Lineker and Shearer disagree on ideal MOTD replacement as Man City are written off

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.

Every major football homepage is dominated by it. Not even Cootegate or the arrival of a new Manchester United manager can truly compete.

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.

Alan Shearer raised ‘huge concern’ about one of favourites to replace Gary Lineker on MOTD

And…

Gary Lineker has already named the man he wants to replace him at Match of the Day

They’re both joking about Micah Richards on the jokey podcast they do with Micah Richards, a podcast in which jokes about Micah Richards form a key pillar.

Obvious tomfoolery apart, ‘one of favourites’ is also a bit of a stretch for a man currently ninth favourite with the bookies behind David Jones and Manish Bhasin and who didn’t even make it into the Mirror’s own list of ‘9 possible Gary Lineker replacements as Match of the Day host to leave BBC role‘.

READ: Match of the Day has pitfalls to beware in hunt for Gary Lineker replacement

Strawdiola
We fear Ollie Holt is slightly losing his touch. He doesn’t usually let you see quite so clearly behind the curtain, to see all the workings when constructing one of the strawmen he then has no choice but to tear apart while shaking his head sadly.

You cannot write off Man City despite their record-breaking run of defeats, writes OLIVER HOLT

Mediawatch will never come to terms with this new Mail obsession with putting journalists’ names in headlines in caps, but never mind that now. We… we weren’t going to write off Man City, the champions from the last four seasons and currently second in the Premier League table four points clear of third.

Who, precisely, is writing Man City off to the extent that Holt has no choice but to commit several hundred words behind the Mail+ paywall to poo-pooing said fools while so bravely pointing out that Pep Guardiola is a good manager?

Is anyone, anywhere, writing City off? Are they balls. But happily, Holt tells us precisely how he determined that they are.

Even the bookmakers have dropped them down to second favourites for the title behind Liverpool.

I find it strange that they, and so many others, seem to be writing City off.

Almost snuck that by us all, didn’t he, especially with that airily non-specific ‘so many others’. Shouldn’t really need saying, but no, bookmakers are not ‘writing City off’ by making them second favourites.

Do you know who win things quite often? Second favourites. Liverpool were third favourites a few weeks ago. Had the bookies written them off then?

You can quibble, as Mediawatch would, whether City should really be quite as big as 9/4 second favourites at this time. But it’s a huge leap from ‘seems quite a big price, that’ to ‘writing City off’.

Every breath you take
Mediawatch is as ever painfully aware it has its own little obsessions that absolutely nobody else cares about. Silences being broken. True colours being shown. Volumes being spoken.

Our newest one, as Monday’s readers will remember, is the MEN’s baffling ‘I saw/watched/spotted’ headline trend. It is a bit creepy, and also oddly juvenile; it makes a lot of their headlines now read a little bit like a six-year-old’s ‘what I did on my school holidays’ homework, if six-year-olds were more interested in spotting really obvious things at football training grounds than finding a pebble on the beach and deciding it is a dinosaur tooth.

Anyway. We don’t expect you to share but hope you will at least forgive our excitement at seeing two of these favourites combined to devastating effect.

I spotted what Omar Berrada did during Ruben Amorim Man United arrival and it speaks volumes

Magnificent. Spotter’s badge for Kieran Horn. For what it’s worth, the volume-speaking thing Berrada did that was so adroitly spotted really is worth an entire column: reader, he smiled.