Please, BBC: Keep Match of the Day Authentic, by JONATHAN McEVOY

A final farewell witticism apart, Gary Lineker is gone from our screens. Which leaves a wider question: what will become of Match of the Day as we have always known it?

Jonathan Martin, head of BBC TV Sport in the Eighties and Nineties when terrestrial TV, and the BBC in particular, ruled the airwaves like an absolute monarch, raised a worrying parallel, the thrust of which is gnawing at those millions of us reared on the Saturday night highlights show.

‘When the BBC removed Sue Barker to reset A Question of Sport, the programme declined and is no longer on our screens,’ Martin wrote in The Times letters page.

‘Now its red card for Gary Lineker, a talented presenter in the great tradition of David Coleman, Jimmy Hill and Desmond Lynam, poses a similar threat to Match of the Day, said to be reset as well.’

Yes, A Question of Sport descended into a celebrity gloop of imbecility, with a lot of inane laughter at nothing remotely funny. It died unlamented, a staple of our sporting lives reunited, alas, with Grandstand and Sportsnight.

Des Lynam, whose own move to ITV 26 years ago freed up the presenter’s seat for Lineker, echoed his former boss’s fears. ‘The chairman of the BBC (Samir Shah) was quoted a few weeks ago as suggesting that Match of the Day should have more chat and less football when Lineker leaves,’ said Lynam.

The broadcaster’s tried-and-true formula is its unique selling point among highlights shows (pictured in 2018)

‘That is nonsense. People only tune in to see the action. The chat is minor compared to the action. Obviously if there is a discussion point – somebody gets sent off, somebody does a harsh tackle or something – then you can discuss it for a brief time after the match.

‘But to say that Match of the Day is about chat and not about action is baffling to me.’

Well, surely, if Des will forgive me, it is about the amalgam of both, the action dominating with the reassuring-as-old-slippers insight of the pundits as an accompaniment. This diet is distinct from both the protracted analysis of Sky’s ‘main event’ and the unvarnished 10-second video clip trotting across personal smartphones.

That balance of football and chat is Match of the Day’s USP, and an increasingly distinctive one in the incessantly diversifying broadcast landscape. One hopes the modern Beeb understands the value of its inheritance rising rather than diminishing as the world around it changes.

As Lynam pointed out in his Telegraph column, Lineker was a pundit in his early broadcasting days, alongside Hill, Trevor Brooking and Alan Hansen. All were of independent mind and argued their strong views robustly.

Alan Shearer, Hansen’s chief successor, is in that tradition if not as naturally withering as his predecessor. He still brings the first-hand authority of the ex-international footballer of high pedigree. Who better to opine on why the striker should have peeled off to the near post a fraction earlier than he did?

Lineker (pictured with Alan Hansen) is a BBC veteran and his departure will be naturally jarring

Shearer and Micah Richards (less guffawing, please) have indicated they will remain on the sofa beyond the Lineker era. They and their fellow ex-players, however much we like them or they grate with us, are suddenly important threads between the old and the new, which is represented by the incoming cast of revolving hosts, Mark Chapman, Kelly Cates and Gabby Logan.

Nobody, even among the small ‘c’ conservative Saturday night audience, is opposed to innovation and judicious tinkering. But the great hope is that change for its own sake, such as box ticking and wokery, or indeed a bellyful of laddishness, is left at the studio door.

As Jonathan Martin warns, A Question of Sport, with its dumbed-down crassness born of a lack of conviction in its own merits, stands as a warning for the post-Lineker future of one of the BBC’s last sporting jewels.