Yes, of course, Gary Lineker spoke accurately when he said that journalists had extracted leverage from his description of England as ‘s***’, in a press conference with Harry Kane to discuss the performance against Denmark.
It’s a process which occurs almost every week and it oils the wheels of football’s contemporary ecosystem. Sometime, managers want a means to vent about what they’ve seen emanating from the TV studios and we are that vessel.
It’s been a way of Guardiola leaving something on Carragher, of Klopp letting Keane have it and Ten Hag giving it back in spades to anyone who’d ever carried a microphone, after Manchester United won the FA Cup.
The studio comments will always shape the questions. The broadcast producers want this. Controversy means profile means ratings. Football is an angry world these days.
Lineker spoke on his ‘Rest is Football’ podcast of ‘journalists being what journalists are,’ and how they ‘can be a bit tricky on these things, trying to wind up footballers.’
England have put in underwhelming performances in their first two Euro 2024 group games
It has led to Gareth Southgate’s side being heavily criticised from all angles over recent days
Slightly irritating, because of the distinct air of superiority, there. That ‘us and them’ you can get in the higher reaches of football, rooted in the sense that those who report and write are an inferior species because they’ve not played the hallowed game and are not the keeper of the keys.
Football journalists have different skills, not inferior ones, which expose the machinations that the rich and powerful would rather wish you didn’t know about.
The clandestine moves to create European Super League. Manchester City’s legal pursuit of unlimited spending. Almost any transfer you care to mention. Fuel for subsequent studio discussion. More oil for that contemporary ecosystem.
But I’m struggling to muster much anger over Lineker’s ‘journalists being what journalists are.’ In part, it’s because I like him and his work and consider Match of the Day to be a shadow of its usual strength when he doesn’t appear on it.
There was a sense of how the flagship would be without his presence when he was absent through illness, one week in February. No anchor comes remotely close. BBC Sport will be a more impoverished place if his contract is not renewed, a year or so from now.
But Harry Kane came out swinging and took umbradge with the criticism of his team, with Lineker subsequently blaming journalists for creating a spat with him and England’s stars
Yet Lineker called England’s performance last week against Denmark for precisely what it was
The myriad other Lineker controversies? I don’t care. Life’s short. Speak your mind. I don’t subscribe to the ‘stick to football’ argument. I also find it hard to fulminate when Lineker called England’s performance last week – and Kane’s, as an integral part of it – for precisely what it was.
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Kane’s principal objections to the criticism were, to paraphrase his drivel, that everyone is under pressure because England have won nothing for years, that the young players aren’t used to this, that it’s very hard to avoid exposure to it, and that ex-players ‘have a responsibility’ to be nice.
Excuse me? England’s highly renumerated, immensely coached stars – supposedly a golden generation this time – sleepwalk their way around a football field for 90 minutes and Kane has the temerity to surface a few days later and pronounce that their, youth, fragility and the weight of history renders the criticism unfair? Well, God help us if reach a quarter final.
Where along the road did we reach this place where anyone publicly criticising England during a tournament is somehow deemed disloyal or unpatriotic, by the way? We wear these media accreditations to offer a critique. Lineker and Shearer should no more be cheerleaders than we are.
Other British players have demonstrated that speaking like an AI bot is not the only stock response when your team has performed poorly. The restored public optimism preceding Scotland’s second match of the tournament was, in part, a consequence of Andy Robertson speaking from the heart about the ‘fear’ his side had struggled with against the Germans.
Whining Harry Kane’s drivel is the real issue here rather than Lineker’s honest criticism
Where along the road did we reach this strange place where anyone publicly criticising England during a tournament is somehow deemed disloyal or unpatriotic, by the way?
It was a long way from the whining of Kane, to whom England supporters looked for a sign of optimism and a hint of direction. It was apparently too much to think that the 30-year-old England captain might have accounted, with some genuine depth and intelligence, for a desperate performance and offered some rationale. Demonstrating in the process that this was rather more than a player undertaking media duties.
Someone might want to point out to Kane that a scintilla of humour can do wonders at a time like this. It was the commodity Jack Grealish reached for when Graeme Souness had argued in these pages, the season before last, that he had not improved following his move to Manchester City from Aston Villa. A night out with Grealish would be good, Souness had observed in passing.
‘Let’s do it,’ Grealish tweeted. ‘As long as I can bring Pogba as a +1!’ Grealish, a free and unencumbered soul, would be such an excellent man for this England campaign, you feel. But that’s another story.
