Gary Winston Lineker, 30 November 1960, Leicester, England.
PART ONE
Born in Leicester, Gary Lineker grew up in the city whose club would give him his start. In July 1977, aged 16, he became a Leicester City apprentice, and his first steps towards the senior side were made among older players who knew that promise counted for little until it survived a Saturday afternoon. Leicester were in the Second Division when he made his first-team debut against Oldham Athletic at Filbert Street on New Year’s Day 1979, in a 2–0 victory, and there was nothing about that one appearance to suggest that within a few years he would be wanted by leading clubs across Europe. It was a beginning, though, and the fact that it happened at home mattered to a young player who understood both the club and the people paying to watch it.
The first team did not immediately make room for him every week. Leicester won the Second Division championship in 1979–80, giving Lineker a winner’s medal while he was still learning the demands of senior football, and promotion brought a harder test because the next season placed him against First Division defenders when his own position in the side was far from secure. Leicester went back down in 1980–81, and for an ambitious young forward the obvious temptation would have been to measure himself only by how seldom he had played. Lineker had a more useful measure: he could see the gap between finding chances in youth football and finding them against men who were stronger, more experienced and better at closing the space he wanted. He had pace, but pace on its own only carried a forward towards a defender; he needed to learn when to hold a run, when to change its direction and when a ball that appeared lost might still be made into a chance.
By 1981–82 he was playing regularly, and the change showed in his goals, with 19 in league and cup football as Leicester chased a return to the top flight and reached the FA Cup semi-finals. The cup run brought an occasion that a young Leicester player could hardly miss: on 3 April 1982, Jock Wallace’s Second Division side met Tottenham Hotspur at Villa Park for a place in the final. Leicester lost 2–0, so Lineker’s first visit to the last four ended with the other team going to Wembley, but a player who had spent years trying to secure a place in his hometown side had now tested himself on one of English football’s biggest days. Tottenham would enter his story again, although neither he nor the supporters watching at Villa Park could yet have known how much that connection would come to mean.
Leicester’s next promotion push gave him a clearer role. Playing closer to goal, he scored 26 times in the Second Division in 1982–83, and the partnership growing around him had a balance that suited his game: Alan Smith offered another forward’s touch and judgment, while Steve Lynex supplied width and work that stretched opponents. Leicester were promoted, and Lineker no longer looked like a young player borrowing a place until somebody more established returned; he looked like a man the team expected to score. That expectation is a burden until a striker discovers he can carry it, and Lineker carried it into the First Division, where the defenders were quicker to spot an early run and the chances generally came at a higher price. Leicester’s account of the period credits the Lineker, Smith and Lynex combination with more than 150 goals across Lineker’s final three seasons at the club, which says plenty about how effectively those different strengths fitted together.
His first full season back in the top flight, 1983–84, settled an important question. A striker can fill his boots in the Second Division and then find that First Division centre-halves give him neither the same time nor the same openings, but Lineker scored 22 league goals while Leicester finished 15th, and the figure was too large to dismiss as a passing run. He did not need to beat three defenders before every finish. Often the work had happened earlier, when he had slipped between them, waited for the right moment or made a teammate’s pass look better because he was ready to meet it. People sometimes use natural goalscorer as though it explains anything; in Lineker’s case it can hide how much reading, repetition and nerve went into the apparently simple act of scoring from six or ten yards.
PART TWO
In 1984, Bobby Robson brought Gary Lineker into the England side. Leicester’s forward had made himself difficult to overlook, but international football offered a different kind of uncertainty because a player could perform well for his club every week and still find that an England shirt changed the pace of the game around him. He had yet to become the striker people would associate with Mexico and Italy; he was one of several forwards trying to give Robson a reliable answer up front. His club work continued to make the strongest argument on his behalf, and the 1984–85 season supplied another 24 First Division goals, a share of the division’s leading scorer position and a firm place among the forwards opponents discussed before playing Leicester. The numbers showed consistency, while the way he scored them showed that the same habits worked at the higher level: watch, move, strike, and be prepared to do it again after a miss.
England’s first choice was still open to debate, but Leicester’s was not. Lineker had grown from an apprentice at Filbert Street into the player whose goals gave the team its sharpest edge, and that growth created the familiar problem for a club outside the richest group: the better he played, the harder he became to keep. Everton, the reigning English champions, paid about £800,000 for him in the summer of 1985. Leicester lost a local boy who had become a leading First Division scorer, while Lineker entered a dressing room that expected to win trophies and regarded a strong season as the minimum. It was a serious step up in pressure, though the way he had scored at Leicester gave Everton good reason to think he could handle it. The move also came in the shadow of the ban on English clubs in European competition after the Heysel disaster, which meant the champions and their new striker could not take their place in the European Cup.
His first Everton league match took him straight back to Leicester, an awkward fixture for a player who knew the ground, the corridors and many of the men in the opposing dressing room. Soon enough he belonged unmistakably to the side in blue. Everton had power across the pitch and were in no mood to surrender the league title, while Lineker gave them a finisher who could turn service into goals without demanding that every attack be built around him. During the season he found a particularly emphatic way of settling arguments about his fit: he scored hat-tricks against Birmingham City, Manchester City and Southampton. The first came in a 4–1 home win over Birmingham on 31 August 1985, the second in a 4–0 home win over Manchester City on 11 February 1986, and the third in a 6–1 victory over Southampton on 3 May, as Everton tried to keep the title race alive. Those were three different points in a demanding season, and each burst of scoring reminded the rest of the division that if Everton created openings, Lineker was likely to take more than one of them.
Yet Everton’s season cannot be told from their striker’s goal tally alone, because Liverpool matched their neighbours over the long run and finished two points ahead. In the penultimate league game, the Southampton victory and Lineker’s hat-trick kept Everton’s hopes going; in their last, he struck twice against West Ham United in a 3–1 win, but Liverpool won at Chelsea and took the championship. Lineker finished with 30 league goals, the division’s leading total, and 40 in all competitions across 57 appearances, figures that usually accompany medals but in this case marked a season of near misses. There is no need to dress that up as a hidden victory. Everton had signed him to help them win the league again, and they fell short, although nobody could fairly lay that failure at the feet of a forward who had supplied goals at such a rate.
One match remained that could give Everton the last word over Liverpool: the FA Cup final at Wembley on 10 May 1986. Lineker scored first, getting away from Alan Hansen and putting Everton ahead, and for a while the club’s outstanding individual season appeared headed for a trophy that would make the summer easier to bear. Liverpool came back, however, and won 3–1, completing the league and cup double while Everton finished runners-up in both competitions. Lineker had done the job a striker is hired to do in a final; the result still belonged to the other side. His Everton spell lasted only a season, but it left one of the clearest examples of his gifts, because he had arrived under heavy expectation, scored freely and remained a danger even on an afternoon when the team lost its most important match.
While the English season was winding down, England were preparing for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, and Robson had a forward whose domestic form demanded attention. Mexico would put Lineker in a different kind of spotlight: millions could see the games, a small number of matches would shape a player’s standing for years, and one missed chance could sit beside the few that went in. England began badly, losing 1–0 to Portugal and drawing 0–0 with Morocco. After two matches they had no goal and one point, while Lineker had no World Cup goal to his name. The pressure before the last group match against Poland was plain: England needed a result, and the man who had scored so regularly for Everton needed to bring that form to an international tournament before there were no matches left in which to do it.
On 11 June 1986, against Poland in Monterrey, he answered with a first-half hat-trick and England won 3–0. The change in England’s prospects was immediate, but what made the performance feel so emphatic was the way he kept reaching the ball first in a penalty area full of men who knew exactly whom they needed to stop. A World Cup hat-trick cannot be explained away as a striker finding himself unmarked three times by accident. He had a hard-earned sense of how a move might finish, and his runs made room where the defence expected none. The goals sent England into the knockout rounds and gave Robson a settled threat up front; they also made Lineker an English name recognised far beyond the supporters who had watched him at Leicester or Everton. FIFA records him among the World Cup’s hat-trick scorers, although the match itself supplies the stronger evidence of how swiftly his place in that England side changed.
Paraguay came next in the last 16, and England won 3–0 again, with Lineker scoring twice and Peter Beardsley adding the other goal. Five goals across those two victories turned an England side that had looked short of answers into a quarter-finalist, and the striker who had reached the tournament amid questions about the team’s attack was now central to everything it hoped to do. There was skill elsewhere in the side, and Beardsley’s movement in particular helped him, but Lineker was the player making the final touch count. He was playing through an arm injury and wore a light support, a detail that only sharpens the picture of a forward concerned less with looking comfortable than with being ready when the next chance appeared. The knockout matches grew harder, and his ability to score became more valuable with every round England survived.
Argentina awaited on 22 June at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, and the match became inseparable from two moments supplied by Diego Maradona. The first goal came when Maradona used his hand to beat goalkeeper Peter Shilton to the ball; the second followed a run of extraordinary control and balance through England’s defence. Argentina were 2–0 up, and the match that had begun as another chance for Lineker’s scoring run was close to being settled by the most talked-about player in the competition. Lineker pulled one back late, getting himself onto a ball across goal and giving England a chance to force an equaliser, but Argentina held on to win 2–1. His goal did not erase the defeat, though it completed a striking personal tournament: six goals in five games and the Golden Boot as Mexico’s leading scorer. He had scored a hat-trick when England faced elimination, twice in their next win and once when they were beaten, which was a fair picture of a striker who kept looking for the next opening regardless of the score.
The Golden Boot did more than give him a prize to take home. It changed the scale on which clubs judged him. Everton had shown in one season that he could score heavily for an English title contender, and Mexico had shown that he could do the same when the best defenders from other countries were watching him; Barcelona now offered him the chance to carry that form into Spain. Terry Venables, an English manager working at the Camp Nou, had already taken Steve Archibald to the club, and a move for Lineker made sense in a side that needed goals as well as big names. The fee, widely put at £2.8 million, was enormous beside the sum Everton had paid Leicester the previous summer. That rapid rise could have been a distraction, but Lineker had a more immediate task: he had to learn a different league, adapt to new teammates and prove that his Mexico goals were the work of a dependable striker rather than a few weeks of exceptional timing.
PART THREE
Spain offered Gary Lineker European club football after the ban had denied Everton its place among the continent’s leading sides. Barcelona also offered a kind of daily scrutiny he had not met before: a large club whose league position, style of play and relationship with Real Madrid invited constant argument. He began well, scoring twice on his league debut against Racing Santander, and the early goals gave him something useful while he settled in: the trust that comes when a new forward demonstrates, before anyone has had time to grow impatient, that he can finish chances. Venables knew his game, but Lineker still had to find an understanding with players whose habits had been formed in another football culture, and he had to judge when to make a run when the ball was being held or moved differently from the way he had known in England. Barcelona’s official account credits him with 42 goals in 103 league appearances across his three seasons, a strong return despite the more difficult final year that lay ahead.
The match that made his first Barcelona season especially easy to remember was a home game against Real Madrid. Lineker scored a hat-trick in a 3–2 victory, and a striker who had arrived from Everton after a famous World Cup now had a performance that belonged entirely to Barcelona supporters. A hat-trick against Madrid is understood immediately, whatever language a player speaks, and it helped secure his place with people who expected rather more than a respectable goal total from a costly signing. Across 1986–87 he scored 20 league goals in 40 appearances. Barcelona finished second, however, and the distinction between Lineker’s productive season and the team’s disappointing finish mattered because he had joined a club where second place rarely felt like much comfort. Nor did European football supply the answer: Dundee United knocked Barcelona out of the UEFA Cup in the quarter-finals, an unexpected defeat that left supporters with another reason to feel that a talented side had failed to collect the results its players ought to have achieved.
His second season, 1987–88, brought changes on the bench and another reminder that a player’s form does not settle a club’s wider troubles. Venables left after Barcelona’s poor opening to the campaign, and Luis Aragonés took over. Lineker continued scoring, including twice against Real Madrid in a 4–1 win that December, but Barcelona finished sixth in the league, a position far below what the club expected. For Lineker there was a clear division in the season’s evidence: he could still hurt the strongest opponents, and he finished with 16 league goals in 35 appearances, yet those goals did not give Barcelona the consistency needed to challenge for the championship. The Copa del Rey provided a trophy in 1988, and it was an important one for a forward who had come painfully close at Wembley two years earlier. A cup medal could not make the league table look better, but it meant he had won a major prize at his Spanish club.
By the summer of 1988, the difficulties around Barcelona extended beyond team selection or a run of poor results. A dispute involving players and club officials, remembered as the Hesperia affair, accompanied a broad change of direction, and Johan Cruyff came in as manager. Cruyff’s Barcelona would be built around a different way of attacking and a different view of where certain players belonged within it. Lineker remained at the club, but a forward’s central position could not be taken for granted once Julio Salinas arrived and Cruyff began reshaping the side. Lineker spent much of 1988–89 on the right rather than through the middle. He could still work, combine and threaten from there, but the move took him farther from the area where his sharpest judgments usually became goals. The drop to six league goals in 26 appearances reflected that altered job as well as the ordinary ups and downs that come over a season.
There was nevertheless one more substantial Barcelona achievement before he left. The club reached the 1989 European Cup Winners’ Cup final against Sampdoria in Bern and won 2–0 on 10 May, giving Lineker a European winner’s medal at the end of a year in which his own league scoring had fallen. A footballer seldom gets to choose the neatness of his best seasons: he had scored heavily in 1986–87 and finished second in Spain, played amid turmoil in 1987–88 and won the domestic cup, then spent much of 1988–89 away from his preferred position and helped the side collect a European trophy. Those contrasting years make his Barcelona spell more interesting than either the Madrid hat-trick or the final season’s goal total suggests on its own. He had succeeded abroad, adjusted to different demands and learned, too, that a manager’s plans could move a striker away from the place where he knew he did most damage.
England meanwhile had given him a difficult European Championship in 1988. The side lost all three of its group matches, and Lineker, so prolific in Mexico, did not score. His poor physical condition was later linked to hepatitis, which gives needed context to a tournament in which he looked far from the forward England supporters expected to see. Still, that explanation could not put goals on the board or turn the results round; it could only help explain why a player with his record had struggled. The contrast between 1986 and 1988 was a useful check on any easy claim that a great finisher could simply produce a goal whenever the country demanded one. He needed health, service and a functioning team, as every striker does, and England had too little going right that summer.
PART FOUR
In July 1989, Gary Lineker returned to English football with Tottenham Hotspur. Alex Ferguson had been interested in bringing him to Manchester United, where he could have been paired with his former Barcelona teammate Mark Hughes, but Spurs secured him instead, and the move placed him beside a creative talent whose influence on his next three years would be considerable: Paul Gascoigne. Lineker had played with fine footballers before, yet Gascoigne could open a match with a turn or pass that made a defender change direction at precisely the wrong instant. For a forward living on the fraction of a second before a chance appeared, such a player was a gift. Tottenham’s own account describes the partnership as productive from the start, and their records credit Lineker with 80 league goals in 138 appearances across his three seasons at the club.
The first of those seasons, 1989–90, made his return to England look like a sound decision for club and player alike. He scored 24 First Division goals, led the division’s scoring list and helped Spurs finish third. His totals at Leicester, Everton, Barcelona and now Tottenham showed that the move between clubs and countries had not taken away the qualities on which he relied, although the particulars around him kept changing. At Spurs, Gascoigne’s imagination and the team’s willingness to attack suited him, while Lineker’s steady supply of goals gave their good play a harder edge. He had been a leading scorer as a developing Leicester player, the leading scorer in Everton’s title chase and an effective forward abroad; now, approaching 30, he was again the First Division’s top marksman. That sequence says more than any one spectacular finish, because it required him to keep finding space after opponents had spent years studying how he did it.
Before Tottenham could build on that third-place finish, Lineker was back with England for the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Bobby Robson had taken him to Mexico as a forward still establishing his international standing; in Italy he arrived as a known source of goals, and with that came a more exacting demand. England opened against the Republic of Ireland in Cagliari on 11 June, and Lineker scored early, turning a chance close to goal into a lead. Kevin Sheedy equalised, however, and the match finished 1–1. England then drew 0–0 with the Netherlands and beat Egypt 1–0 to advance from the group, with Lineker’s opener against Ireland his only goal of those three matches. It was a quieter start than his decisive burst against Poland four years earlier, but the tournament was developing differently: England were difficult to beat, matches were tight, and the room he wanted in the area was hard to find.
Belgium held England through 90 minutes in the last 16. Lineker did not supply the winning goal, and England had to wait until the final moments of extra time for David Platt to turn Paul Gascoigne’s free kick into a 1–0 victory. A striker’s tournament cannot sensibly be judged only by whether he scores in every round; England’s progress depended on other players finding answers, too, and Platt’s finish kept all of them in Italy. The reward was a quarter-final against Cameroon on 1 July in Naples, a game that would ask much more of Lineker than waiting for a routine chance. Cameroon were strong, quick and confident, and England would need their most experienced forward to deliver when the match began slipping away from them.
Platt headed England into the lead against Cameroon, but the opposition struck twice to go 2–1 ahead, and with time running out Robson’s side faced elimination. Lineker got behind the defence, was brought down and converted the penalty that made it 2–2. In extra time he drew another foul inside the area and scored from the spot again, this time against goalkeeper Thomas N’Kono, giving England a 3–2 victory and a place in the semi-finals. Penalty goals can look plain in a record book beside a twisting run or a volley from distance, but the first of these stopped England going out and the second sent them through, with a World Cup place in the last four riding on his ability to remain calm after already taking one. He had won the kicks by moving into dangerous positions, then taken responsibility for finishing them. FIFA’s record of the match confirms both penalties, and the two goals lifted his World Cup total in Italy to three.
West Germany waited in Turin on 4 July. The semi-final was close and tense, and Andreas Brehme put the Germans ahead in the second half when his shot deflected beyond Peter Shilton. England needed a goal against a side well equipped to protect a lead, and Lineker supplied it: he collected the ball after Paul Parker’s involvement, found his way between defenders and finished low to bring the score to 1–1. It was a different sort of Lineker goal from a tap-in following a cross, because he had to take the chance through traffic and make the space to shoot, but it came from the same calm judgment he had shown throughout his playing years. The match went through extra time and into a penalty shoot-out; Lineker scored his kick, while England lost 4–3 after misses from Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle. His equaliser had kept the side in the tournament for another hour, yet it could not take them to the final.
England then lost the third-place match to Italy 2–1, bringing their tournament to a close with Lineker on four goals. Together with his six in Mexico, they gave him ten goals across two World Cups, a return that needs no embellishment. The settings and circumstances had differed sharply: in 1986 he had scored three against Poland to rescue a campaign that seemed to be ending early, while in 1990 his two penalties against Cameroon had saved England in a knockout match and his semi-final finish had given them a chance against West Germany. The games also explain why his figures meant so much to England supporters who watched both tournaments. These were not goals added after matches had been settled; several arrived at points when the team’s next step depended on him getting the ball in.
PART FIVE
Back at Tottenham, 1990–91 would bring a more uneven league season but a sustained FA Cup run. Lineker remained the forward Spurs looked to when a chance fell, and Gascoigne remained capable of producing a pass or burst of play nobody had prepared for, but cups add a particular pressure because an off day ends the argument at once. Spurs got as far as a Wembley semi-final against Arsenal on 14 April 1991, a North London meeting with a place in the final at stake. Gascoigne scored from a free kick, and Lineker struck twice as Tottenham won 3–1. The combination of the two players has often been remembered through Gascoigne’s spectacular opener, understandably, but Lineker’s goals were what made the victory secure, turning a fierce local contest into a convincing passage to the final. Spurs’ own history records his double as an essential part of that win.
Nottingham Forest were the opponents in the FA Cup final on 18 May, and Lineker entered it with an old result at the back of his mind: five years earlier he had put Everton ahead against Liverpool and still finished a runner-up. At Wembley in 1991, he had a goal disallowed for offside and later had a penalty saved by Mark Crossley, giving him ample reason to fear another afternoon when his own chance at a medal would pass him by. Forest went ahead through Stuart Pearce’s free kick; Paul Stewart equalised for Spurs; and in extra time a Des Walker own goal gave Tottenham a 2–1 victory. It was a final in which Lineker did not get the goal he wanted and did not leave with a penalty to remember fondly, but the result gave him his first major English knockout trophy. His earlier semi-final work counted every bit as much as a final goal would have done, although there was a pleasing human messiness to winning at last on an afternoon when his own finishing had deserted him.
The happiness of that cup win was complicated by Gascoigne’s serious injury in the final, and Tottenham’s next season unfolded without the same partnership that had helped bring Lineker back to the top of the English scoring list. He nevertheless produced his most prolific league season for Spurs in 1991–92, scoring 28 times in 35 First Division appearances. Ian Wright scored 29 and finished one ahead of him, while Tottenham ended the season 15th, so once more Lineker’s figures and his side’s position told different stories. There is something revealing in that separation. A forward may carry much of a team’s attack without being able to settle its other problems, and a player who scored at almost a goal a game in the league could still leave a season dissatisfied with the table. Tottenham’s records put his total across all competitions that season at 35, the last great surge of goals before he left English football.
The move ahead had been set in motion months earlier. Lineker agreed to join Nagoya Grampus Eight in Japan, bringing his Tottenham stay towards a known end while he was still scoring freely. That mattered to supporters watching him through the final weeks, because every goal now carried the sense of one of their last chances to see him in a Spurs shirt. His last English league match came at Manchester United on 2 May 1992, when he scored Tottenham’s goal in a 3–1 defeat at Old Trafford. It was a fitting detail without being a happy result: the team lost, the striker scored, and the finish marked the close of a period in which his goals had kept arriving even when the club’s league fortunes had dipped. His 80 goals in 138 Tottenham league appearances stand beside the 1991 FA Cup medal as the clearest record of what the move from Barcelona had brought both sides.
One last England tournament remained before Japan became his football home. Graham Taylor selected him for the 1992 European Championship in Sweden, where Lineker arrived with 48 international goals, one behind Bobby Charlton’s England record of 49 at the time. A missed penalty against Brazil in a pre-tournament friendly had already denied him the equaliser, and the attention paid to the number was understandable, because England supporters knew exactly how many goals he had scored and how few opportunities might remain. Yet a European Championship is a poor place to chase a personal mark if the team is not creating chances. England drew 0–0 with Denmark, drew 0–0 with France and needed to beat Sweden in their last group game; for Lineker, every goalless match left the record where it was, while the team’s wider problem grew more urgent.
England took an early lead against Sweden through David Platt, but Sweden equalised, and with the score at 1–1 Taylor took Lineker off and sent on Alan Smith. The substitution was striking because of the stakes and the timing: England still needed a goal, and the departing player was their long-serving centre-forward, one short of Charlton’s record, playing what became his last international match. Tomas Brolin subsequently scored Sweden’s winner, England lost 2–1 and went out. Lineker finished with 80 caps and 48 goals, a total that had seemed almost certain to rise during the years when chances came so regularly. It did not. His final appearance was neither a farewell arranged to suit him nor a goal that made the numbers look complete, and perhaps for that reason it remains a sharper memory than a tidy send-off would have been. The disappointment belongs first to England’s failed tournament, while the record adds a personal sting that could not be missed.
Japan offered a fresh setting and, on paper, a chance for Gary Lineker to keep playing while football there entered a new era. Nagoya Grampus Eight had invested in a forward known across the world, and a successful final spell would have given him time to enjoy the game without the same England questions following every match. Injuries made it much harder than either player or club wanted. He scored nine goals in 23 appearances across his two affected seasons, and by September 1994 he had announced that he was retiring. Those final figures are modest beside the runs of goals at Leicester, Everton, Barcelona and Tottenham, but they do not diminish them; they show a player whose body no longer let him get consistently to the positions he had spent years learning to find. The timing that made a half chance into a goal still lived in his head, while the repeated strain of reaching those chances had become a different matter.
After retiring, Lineker moved into broadcasting, first building experience in radio and television before becoming one of British football’s most familiar presenters. It was another job in which speed of judgment helped, although speaking to an audience about a match differs entirely from playing one. Viewers who had watched him score in Mexico or Italy could now hear him introduce and discuss other players’ performances, and his public life grew far beyond his own match record. This later work belongs after the football when telling his story in order: it depended in part on the recognition he had earned as a player, while demanding skills he had to develop afresh. Whatever people came to think of the broadcaster, the playing years had already supplied enough to judge the centre-forward.