Skip to main content

Gary Lineker: ‘Lamine Yamal blows my mind. I’ve not seen anything like this’

The former striker on what he was doing at 16, his respect for Harry Kane and why England are a bit like Real Madrid

“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.

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”.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/agmPBTl

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

England booed off after failing against Iceland once more in Euros warm-up

It was a long way from being the triumphant Euro 2024 send-off for Gareth Southgate and his England players at a sold-out and increasingly fretful Wembley. Never mind the result because it was not the main thing, however much it stirred memories of you-know-when against Iceland. It was the performance that raised the difficult questions, the worst one for quite some time and at exactly the wrong time. The home fans, thousands of whom made for the exits before the end, were forced to watch the second half – from about minute 55 onwards – through the gaps between their fingers. And it had not been great before that. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/4ndfQL0
Post a Comment
Read more

Bodies of Men: the love story taking on toxic masculinity in a time of war

Nigel Featherstone’s new novel tackles traditional conservatism and patriarchy through an unconventional romance How can you be a man and be anti-war? This is the question that Sydney-born novelist Nigel Featherstone, who is a pacifist, considered while he took up a three-month writing residency in a military library. He set out to discover what happens to very different expressions of masculinity placed under military pressure. “Australia does have a very defined, toxic brand of masculinity,” says the bespectacled Featherstone, seated by the window at his local pub facing the railway station at Goulburn, north of Canberra, while men on stools at the nearby bar sink beers and televisions on the walls screen horse racing results. Continue reading... from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2N8piOc
Post a Comment
Read more

Coronavirus live news: California sees record daily cases as global infections top 15m

California Covid-19 cases pass New York’s after record day ; WHO emergencies chief says vaccinations unlikely before 2021; global cases pass 15m. Follow the latest updates US daily coronavirus deaths surpass 1,000 for first time since June California surpasses New York as state with most coronavirus cases after record day Nearly a quarter of people in Delhi have had coronavirus, study finds See all our coronavirus coverage 12.54am BST South Africa on Wednesday announced a record 24-hour increase of 572 coronavirus deaths, bringing its total number of fatalities to 5,940, AFP reports. The country is the worst-affected in Africa and among the top five in the world in terms of confirmed cases, with 394,948 infections reported to date. 12.33am BST Dr Deborah Birx, the chief medical officer on the White House’s coronavirus task force, has called the surge in infections across the United States, “a very different epidemic than we had in March and April”. Speaking on Fox news, Bir...
Post a Comment
Read more