The problem really comes down to a single word. Unfortunately, that word—the key word in all of this—is not one that can be used here. But you know her. It is an adjective, a noun, a verb and, in most cases, an exclamation. You can say it when you stub your toe, or spill a cup of coffee, or realize you’ve accidentally hit reply all.
Or, if you’re Gary Lineker, you could use the word on a podcast to describe an England performance at the European Championship. In this case, the one the team achieved in their soporific draw with Denmark, but it could also have applied to much of the victory against Serbia and the draw with Slovenia.
Reduced to its basic elements, then, it can be difficult—particularly for outsiders—to understand why the word has caused so much consternation.
Lineker, a respected former player and a judicious analyst, suggested that England had played poorly. This is apparently true. Gareth Southgate, the England manager, said after the same match that it was necessary to “hit the reset button”. The players have admitted that they have not performed well so far.
England’s contribution to Euro 2024 currently stands at two goals and one win in three games, and a place in the knockout rounds despite taking fewer shots than all but a couple of the teams in the tournament. No one has questioned the accuracy of Lineker’s single-word analysis. If he had used a little more child-friendly vocabulary, chances are no one would have batted an eyelid.
The word, however, seems to have stuck. Partly this is probably because the language of pundits still avoids the scatological, however vaguely old-fashioned it may sometimes seem. And partly it is because of the enormous – and somewhat contradictory – role that Lineker plays in the British football industrial complex.
He is best known to all as the presenter of the BBC’s coverage of major tournaments and the Premier League, a position which generally prevents him from offering much opinion. Sitting in the “Match of the Day” chair every weekend, he is supposed to be an impartial referee: the man in the smart shirt and sneakers asks questions, not offers answers.
But in recent years Lineker has also become a highly successful podcast entrepreneur, documentary producer and all-round media expert. His production studio, Goalhanger, is responsible for Four of Britain’s top 10 podcasts. It was in one of them, “The rest is football”, where he used the word.
Of course, on that platform, Lineker has every right to give his unvarnished views on whatever he wants; it is not governed by the often arcane conventions of the BBC. Lineker does his best to draw a line between his podcast and television characters, although often this essentially amounts to cursing for one and not the other.
But the distinction is subtle, and it doesn’t help that his two interlocutors in “The Rest Is Football,” Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, also appear in “Match of the Day.” To the public, Lineker is supposed to be the embodiment of neutrality. Listening to him be so scathing is like watching David Attenborough punch a dolphin.
However, that doesn’t adequately explain why Lineker’s choice of slang came to dominate the conversation over the past week. speech around England Euro 2024 Campaign.
There certainly seem to be more pressing issues at hand than whether a 63-year-old television presenter — even one who once served as his country’s captain — is allowed to swear.
Has Southgate’s decision to change his character and name a bold, crowd-pleasing team left him with a squad he doesn’t fully understand? Is a sudden tendency to try out new ideas for no more than 45 minutes and then abandon them when they don’t work straight away a good thing? Does the fact that Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden have been identified at various points as the root of all England’s ills not suggest that the problem may be structural?
That the media have been drawn to a story about swearing is not really a surprise: Lineker is a high-profile polarising figure; the games themselves have been intensely boring; and, deep down, everyone loves to fight.
For the players, however, it has come to symbolise something far more pressing: the question of what, precisely, is the role of the media during these tournaments. And that has highlighted a long-standing and possibly irreconcilable schism over how the relationship between a national team and journalists (ex-players or not) should work.
“I would never want to disrespect any player, especially a player who has worn the shirt and knows what it is like to play for England,” Harry Kane said in response to a question about Lineker at a press conference last week. Kane’s appearance was slightly unusual; he had clearly arrived with a message to send.
“What former players now have to realize is that it’s very difficult not to hear it now,” he said. He felt that instead of criticizing the team’s performances, former players in particular should be “as helpful as possible.”
“Giving the boys confidence would be a much better way to do it,” he added.
Declan Rice has advocated the same approach. “We need to have some positivity before games,” he said. “Let’s give the players the most confidence in the world. Let’s tell them they are the best players in the world. Let’s get them to read that and think: I’m going to go out and play and give it my all.”
In both assessments, the role of a country’s media is to act as cheerleaders, “supporting us during the tournament and then judging us afterwards,” as Kane put it.
It should be noted that this is standard elsewhere. An image circulated on social media last week, after Scotland’s defeat to Hungary, showing a Scottish television reporter, dressed in a somber work suit, standing alongside a Hungarian television contingent, all who wore their team’s shirt.
And while tension over the role of the media is not new (Lineker undoubtedly felt the same as Kane and Rice during his own England career), it has been exacerbated by the climate in which his successors have been conditioned. to exist.
Local newspapers, for so long the first to hold clubs in their communities to account, have been so hollowed out by cuts that many (not all) have been tempted to tell readers what they want to hear, rather than what they need to know. . Players find influencers, happy simply to bask in their reflected fame, a much more attractive audience than journalists. Access to players is increasingly controlled. So is what they are willing to discuss.
But, as predictable as this conclusion may seem, the media is not there for that. Lineker was undoubtedly a bit hypocritical when, in his response to Kane’s response (the snake of football commentators eating its own tail), he suggested that it was all the work of a “cheating” media that “busts the “wasp nest,” since, after all, what is he if not part of the media?
But he didn’t need to pass the ball to someone else. His job, whether as a TV presenter or podcast mogul, is not to blindly support England.
He was not personal or abusive in his evaluation. Compared to the bile and vitriol on social media, where exaggerated negativity is rewarded, his analysis was comparatively tame. Maybe his word choice was jarring, the dissonance of hearing your parents curse. But it was not inaccurate. It really is telling that the England players did not disagree with what he said, but simply with his right to say it.
European fever: Week three
TRANSALPINE BILIARY Maybe Ralf Rangnick knew what was coming. Just over six weeks ago, the 65-year-old was on the cusp of the greatest glory of his career.
Bayern Munich not only wanted him to supervise their team, but to transform the club: say goodbye to a previous generation of players, modernize the facilities, implement radical changes. In other words, Rangnick would have the opportunity to build one of European football’s greatest institutions in his own image.
And then, just when everyone thought a deal was close, he turned it down. He wanted, he said, to finish the job he had started with Austria. At the time, it seemed a strange decision; instinctively, I felt as if there must have been a dispute about money or control or something. Nobody turns down Bayern Munich just to be eliminated from the group stages of a European Championship.
As you may have noticed, it hasn’t worked out that way.
Austria, along with Switzerland, has been the revelation of Euro 2024, beating Poland and Holland to top Group D, ahead of France. He did so by playing the fast-paced, high-intensity football that Rangnick has long championed and, to some extent (at least in the modern incarnation of it), helped popularize.
Of course, Austria’s adventure is likely to come to an end relatively soon, in the round of 16 on Tuesday, or perhaps in the quarterfinals. But it’s hard not to get the feeling that Rangnick has created one of the few teams in this tournament that has a true sense of itself: a clear identity, a defined purpose, a honed intent. There is a small chance, but a chance nonetheless, that Rangnick did not miss his chance to crown the title.
CONCERTINA That Austria (and the Swiss, let’s not forget the Swiss) can reach the round of 16 with their eyes raised and their horizons broadened is a testament to the trait that makes international football, increasingly, a ray of sunshine.
Europe’s domestic leagues spend so much time and energy explaining to everyone how competitive, unpredictable and exciting they are that it’s hard not to feel like they’re protesting a little too much. There are surprises, of course, and there’s drama, but most of us know, deep down, that ultimately the deciding factor tends to be pure economics.
This is not true in international football, where even the heavyweights are marked by lapses. Both France and England have been stultifying. Spain and Germany have impressed sporadically. Only Portugal seem unfazed and seem to have decided to spend much of the games playing with 10 men.
And that, of course, means that success is not so far out of reach for outsiders, for teams that don’t have the talent weight of the favorites but do have a well-coached system and a dash of talent. The landscape is flatter and the gaps narrower, and that creates real uncertainty. Which is, really, how sport is supposed to be.
Blunt edge Have you seen who the top scorer at the Euros is? That’s right, it’s an own goal! Own Goal is having a great tournament! I wonder if Chelsea will try to score an own goal! Or, if they are unreachable, maybe the current runners-up: Romelu Lukaku without VAR!
Of course, these jokes are all very funny and hardly original, but they also offer a pretty clear encapsulation of what is fast becoming one of the defining features of this era of football: the dearth of real strikers. That’s not to say they don’t exist. They do. It’s just that they tend to be fairly old (Robert Lewandowski), ambivalent about playing in attack (Kylian Mbappé) or have been created in a laboratory (Erling Haaland).
At the risk of making too bold a prediction, this won’t last. Youth development in football is cyclical. Academies tend to focus on producing the kind of players missing from senior football. For a long time, that meant neat midfielders and “inverted” wingers. The next version may well be physically imposing and cold-blooded.