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However, if there was one player in England who epitomised the very best of football in the country during the 1980s it was the man, who, at the end of it, became its captain. Gary Lineker made his full debut for Leicester City as an eighteen-year-old on New Year’s Day in 1979. He wore Keith Weller’s number seven shirt but did not score in a 2–0 victory over Oldham Athletic. His future agent, Jon Holmes, watching from the terraces, thought the debutant played appallingly and was unimpressed. Leicester had been relegated from Division One the previous season and were now sliding ignominiously towards Division Three. Jock Wallace, the manager, must have shared Holmes’s opinion because Lineker was dropped and did not play again until 24 April when he scored the winner in a 1–0 win at Notts County. Leicester barely escaped the drop, finishing seventeenth, and Lineker did not feature on the score sheet until the thirteenth game of the following season, 1979–80, when he scored both goals in a 2–0 win over Sunderland. Leicester were promoted, but Lineker found it hard to command a regular first-team place in the top division. The club also struggled and were relegated back to the Second Division. Life was not without incident at Filbert Street but it didn’t lead to any kind of stability and suddenly the warning words of the headmaster of the City of Leicester Boys’ Grammar School did not sound so clichéd.
A young Gary Lineker of Leicester City, August 1979 (Bob Thomas / Getty Images).
It was 1982 before Gary established himself as a regular striker when Alan Young was injured at the start of the 1981–2 season and he was included from the opening day in a productive partnership with Jim Melrose. He finished that season as the club’s leading scorer with seventeen league goals in thirty-nine appearances. Leicester reached an FA Cup semi-final before losing to Tottenham Hotspur, the holders and eventual winners, but Jock Wallace returned to Scotland to manage Motherwell and Gordon Milne took over at Filbert Street. Wallace’s last act was to spend £15,000 on Alan Smith from Alvechurch and he and Lineker struck up an instantly successful partnership. In the 1982–3 season, they contributed thirty-nine league goals between them with Lineker claiming twenty-six of them in forty games as Leicester were again promoted to the First Division. The difference between the struggles of his first three seasons and the success of the fourth was mostly attributable to the quality that accounted for his success over the next decade – his speed. It was sheer pace that gave him the ability to leave defenders for dead as he demonstrated at Wembley in the 1986 FA Cup final when he embarrassed the slow-turning Alan Hansen to sprint away and put Everton into a lead they could not hold.
The speed that I had was a gift from somewhere. I don’t believe in God. You can’t train for it. You can help a fraction by building up the strength to make you a little bit quicker but ultimately you are either quick or you’re not. You’ve either got fast twitch muscles or slow twitch muscles. I had fast twitch muscles and I was seriously quick.
There was more to Lineker than just pace, though. Howard Kendall recognised the quality of his linking play and the intelligent awareness that was rapidly developing. Above all, what was impressive about Gary Lineker from an early stage was how he handled himself.
Lineker had quick feet and an agile brain but he was never cocky. He liked his family and he liked living at home, but to make progress he needed to leave Leicester who did not have the ambition or the resources to give him what he needed in 1985. When he scored he didn’t go crazy and when he missed he never berated himself. His celebrations were more in keeping with Japanese Noh theatre than the climax of A Chorus Line. He could be infuriatingly casual in training, as he himself admitted, but there was always method in his madness.
It’s a bit of a myth that I didn’t like training. It’s true that I got very bored with training that didn’t really help me. It’s progressed a lot since but in those days it was all very basic. I was talking about this to Ian Wright the other day and he said that most teams tended to work on defence and we used to be a part of helping the defence but that didn’t help us much. That used to bore me senseless and five-a-sides never really interested me either. Even when we did finishing, which did interest me, everybody had to do it, so you had seventeen or eighteen players in the way and I had one shot every five minutes which I thought was completely pointless. Towards the end of my career, and I wish I’d done it all the way through, I used to say, ‘Do you mind if I go and do some finishing on my own?’ I would grab a goalkeeper and a coach and it was finish, finish, finish, finish because I knew I was getting something out of it.
Lineker’s rapid improvement and goals were noticed by Bobby Robson who had taken over the England manager’s job from Ron Greenwood after the 1982 World Cup in Spain. Lineker stepped on to the field as an England player for the first time in the match against Scotland at Hampden Park in May 1984. His move to Everton came at the end of the 1984–5 season during which he was the First Division’s highest scorer, and by which time he had become England’s principal striker. It was his success with England that turned him into a household name. A successful club striker will be very popular with his own supporters but possibly not with the supporters of rival clubs. A successful England striker wins the respect and gratitude of most of the country and soon Lineker was exactly the player that Jon Holmes hoped he would become when he first took him on as a client.
Another of Holmes’s clients, the striker Tony Woodcock, had already moved to Europe in a transfer from Nottingham Forest to FC Köln in 1979, thereby quadrupling his wages, but Holmes was never attracted by the prospect of easy money and thought carefully about his clients’ long-term interests. In 1985, he thought it better that Lineker stay in England for another season to see what the 1986 World Cup would bring. Lineker was keen to go to Manchester United but United didn’t have the money unless they sold Frank Stapleton, which they were unable to do. Liverpool made a bid, but there was always the chance that Liverpool would continue their tradition of playing their new signings in the reserves for a year and in a World Cup year this was not an attractive prospect. Besides, Dalglish and Rush were still the most feared striking partnership in English football and Lineker would by no means be certain of a place in the first eleven.
It was the six goals he scored in the World Cup in Mexico in 1986 that were the making of Gary Lineker. Until the group game against Poland, he was just one of a group of strikers – Woodcock, Francis, Mariner, Hateley, Allen, Withe, Dixon and Blissett – who had played for England over the past few years without establishing themselves as an automatic choice. His performance against the team that had been England’s nemesis in 1973 turned Lineker into Roy of the Rovers at a time when English football was sadly lacking in heroes. The victory over Poland came after a disastrous start to the tournament in which a mistake by Kenny Sansom gave away the only goal of the first match against Portugal in Monterrey. In the second, Ray Wilkins was sent off and the inspirational captain Bryan Robson dislocated his shoulder. In the circumstances the goalless draw against Morocco was not a bad outcome, but it meant that England had to beat Poland or face an ignominious early exit.
The injury to Robson and the suspension of Wilkins meant that the instinctively conservative Bobby Robson had no choice but to make changes. The loss of Robson was keenly felt by Lineker:
The best captain I ever played under was Bryan Robson. He led by example on the field. His work rate was unbelievable. He had that ability to get from box to box. He was a great defensive midfield player but he was also a great attacking midfield player. He was hugely respected both on and off the field by everyone. If you want your captain to grab a game by the scruff of the neck, he was the sort of bloke who could do that. It’s just a shame he was injured so often. Someone else will step in. They might not be as good in that particular role as you but it happens frequently in football because players get injured quite a lot.
The goalkeeper Peter Shilton now took the armband, which – since he was inevitably far behind the play – seems to suggest that Bobby R
obson did not believe that captaincy was so important. Steve Hodge and Peter Reid came into midfield, Trevor Steven replaced Chris Waddle as the wide man and – crucially – Peter Beardsley replaced Mark Hateley. It was only the second time he and Lineker had played together but it proved a hugely successful move and a watershed in Lineker’s career as he scored twice in the first fourteen minutes and claimed another before half-time to win the game and take England through to the knock-out stages.
It seemed to most observers that the changes forced on Robson by injuries and suspensions were the key to England’s change in fortune, but Lineker disagrees.
We’d have probably done well in Mexico in 1986 if Bryan Robson and Ray Wilkins had stayed in the side so you can’t attribute that success to their being out of the team. We didn’t collapse and I suppose it proves my point in the end that the captain’s role is not that significant on the pitch. Bryan was still our captain off the pitch. On the pitch he was a driving influence but the guy who came in to replace him was Peter Reid and he was a similar sort of player though not as good as Bryan Robson. He had the same kind of up and down the pitch ability and he was a natural leader himself and I’d just spent the past year with him when he was captain of Everton.
On the day of the Morocco game, Jon Holmes had received a telephone call from Joan Gaspart at Barcelona during which he agreed to fly to Barcelona the day after the Poland game to discuss a transfer from Everton. The thirty-eight goals Lineker had scored for the Merseyside club in the 1985–6 season was the reason for the call, but the hat-trick against Poland and the two further goals he scored in the 3–0 win against Paraguay must have helped to smooth negotiations even if the move was going to happen anyway. Many of those thirty-eight goals had come from Kevin Sheedy clipping the ball over the top of the defence for Lineker to run on to, but if he was going to improve he had to discover a more sophisticated way of playing. Holmes knew that he needed to play abroad. Barcelona under Terry Venables, they felt, was the right club at the right time. The former Queens Park Rangers manager had been appointed in the summer of 1984. He had won the title by ten points from Atlético Madrid to give Barcelona its first triumph in La Liga since Johan Cruyff’s playing days. Venables now had a blank cheque. In his second season, Barcelona had finished a long way behind Real Madrid but they had won their way through to one of the most boring European Cup finals ever played, which they lost on penalties to Steaua Bucharest. Barcelona’s Scottish striker Steve Archibald was now approaching thirty and Venables decided that it was time to replace one Briton with another.
Back in Mexico, Lineker scored again against Argentina in the quarter-final ten minutes from time, but it was not enough to wipe out the 2–0 lead given the South American side by one outstanding individual goal by Maradona and an earlier one which the same scorer attributed to divine intervention. If the defeat was frustrating for England and their supporters, it was the occasion for national rejoicing in Argentina. Maradona is alleged to have drawn a strong parallel between football and the Falklands War. It has to be said that, in translation, the language sounds very like an Argentinian journalist rewriting Maradona’s words in the style of speech employed by footballers the world over.
Before the match we said football had nothing to do with the Malvinas War but we knew a lot of Argentinian kids had died there, shot down like birds. This was revenge. Bollocks was it just another match… We blamed the English players for everything that had happened for all the suffering of the Argentinian people.
If English football supporters can still find parallels with the Second World War before every game against Germany, it was reasonable for Argentina supporters to believe that they could also use their superiority at football as a means of refighting a war that had caused such national humiliation.
Lineker returned home from Mexico a national hero. England’s golden boy had planned a quiet summer wedding to his childhood sweetheart, Michelle Cockayne, but by now he was national property and the 300 uninvited guests who showed up at the Linekers’ wedding in 1986 dwarfed the small group of well-wishers who had crowded round Billy Wright and Joy Beverley at the Register Office in Poole back in 1958. The media crush was so great that the official photographer could not get through, leaving the bride in tears. Life for the newly married couple in Barcelona was clearly going to be significantly different from life in Leicester and Liverpool. In the days of Filbert Street, the Baseball Ground and Burnden Park, a football ground like the Bernabéu or the Camp Nou was on a different planet. In the mid-1980s, Spain was the place for a fortnight’s holiday of sangria, sunburn and – as Eric Idle would have added – ‘last week’s copy of the Daily Express’. It was not a place many English people saw as a place to live and work. Barcelona also offered a challenge that had no parallel in any English club – its football team represented the five million inhabitants of Catalonia in a political and not just a sporting sense.
The Linekers set up home in a four-bedroom villa on an exclusive estate in the town of Sant Just Desvern, a short drive from the Camp Nou. Jon Holmes had told them in no uncertain terms that they had to learn the language, having absorbed the lessons of Woodcock’s and Keegan’s time in Germany. There were also the salutary examples of the young Denis Law and Jimmy Greaves at the start of the 1960s who never really wanted to go and live in Italy but allowed themselves to be persuaded. When reality dawned they couldn’t wait to come home. Lineker agreed with his agent’s diagnosis.
I looked at the players who had moved abroad and by and large it seemed to me that the ones who had immersed themselves in the culture and learned the language – people like Ray Wilkins and Liam Brady – did really well. The players who had had a go and learned the language rather than the ones who said, ‘I’ll go over there for a couple of years, get a few quid and get back’, were the ones who were successful. I found learning Spanish to be reasonably easy especially if you did what we did and throw yourselves into Spanish society. I didn’t exactly evade or shun expat society but I wanted the opportunity to learn Spanish quickly, added to the fact that I went to school three times a week – two-hour sessions at a time. After two or three months I could get by and then you keep learning as you go along. After a year I suppose I was pretty fluent.
Lineker’s point about the importance of learning the language was reinforced when Mark Hughes arrived at Barcelona from Manchester United for a highly unsatisfactory spell before being loaned to Bayern Munich. Hughes was only twenty-two years old as opposed to Lineker’s twenty-six, and the difference in maturity was stark. Lineker was effectively forced into translating for his compatriot, but it was not a long-term solution for the Welshman. Lineker’s fluency with the language translated into a successful transition on the field where he adapted quickly to the Spanish style of play. In his first season with the club, 1986–7, he scored twenty-one goals in forty-one matches, including a hat-trick against Real Madrid, but Barcelona again finished second to Real.
Gary Lineker poses at the Camp Nou stadium, Barcelona, 17 March 1987 (Bob Thomas / Getty Images).
The club made a bad start to the 1987–8 season and by the end of September Venables was gone, sent on his way by the traditional ceremonial fluttering of white handkerchiefs. Lineker continued to score goals under his replacement Luis Aragonés but his successor, Johan Cruyff, played Lineker as a winger rather than a central striker after his arrival at Barcelona in May 1988. The Dutchman, no great admirer of British football, believed, wrongly, that Lineker was an English player who could play only in traditional English formations. He played him out of position or substituted him so that he could never get into his rhythm which meant the goals dried up and he was eventually dropped.
Lineker’s form with the national side initially remained strong after his move to Catalonia. In a friendly in Madrid in February 1987 he was given four chances, scored four goals and England ran out 4–2 winners. England qualified well for the European Championships of 1988 in West Germany but the tournament was a dis
aster with three defeats in three games, including one to Jack Charlton’s newly emerging Republic of Ireland. In addition, Lineker was now struggling with club, country and health as he was stricken with hepatitis. It was his most difficult time since he had established himself in the Leicester City side. This was where his trust in his agent was repaid as Holmes skilfully played off one club against another until, in July 1989, he secured the transfer they wanted back to Tottenham Hotspur for an absurdly low fee of £1.1 million. Lineker repaid the transfer fee immediately, scoring twenty-four goals in his first season back in Division One. The scene was set for the triumphant climax to his career as a player on the world stage in Italy in 1990.
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