Johnny Nicholson: No way for BBC not to lose face in 'Gary Gate'
STILL SMILING: Gary Lineker arriving ahead of the Premier League match at the King Power Stadium, Leicester. Pic: PA
What an almighty and unnecessary mess. The BBC management have completely overplayed their hand in their dispute with Gary Lineker and his infamous tweet, by asserting it broke their impartiality clause. Only a few right wing headbangers were offended by what he tweeted in the first place and he’s been winding them up for years anyway.
When they suspended him on Friday, you can bet your bottom dollar that they didn’t expect a collective downing of tools by the whole of the BBC’s TV and radio football freelance presenters, pundits and commentators and a significant number of the staff. Nor that their flagship programme, Match Of The Day would be reduced to 20 minutes of silent action on Saturday and Sunday. It was a lesson in the value of collective action.
But there should be no sympathy for a management so detached from reality. They have allowed other non-news freelance BBC workers to offer political opinions, they have allowed Lineker to do so presenting the Qatar World Cup. The corporation is already mired in sleaze, cronyism and outright bias because the Chairman Richard Sharp helped arrange an £800,000 line loan for the financially incontinent Boris Johnson and didn’t declare that fact in the job interview. He’s also given £400,000 to the Tory Party, so it is obvious where his political sympathies lie, not something you could say of Lineker. Tim Davie, also a Tory supporter, is Director-General. They have turned what was a mere spark into a raging skip fire on Friday when it was fizzling out. Buy why?
It's tempting to think it is because they are doing the bidding of their moribund Tory overlords who have wanted Lineker’s scalp for years and want to use it as part of an ongoing culture war being conducted to deflect from their failures.
But it has backfired massively and now there is no way for the BBC not to lose face. Being craven to a widely discredited and often hated Conservative Party that is 20 points down in the opinion polls, is infecting the whole organisation with poison. Meanwhile Lineker, who just seems a nice middle-of-the-road sort of fella, simply a man with a conscience and obviously not some sort of Marxist firebrand, holds all the cards. No wonder he’s smiling in every photo. One way or another, he will have the last laugh.
Arsenal put on a classy, dominant first half show at Fulham, who didn’t have a touch in Arsenal's penalty area for the whole of the first 45. They should have had the lead earlier than they did, when VAR found a microfibre ahead of the ball in the build-up, which gave Arsenal no advantage at all. Infuriating.
Gabriel Martinelli and Leandro Trossard swapped left and central positions all afternoon. The Brazilian was like liquid fire from first to last. This was a masterful, very fluid performance right across the midfield and attacking positions, but still solid at the back. They found space easily and exploited it to great effect. Martin Odegaard had all the time in the world inside the box to fire it in.
Fulham were a yard off the pace for most of the game. Trossard made a hat-trick of assists - a Premier League first in an away game - and has been an excellent January signing. The pressure of playing second, knowing Manchester City had won on Saturday evening, didn’t weigh on the Gunners at all. The fact Gabriel Jesus returned as a sub was another bonus.
Casemiro got a debatable second red card in three games for a challenge which won the ball, and then his foot slipped over the top of the ball into the other man’s shin. He was given a yellow but VAR unfairly converted it to red. Yet a real shin-cruncher in the Leicester City game which didn’t get the ball went without punishment.
On top of that an obvious Southampton handball in the Manchester United game was ignored by both the VAR and ref Anthony Taylor. Because VAR sells itself as the ultimate scrutiniser with replays available to them instantly, this is what drives fans crazy. It’s one thing to make an error in real time, it's another to do so over something so obvious, when they are prepared to spend four minutes working out if a toe is on or offside. Talk of corrupt officials is silly, it's incompetence; the very thing VAR was supposed to get rid of.
Leicester can be dangerous opponents, as you never quite know what you’re going to get from them, apart from an inability to defend set plays. They’ve netted 37 times, which is easily the most goals of any team in the bottom half. That does give them something to cling to. But only Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest have let in more goals in the entire league. This is their dilemma.
They could’ve had more than one goal in this game but Chelsea were far too good in front of goal for a change, winning 3-1. Felix had a goal ruled out for offside and hit the post in the first half but was subbed by Graham Potter at half time, who decided to add in Conor Gallagher to beef up the midfield in order to protect their lead. It worked.
A couple of weeks ago, things looked desperate for Potter and he couldn’t do right for doing wrong. Some modern football fans seem to have little patience and had already made up their minds that he wasn’t good enough. But an excellent and important midweek victory over Dortmund and now this healthy Premier League win has lifted Stamford Bridge spirits. Leicester are just a point above the relegation places but the team looks fully committed and is playing for their manager.
Football makes fools out of everyone eventually. Who would’ve given the Cherries a chance against last week’s seven-goal Scouse heroes? Yet it looked as though a listless Liverpool were suffering some sort of after effects of the huge win because on the south coast they were terrible. Too much sideways passing, too little penetration. Even as the clock wound down, they just didn’t seem to have any energy and urgency.
Mo Salah missed their first penalty of the season by such a wide margin that it looked as if he’d done it deliberately. While they had 68% possession, that suggests more dominance than was the case. They simply didn’t do enough with it against opponents that put everyone behind the ball once in the lead. Now in fifth, six points adrift of Spurs with a game in hand, with both teams able to throw in a poor game or two, fourth place is impossible to call.
Another meat grinder of a performance and a third 1-0 win at home, took the club out of the relegation positions once again. After Dwight McNeil had scored a screamer, Everton dominated the first half against a lacklustre Brentford, who hadn’t lost since October. In the second half the Bees threw several kitchen sinks at the Toffees but they defended for their lives. This is what Sean Dyche can get a team to do via organisation and insisting on maximum physical commitment. And their fans seemed to enjoy it.
Although it wasn’t pretty and it involved some full body challenges and last ditch tackles as they hung on for almost the whole half, that one goal gave them the victory. While the three points was essential, with their next game against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, how much will a performance like this have taken out of them? Dyche doesn’t like to tinker with his teams much and that risks burnout. But no-one can argue they are not almost literally fighting for their survival.
An interesting stat that emerged this week was that Erling Haaland is found by his team-mates less than any other striker in the league. Basically, they seem very reluctant to pass to him and it appears to be hardening as either a tactic or a habit. Given Pep Guardiola’s attention to detail, it seems unlikely this is accidental. It is as though they don’t want him involved in any of the football, he’s just there to hit it into the net when the rest of the team have created an opportunity.
And while his goal tally might be an argument as to the value of this, the fact remains that they have five less points this season than last, have scored three more but conceded eight more after 27 games. It’s perhaps not statistically overly meaningful, but it is hard to argue that Haaland has added anything significant to the outcomes of games. Although it's just a gut feeling, they do not seem to be playing as well this season.
And his winner against Palace from the spot was just his fourth goal in the last 12 games City have played in all competitions. And that’s why many are convinced, counterintuitively, that he’s not a new big asset and is just scoring the goals that other players would score if they had set up without him. On top of that he is perhaps a drag on the team that leads to them conceding more goals, because he leaves them a player short in all other moments. It’s certainly an interesting experiment.
Crystal Palace are in a terrible slump. They are bottom or 19th for every attacking metric. Only three players have scored more than twice, Wilf Zaha tops the scoring list with just six. They didn’t even have a shot on target in their previous two games and this game made it three. They haven’t won in 2023. And have won just six games out of 26 this campaign. Remarkable then that they started and ended their defeat against Manchester City still in 12th place, five points above the drop zone.
Like many teams that are low on confidence when they play Manchester City, they put nine men behind the ball and rely on counterattacking to nick a goal. But the fact is, they couldn’t get the ball for long enough to do anything with it. The stats say they had 36% possession but that percentage was so fractured it ensured nothing much could be built out of it. Several teams look on a severe downward slide right now and Crystal Palace are probably the worst of all of them.
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