Match made in heaven as Lineker keeps banging them in

Gary Lineker once recounted, with obvious bemusement, how one of his sons had marvelled while watching a match on television at the idea of having a father like David Beckham. Footballers have a shelf life, seemed to be the message, even in their own homes.

A growing number manage to put off their sell-by date by moving into television punditry, but Lineker says he looked beyond that even while he was at the height of his playing career. Having cast a careful eye over the television landscape, the England international saw presenting as having the potential to offer a career that could continue to develop long after the memories of his goals had dimmed.

In July, 18 years after he hung up his boots and 13 after he started working for the corporation, he was reported to be the BBC’s best-paid employee with an annual salary estimated to be in the region of €2.5 million.

Junior Des

“Even back with England,” he recalled yesterday while in Dublin doing work for Walkers crisps, “Gazza and Waddle used to call me Junior Des (after the Match of the Day frontman, Lynam) because I used to spend a lot of time with the journos and the TV people . . . I knew what I wanted to do. I thought there was the chance for a player who had played at the top to do that, we’d seen Jimmy Hill and Bob Wilson obviously. But there weren’t many of them in football, whereas if you looked at tennis or cricket there were plenty of them.”

It wasn’t easy, with the 52- year-old admitting yesterday to having had serious doubts about whether he could succeed in television over the course of the first year or so. “I had a great football career but I know I was born with a gift to play football and to score goals. The television thing has come an awful lot harder.

“There were times when I felt I was never going to be able to do it but then you relax and over time you become yourself. Ultimately people decide whether they like you or hate you and you just need more to like you, but there’s always a lot who will hate you in this business.”

His overall popularity is beyond question and Lineker has, at different times, had stints fronting the BBC’s golf and Olympic programming. When Match of the Day is discussed in the media, there is constant debate about the quality or freshness of the panellists but his role as anchorman is simply taken for granted.

The recent emergence of Gary Neville as a pundit with Sky has again prompted the BBC’s line-up to suffer some unfavourable comparisons but Lineker maintains it is a case of chalk and cheese.

Action led

“I think Gary Neville is excellent,” he says. “He’s been the best to come into that for some time. He reads the game very well and he puts it over very well. But he would find it considerably more difficult to do it on Match of the Day because we don’t have time for that; we’re an action-led programme.

“We’re got one minute 30 after a game, two minutes 30 after a game, three minutes 15 and then 35 seconds. You’ve got to do it within that and so it’s a much more difficult job for our analysts.

“I watched Gary Neville last week and he spent about 10 minutes analysing a free kick. It was excellent; it was really good television for people like myself who are really into their football. It was fascinating, but you could never do that on Match of the Day because you’d have to lose so much action.”

Lineker says he has seen his Irish equivalents – Dunphy, Giles and co – and acknowledges it is “probably a bit more feisty” without necessarily sounding all that impressed.

“They can probably afford to be because players are not watching it,” he observes. “And the managers are not watching it. That makes a difference. If we overdid it the clubs wouldn’t talk to us.”

There is not, he maintains, any self-censorship. Rather, it’s a case of presentational style: “You’ve got to be slightly responsible on our show,” says Lineker.

BBC research, he says, shows the likes of Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson continue to go down well with the broadcasters’ audience while Lineker himself gets a fair bit of feedback more directly, via twitter on which he has some 1.2 million followers, having opened his account back in January.

“I get a bit of stick,” he says. “Generally it’s favourable or friendly banter but I quite enjoy a bit of stick. Occasionally you get some idiot who will really abuse you but they’re generally 17-year-old kids who are trying to show off to their mates. You look at their profile and you see that they’re kids,” he says, “before blocking them.”