- Gary Lineker will step down from presenting Match of the Day this summer
- He hosted his last FA Cup final on the BBC at Wembley on Saturday afternoon
- LISTEN NOW: It’s All Kicking Off!, available wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday and Thursday
His last BBC FA Cup Final anchoring role was preceded by a storm over his sharing of an Instagram post about Zionism, so perhaps you might say Gary Lineker did not go quietly.
His recent appearance on ITV’s The Assembly, where he is grilled by a group of autistic and neurodivergent interviewers, provides a better, more nuanced sense of him. It was hard not to be moved by some of what he said.
The live broadcast of Crystal Palace’s moment in the sun certainly bore out the finer side of Lineker.
We’re at the end of a season in which shouting and noise are more prevalent than ever, but his was an understated perspective.
His experience at the highest level meant that he too, of course, had views on questions he was putting to Wayne Rooney, about demanding to take penalties, exploiting the wings and overriding your manager.
As so often, he did not venture to offer an opinion. The gravitas resided in the questions and the way he put them. It’s called personality.
Gary Lineker was on fine form during his anchoring role for Saturday’s FA Cup final on the BBC
The presenter has been under the microscope this week after he shared a post about Zionism
His understated nature and gentle observations means the BBC will be poorer without Lineker
The easy flow of conversation between the two of them was an absorbing part of the broadcast. When Lineker asked Rooney, who was excellent, whether he would have liked to play alongside Erling Haaland, it carried significance.
When Micah Richards asked Rooney what it was like to take a team talk when 1-0 up, Lineker could offer an interjection that few presenters would dare attempt: ‘His teams never were 1-0 up.’
We’re being told that the geniuses running BBC Sport want to appeal to ‘the young’, as if that audience does not appreciate perspective.
Yet when a 64-year-old who has lived and breathed the football life quietly observes that a beautifully shot programme segment on Eberechi Eze was moving — ‘That’s lovely! What a thoughtful young man’ — it actually means something. There was excellence, too, in the contribution of the former Palace striker Glenn Murray.
‘The FA Cup always will be important for some of us,’ Lineker reflected, talking us through the 1990 final and an analogue video of himself, ‘a numpty’, missing a penalty for Spurs against Nottingham Forest in 1991.
The BBC will appoint less opinionated presenters for the final this time next year. The broadcast will be the poorer for it.
