“I hadn’t reached puberty yet,” Gary Lineker says, cracking up. Then he stops and adds: “It’s true, I’m not lying. I used to hide in the showers”. Talk has turned, inevitably, to Lamine Yamal, the school kid who stands before England’s hopes of winning a first trophy since 1966, what their former captain calls his “lifetime’s ambition” as a player and broadcaster, and has everyone asking the same question: what were you doing at 16? “I had just joined Leicester City as an apprentice,” Lineker recalls. Which isn’t bad, and beats trying to blag your way into pubs with fake ID, but isn’t this. And this, he says, is “unfathomable”.
Lineker has watched Euro 2024 from in front of the Brandenburg Gate and describes the tournament as one where “the fans were the highlight, showing human beings can get on even when they’re tribal”, as well as one that “started well” but got a “bit turgid” late in the group stages and was lit up by Spain, Germany, Austria and Turkey. “Teams playing brave, attacking football tended to be successful, which is encouraging,” Lineker says, but it has been a “cautious, mixed” Euros, during which he infamously described England v Denmark as “shit” – which is not, he stresses, the same as saying England are. Now, though, a competition with a “flawed” group format has “the dream final”.
