Still playing Mr Nice Guy
Ah, no, not really.
In truth, Gary Lineker answering a question through a mouthful of club sandwich is about as hardcore as the going gets, as the former England international-turned-BBC sports presenter is obliged to take his nourishment on the run while negotiating his umpteenth media interview of the morning. And, of course, he does it all with the good grace you’d expect from a man whose nice guy reputation is so well-established that Walkers Crisps — whose new “Deep Ridged” variety, for the record, he is here to promote — have made him the face of a long-running ad campaign in which he is cast as pantomime villain.
Famously, the real Lineker ended a long and hugely successful career as a striker for England, Leicester, Everton, Barcelona, Spurs and Nagoya Grampus Eight without ever having once picked up a yellow or red card, a feat for which he was honoured with a Fifa Fair Play Award.
It must, I suggest, be enough to make him sick, never mind the rest of us? He offers a hearty laugh. “I was quite tempted in my last match to smack the referee on the nose,” he says, “just for the irony, just for the fun.”
And surely he was tempted to do something similar to Graham Taylor — the manager who substituted him in what proved to be his last game for his country, leaving him a goal short of Bobby Charlton’s England record.
“No, no,” says Lineker, shaking his head, before adding, in a loud voice, and with a mischievous grin, “of course not.”
In any event, the good guy image was not something he ever deliberately cultivated, he insists.
“Obviously, players weren’t booked as often in those days,” he points out, “you had to whack someone a few times to get booked. But I was never one to verbally abuse a referee. I’d whinge alright — I could whinge with the best of them — but I’d always do it in, I think, a reasonably polite manner. And I think that was just my nature. I’m very a laid-back individual. At the same time, I’m driven and ambitious but I haven’t got a fiery temper. And I’d never be holier than thou about players who get red cards or lose their rag. We’re all different.”
An anchorman for the Beeb’s Olympics coverage this summer, Lineker admits to having been as intoxicated by the success of the event as the rest of his compatriots.
But in the summer’s afterglow, poor old football was seen to suffer badly, as pious commentators contrasted the game unfavourably with the Games. Lineker won’t stand for that.
“Football’s always an easy punchbag isn’t it?” he reflects. “The Olympic games is a very special event. It’s for people who have trained and trained and they peak at one given moment and then they either have incredible success or failure. They’re also very well aware that this is their moment in the sun. They want the PR, they want to do the interviews and be nice and jolly. It’s their moment.
“Whereas football’s week in, week out, and footballers are requested to do interviews every single day and it can all get a bit mundane. But, also, we do tend to focus on the negatives. People talk about players’ lifestyles and about diving and they say we didn’t see any of that in the Olympics. But if you really look at the Olympics: there have been quite a few drug cheats, we have incidents of people deliberately falling off their bikes, of deliberately wrecking their boats. Various incidents.
“Football’s the same. In a cross section of working-class society where most footballers come from, you’ll get some of them that drink too much or take drugs or bet too much or crash their cars — but most of them, actually, will be pretty professional, live properly and do things in the right way, doing bags for the community and bags for charity. But that doesn’t make such a good story so we only tend to focus on the bad boys.”
Except, obviously, when Gary Lineker is in the house.
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