Gary Lineker’s critics have got it wrong. It’s reasonable to talk about more than sport | Gary Lineker

The most extraordinary revelation to come from Gary Lineker’s interview with Amol Rajan on the BBC is that he’d sometimes come home from school to find Engelbert Humperdinck playing cards with his dad. Surprisingly, almost all the reaction to the conversation has ignored this bombshell – Engelbert apparently not such a big player in the culture war world; best focus on your Middle Easts, your Bravermans, your impartialities, Brian.

Of course the job of news outlets is to pick out headlines but it does appear almost no one has watched the whole programme. It’s essentially a nice wide-ranging interview covering the career of one of the best English footballers and football broadcasters of all time.

We learn that his parents weren’t that pushy, that his life changed after that hat-trick against Poland in ‘86. He discusses Diego Maradona and the state of that pitch at the Estadio Azteca, the terrible foul on Glenn Hoddle just before Barry Davies talks us through one of the greatest goals of all time: “You have to say that’s magnificent.”

We learn about his views on gambling, the secret to scoring goals, his incredibly moving testimony about almost losing his son to leukemia.

He talks about being thrust into the Grandstand presenter’s chair when Des Lynam was at Aintree the day the Grand National was abandoned because of a bomb scare, and explains that those lines whenever England are knocked out of a major tournament are off the cuff. There’s hilarious footage of him running away from paps half his age to catch a train during the Match Of the Day debacle.

But then comes the headline-grabbing stuff: on being stood down from Match of the Day that Friday in 2023, on signing a letter to have a Gaza documentary put back on iPlayer, and ultimately on whether the BBC wanted him to leave.

Depending on your political allegiance this is just one big BBC circle jerk, or Lineker has taken Auntie to the cleaners.

The usual suspects line up to have a go at one of their favourite targets. “Arrogant BBC interview proves he still just doesn’t get it,” says the Telegraph. The Daily Express quotes a body language expert who says he showed signs of “anger and unhappiness”. Narrator with no body language qualifications: he didn’t.

Take an unfortunate alt-right YouTube adventure and you find Dan Wootton calling it “extraordinarily delusional and out of touch” – while repeatedly calling the BBC the British Bashing Corporation before advertising a body cleansing Hot Chocolate for what seems like an eternity.

Over on GB News Patrick Christys wonders why Rajan didn’t ask Lineker whether he supports Hamas. Presumably because it would be a monumentally stupid waste of a question.

On Gaza, the Jewish Chronicle opens its opinion piece: “One of the BBC’s biggest problems can be summed up in two words: Gary and Lineker.” While at the other end of the spectrum, on his YouTube channel the Guardian’s Owen Jones entitles an episode: “Gary Lineker shames BBC over Gaza.”

I’m not sure Lineker does that. He appears very sympathetic to the BBC bosses who have to make difficult editorial decisions. But he remains adamant that he was right to sign the letter to have Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone reinstated on the iPlayer despite the 13-year-old narrator’s dad being a Hamas official. Can the wrong messenger still tell you the right message? “I think you let people make their own minds up,” Lineker said. “We’re adults. We’re allowed to see things like that. It’s incredibly moving … I think [the BBC] just capitulated to lobbying that they get a lot.”

The word lobbying is problematic, inadvertently invoking the trope of some secretive cabal of Jewish people pulling the strings behind the scenes. But Lineker appears to take the rational view that the 7 October massacre was abhorrent, but that history didn’t begin on that date. And it is incorrect to see all criticism of the Israeli state as antisemitic, especially given how many innocent people, including so many children, have been killed. As I have mentioned before, my family changed our name because of antisemitic threats in the 80s. I’d be an odd antisemite – like Lineker, I’d just like the killing to stop.

I think Lineker and I share pretty much the same political space. The comparisons are obvious aside from his vastly superior football ability, vastly more successful broadcasting career, especially at the BBC (although who doesn’t remember Lunch with Max on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, Saturdays 12pm-2pm, 2004-05?). But as someone with an (albeit much smaller) platform, the question of which subjects to speak about on social media and on air are interesting.

My impression from broadcasting across the BBC, Sky and TalkSport among others over the past 23 years is that most bosses would prefer you just talked about sport – although I’ve never been told what to say, or perhaps more importantly what not to say. Just keeping numerous TV channels or radio stations on air is hard enough before worrying about what your presenters have tweeted or said on air. Even managers want an easy life.

But you have to push back sometimes. I had a producer once say: “Can we not talk about domestic violence today? It’s Friday.”

I was once co-hosting a radio show with a former professional footballer. During the show I got another ex-pro, the former Australia international Craig Foster, a human rights activist, on air to raise awareness of a campaign to free a footballer from a Thai jail, from where he was due to be extradited to Bahrain on false charges. My co-host’s response: “I’m not really into those things.” Human rights, it’s not just not my thing.

BBC impartiality views to one side, do we expect people in sport to have no view on the outside world? They are still humans, being humans in the world like everyone else. Surely the key is balance and timing.

Lineker has never talked about Brexit or the plight of the Palestinian people before introducing Jonathan Pearce at Selhurst Park for Crystal Palace v Bournemouth. Perhaps it’s no surprise that one woke snowflake lefty agrees with another one but in this interview, and in our very occasional meetings, he comes across as a guy who is good at what he does and cares about other people. It actually feels so dramatically uncontroversial.

Match of the Day will be fine without him – it is in the hands of three brilliant broadcasters. Perhaps now people will leave Lineker to do his podcasts rather than obsessing about every tiny little thing he did yesterday.

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