BBC burned by Gary Lineker ego but new trio will stick to football on Match of the Day
You could not find a more professional or likeable trio of presenters. They have clocked up tens of thousands of hours of live broadcast between them on football and radio, but how often do you hear of Gabby Logan, Mark Chapman or Kelly Cates making a bad blunder, causing offence or carrying on like a pork chop off-air? I am struggling to think of a weakness in any one of them as a live sport presenter.
The announcement is a departure, no question. Gary Lineker has been a superb live anchor of football but his soapboxing about politics and society had become a headache for the BBC. Alex Kay-Jelski, its director of sport, has found a creative solution to an unusual problem: Gary was irreplaceable in more senses than one.
Firstly, no former footballer fits the bill. Perhaps a triumvirate interregnum (if we’re not getting too Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about a football highlights show that you watch after the pub) gives the BBC time to develop an ex-footballer successor for a show that has, remarkably, only ever had five hosts in 60 years.
But the likes of Micah Richards and Theo Walcott are still miles off from being ready to host a big live show. Imagine dear Micah having to helm a breaking news event like Christian Eriksen collapsing on the pitch, for example. If Lineker’s departure was happening two or three years ago, Alex Scott and Jermaine Jenas would be the front runners. But Jermaine has texted himself in the foot. While Alex seems to have fallen out of vogue – to the sound of champagne corks popping in many Telegraph-taking households, judging from the correspondence we receive about her.
Of footballers currently active, a Trent Alexander-Arnold, your Conor Coadys or the James Maddisons of this world might well go on to superb broadcast careers but the licence fee payer would have to dig deep to get the modern player out of bed in the morning and, as the Jenas case proved, betting that a rich, young, recently retired footballer celebrity isn’t going to embarrass you is a dicey business and not for the faint of heart. And in any event, that’s five years away at least to get somebody even close to the level of Lineker.
The fact that there wasn’t a realistic ex-player successor is no critique of the trio. A rare win for broadcast journalist trainings over elevating former practitioners. Another option might have been a big BBC star from another discipline. But while it might have been fun to have Richard Osman, or whoever, doing the football, you have to suspect that the days of an Adrian Chiles type being ported in from general broadcasting into sport have been and gone, given how very desperately seriously football must be taken now.
The only other people in football who make a comparable amount of noise to Lineker have been Sky Sports’ headline-grabbing Soccer Sunday pundits. But the appointment of Gary Neville, for instance, would have been even more problematic than Lineker in terms of the presenter firing off opinions at will. Quite clearly the BBC bosses had reached the end of their tether with the background noise.
So a trio it is. If they had given it purely to Chapman then there would have been a section of the chattering classes who would have said the job should have gone to a woman. Logan is probably a little bit rugger-coded to have it full-time and, according to the boffins and eggheads in the Telegraph’s online web search/dark arts department, once the trio announcement came out, a lot of people started googling “who is Kelly Cates?”
There was no one person quite famous enough, perhaps, and it does speak to the in some ways mysterious allure of this football show that it still feels like a really big deal to be the host of it, or even to be one third of the host of it. They will do it very well, no doubt, and surely without creating as many headaches as their illustrious predecessor.