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Gary Lineker’s impending Match of the Day departure is being treated like a manager sacking and it’s all a bit much, while elsewhere the many varied yet sadly fictitious fools writing Man City off are put firmly in their place.
The sound of silence
A point of order here, really. Mediawatch has had its fun for years and years with the concept of assorted football figures ‘breaking their silence’ on assorted matters, generally because said ‘silence’ has usually been ‘broken’ at the very first available opportunity and very often within hours or even minutes of the thing that has prompted such notably silent response. Sometimes this silence can even speak volumes, which is confusing.
Mediawatch accepts that probably nobody else cares about this, but this latest Mirror headline has us worried about a whole new front opening up in the wild world of silence breaking.
Gary Lineker breaks silence for first time since BBC Match of the Day exit confirmed
Is this just a simple, innocent error of tautology, or are we truly entering a horrifying world where every single Lineker social media post or podcast counts as a fresh second, third, fourth or 879th breaking of silence? We must be told.
Taking the Micah
Mediawatch is, in truth, thoroughly baffled by the sheer breadth and depth and dominance of the Gary Lineker coverage across the board.
We’ve long come to understand that people are far more interested in the circus around football than the football itself. But this is a step removed even from that, isn’t it?
This is a circus around a circus around football. The whole thing is being treated like a manager sacking, following every accepted convention of the coverage of such an event.
As well as the silence-breaking, there’s the ‘leading contenders’ pieces, the predictive pieces that sneak in headlines that sound like announcements and confirmations until you get to the end (‘Mark Chapman replaces Gary Lineker, ‘English Roy Keane added’ – how new Match of the Day could work‘), the ones where soon-to-be former colleagues pay glowing tributes under headlines which by sheer bad luck imply they might be doing the opposite (‘I worked with Gary Lineker at the BBC – I won’t forget how he treated me‘). You know, all that good stuff.
But best is surely the resurfacing of old quotes and pretending they are important or relevant. Especially as the Mirror have cobbled together not one but two po-faced stories from very, very obvious jokes. Also very obvious who these jokes are about when you combine all the information within this pair of headlines.
