The tribulations of switching careers
Though his success in both his careers – footballer and TV host/presenter – is undeniable, I have never personally warmed to Gary Linker.
Well, save for the time he made those gestures – caught vividly on the TV cameras – to England manager Bobby Robson on the bench during the 4th July 1990 World Cup match in Italy against West Germany, indicating that Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne was about to “lose it” after getting the yellow card which would result in him missing the Word Cup Final even had England made it that far.
There is a certain lack of gravitas but also supercilious smugness in his personality that grates with me.
Although it was brave at the time, his attempt to broaden his range by attempting to take the anchor role on the BBC’s golfing coverage – of which sport, I understand he is both a super-fan and decent player – was never going to work, well unless he had the potential in him to be a broadcasting great (which he doesn’t).
Perhaps both ironically and ‘for the general good’, in almost every case the best and most successful all-round sports broadcasters in history tend to be those who learned the grammar of their trade – and earned their spurs – by beginning their careers in journalism and working up from there.
There is, of course, no reason in theory or logic why former sporting greats should not also later turn out to be equally brilliant in sports – or indeed any other genre of – broadcasting: it is just that viewers’ perceptions of them tend to operate on the basis of pigeon-holes and inevitably start with the area of life in which anyone first came to public notice and/or prominence.
For example – perhaps to be unfair to him – take a likeable but much lower profile (almost by comparison B-list) individual, Dion Dublin.
He was initially a fine professional footballer, but since retiring – via football pundity etc. – has gradually built himself a budding career as a general TV presenter, most prominently having become a regular on the undemanding daytime airtime-fodder-plodder Homes Under the Hammer.
This series follows the fortunes of those who buy cheapish properties at auctions intending to do them up and then either sell or rent them out. The presenters record both “before” and “after” pieces of how they get on, whether that be ending up making a tidy profit, or getting lumbered with a planning application disaster and a mountain of debt, or something in between.
Over the years he has been presenting the show (as one of three) Dublin has become a perfectly amiable and competent presenter, but at a cost.
Which is that – whenever he return to the screen to do a spot of football punditry, as sometimes he does – this viewer (and I suspect many others) cannot behold the spectacle without feeling an instinctive sense of “What the devil is a presenter of Homes Under The Hammer doing appearing on a football show?”
It’s all about pigeon-holes, you see.
Anyway, here’s a link to a decent interview with Gary Lineker conducted by Donald McCrae that I spotted overnight on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
The only comment I’d add is that I don’t necessarily agree with Lineker’s humble admission that today’s very best teams would have beaten those of his day with ease.
Here on the Rust, we have frequently pointed out the fallacy in any attempt to compare sportsmen and women of different eras, for instance, in order to promote a debate (or make a submission) as to who among them were the greatest exponents of all time.
Fun to contemplate maybe, but it cannot be done – well, not properly.
To do that, you’d have to either somehow bring one of long ago ‘forward in time’ at say the age of 12 – or alternatively say take a current player at the same age and transplant them ‘back in time’ to the era of the person you’re comparing them with … and then see what happens to each of them over the next twenty years.
Or, alternatively, perhaps transport them to an era midway between each other’s – and then leave them there to ‘get on with it’.
