‘Best MOTD I’ve seen. Just about the football’.
That message from a mate may have been tongue-in-cheek, but some might truly have agreed with him.
As I pointed out in that particular WhatsApp group to another friend incredulously querying that ‘review’, the writer is an Evertonian. ‘Everton win, Livepool lose, he never felt more like singing the Blues…’
I’d have enjoyed ‘Match of the Day’ immensely more had those results been reversed.
That’s football fans/ soccer supporters for you.
Team biases aside, it was a pretty poor MotD, despite its audience increasing by half a million, the additional viewership no doubt largely made up of ‘rubber-neckers’ fascinated to see the car crash TV of football without any commentary or analysis.
The only upside for me was that, with the shows lasting around 20 and 18 minutes respectively, I actually got to watch both MotD and MotD2; although even then that was helped by my having a rare Monday off.
One other bonus was that I didn’t have to constantly shout ‘Shush! Get out if you can’t be quiet!’ at my children.
Otherwise MotD was rubbish. The idea expressed by some that the post-match interviews and studio analysis take up around an hour of the programme is plain wrong. These were very truncated ‘highlights’, with many incidents not shown on the BBC this weekend.
We can all see clips of goals and controversial incidents on our mobile phones within minutes of them being scored.
The real positive of ‘Match of the Day’ having no presenter(s) and no commentators, as a consequence of Gary Lineker being forced off his air and his colleagues standing down in solidarity, was that it highlighted the row over the UK government’s heartless approach to refugees and migrants.
Lineker merely pointed out that some of the language used was reminiscent of the early days of Nazi Germany.
His point was proven by some of the more splenetic member of the Tory party immediately putting pressure on the BBC; bullying and controlling the state broadcaster is a clear fascistic policy.
There’s the teeth-grinding irony that many of those who purport to be champions and defenders of ‘free speech’ instantly went on the attack, calling for Lineker to delete, apologise, and be sacked.
The same people who defended the odious Boris Johnson, no matter what he did or said.
The same people who defend the callous policy that Home Secretary Suella ‘Cruella’ Braverman is trying to introduce, even though she admits herself, at the very top of her aptly-named Illegal Immigration bill, that she cannot say it is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
That should have been the start and finish of this awful bill, but this is the UK under these Tories.
Braverman was sacked for breaching the ministerial code on matters of national security, yet was very quickly re-instated by the weak PM Rishi Sunak, because he needs the support of her lunatic fringe of backers.
This desperate Conservative party, trailing Labour badly in the opinion polls, knows that the only tactics left to it as it tries to cling to power at the next general election are scare tactics.
So Braverman lies about ‘billions’ potentially coming to the UK, even though the actual figure last year was less than 46,000.
Applying the ‘expected truth’ metric to that claim produces a figure of 0.00002284 per cent – and that’s with a conservative (small ‘c’) estimate of 2 billion to back her BS.
The right-wing attacks on Lineker merely led to a massive own goal.
The many followers of the UK’s most popular sport are now aware (even though it should have been abundantly clear to anyone sentient long before now) that the Conservatives do not practice what they preach when it comes to impartiality.
Instead, the BBC, the state broadcaster, has appeared to bow to government pressure. Worse still, the BBC still has as its chairman a man (Richard Sharp) who donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party and more recently brokered a £800,000 loan to the discredited spendthrift former PM, Boris Johnson – a Conservative, of course.
The BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie, is a former Conservative candidate.
Robbie Gibb, an influential member of the BBC Board, was Theresa May’s Downing Street Director of Communications, then an editorial advisor to the propagandist GB News channel before its launch; his brother is a Tory MP.
Basically the referee and his assistants at the BBC are all Tories.
The list of Tory place-persons at the Beeb goes on and on.
A level playing field? Everyone playing by the same rules?
Yet even Tim Davie realised that the public wouldn’t keep accepting 20-minute MotDs, no Football Focus, very limited live radio coverage from matches, and so on.
So the extremely dubious decision to keep Lineker off the air was over-turned, albeit even more slowly than VAR trying to find in Manchester United’s favour.
Whether or not he had actually breached the BBC guidelines was a moot point as Lineker is neither staff nor a news/current affairs presenter, although those guidelines had obviously been re-written last year with him very much in mind.
The application of those guidelines has been limited, to say the least.
Across the political spectrum BBC presenters (past and present) have expressed strong views on political matters, with no action taken against them, from Martin Lewis to Jeremy Clarkson and Alan Sugar.
Fiona Bruce, the host of BBC Question Time, for some reason felt compelled to defend Johnson’s father Stanley against the charge of being a ‘wife-beater’, citing friends of the thug that “it did happen but it was a one-off.”
Well, that’s OK then.
Stanley Johnson, who his son has nominated for a Knighthood, remains a wife-beater, even if you’re naïve enough to believe that it was “a one-off.”
The major issue isn’t impartiality, of course.
Sure, there may be some ‘economic migrants’ (although perhaps a country struggling due to a self-inflicted labour shortage should welcome them in anyway).
However, there are also many desperate people who aren’t trying to cling to positions of power and influence, but rather trying to cling on for dear life in the Channel between continental Europe and England.
Gary Lineker shouldn’t have Tweeted what he did; he shouldn’t have had to.
At least he has kicked off a much-needed debate about how to treat other human beings.
‘Best MOTD I’ve seen. Not just about the football’.
