the night the Irish team came home from the tournament Mick Mc- Carthy announced in College Green that Cameroon were beating England 2-1 in their quarter-final back in Italy. Lusty cheering followed.

By the time everybody got home Lineker had scored two penalties to put England through. Again in the World Cup semi-final with Germany it was Lineker who equalised 10 minutes from time, and he was among those who dispatched his penalty with ease in that shoot-out.

“I had a masochistic side,” he grins. “I enjoyed it. It really was the chance to do something that nobody else has the chance to do. You can walk up there and test your bottle to the nth degree.”

Testing himself. That’s as important as timing. With two successful World Cup tournaments under his belt he could perhaps have cruised into retirement and a sinecure coaching job.

Instead he came home from Italy known to his playing mates as Junior Des, for his lively interest in all things to do with the media.

“I enjoyed it. I liked to sit and watch the lads writing their intros after matches or to watch the radio guys doing their wrap-ups. When I was a kid I used to write match reports after every Leicester game I went to. I live my life according to four- or fiveyear plans and I knew that the media was where I wanted to wind up.”

He wasn’t quite ready to sink to our level, though, and in 1992 he was named Footballer of the Year again in England, having scored 28 goals in 35 league games for Spurs.

He finished playing a couple of years later with 322 career goals to his name, 48 scored in his 80 appearances for England. He hasn’t put a pair of boots on since. He doesn’t think he even owns a pair anymore. At eight in the evening he nips into studio to do a live trailer for the programme which will be coming later.

When he emerges a producer says softly to him “Bit flat Gary. Everything okay?” Knowing by now that news of his amicable marriage split is to be smeared all over a tabloid the next morning, he nods quietly. “Yeah. You’ll see why.”

He brightens almost immediately when one of his four sons rings looking for the inside scoop on the state of Rooney’s foot. His voice changes when he is animated, and he laughs a lot.

He’s been doing this job a long time now but still hates to look at himself or to hear his own voice. When he is in shot his east midlands burr is passable. When he is out of shot or on radio he is conscious that he has to increase the level of animation “till it feels like I’m shouting.”

Other than that expertise has brought comfort. He talks about Lynam about the little tricks he picked up from the master. “Des has a way of including the audience on his side of the table. He always says: ‘And now we are joined by so and so.’ He never says: ‘I’m now joined by so and so.’ That and a little humour are the style that made him great.”

And Lineker, a man who describes himself as placid but deep down a man who is defined by doggedness, has replaced Lynam smoothly. The next four or five weeks when he haunts our living rooms day and night represent a challenge he has been looking forward to for some time. Live games virtually every day. Travel. Challenges. Voices in his earpiece, information coming from all sides. And Lineker a tanned spot of calmness in the middle.

The script is back to him now, type-written and also autocued. He chats for a while longer and news comes through at last about just how crunched Wayne Rooney’s foot really is.

“Hello there, big Phil has turned us down but we’re not going to let that worry us. We’re sticking to the old adage, let’s take each World Cup as it comes. It’s been an extraordinary week both on and off the pitch and that theme continued right into Saturday with tales of joy and despair. We have it all . . .”

Indeed he does.