Match of the Day

I love Match of the Day

When I was at primary school we were living in a golden age of hymns - or perhaps just Jesus-y songs - for kids: things like Shine Jesus Shine, and Colours of Day etc. Not much fire and brimstone, lots of sitting on the floor clapping. Whatever I might think about it objectively now, at the time it was fun. And one of the songs - in a no doubt deliberate ploy to weave kids’ (and probably still then boys’) nascent love of football into a nascent love of Jesus - was sung to the Match of the Day tune.

Gary Lineker: a man true to his word

The sad fact is that, while I can’t remember the words very clearly, I still cannot hear the Match of the Day music without the fragments coming back to me:

Why don’t you put your trust in Jesus

And ask him to come in

da-da-da-daaa-da-da-da-da-da

He died to save our sins

(…??)

(…??)

da da daaa-da da da da

till we reach the promised land.

All that being so, and as someone whose interest top-tier association football has, in civilian life, waxed and waned, but for whom it has become a rather prosaic part of professional life, Match of the Day is a familiar, but exciting friend.

It means staying up late: I’ve fallen asleep during a good 50% of the ones I’ve watched in this my fourth decade. It means having to withstand the glittering intellects of the likes of Danny Mills and Trever Sinclair. It means that preternatural irritation one feels when Newcastle are featured last (unless they happen to be playing “City” as if there’s only one, or “United” as if there’s only one).

But all the same it is, I think, a jewel set in the crown of English football which, for all its faults, remains without parallel; that is the case whatever the superleague plutocrats might wish: here I was slagging that off on Vanessa Feltz’s BBC London show a year or so ago":

And now MOTD comes to represent something even more dear to me. Whatever the inadequate morons running the country might wish, ordinary Brits are by and large just as decent as Gary Lineker is (or Marcus Rashford, for that matter, or any other working class boy done good in football’s perhaps-unique meritocracy). If MOTD has to be the lamp that throws into relief the hypocrisy of sinister nobodies like Davie, Johnson and Braverman, then so be it. If Ian Wright’s and Alan Shearer’s displays of solidarity are needed to remind the BBC what it’s supposed to be for - the common good, not the Tory good - then so be it. If I have to watch toady soon-to-be unemployed red wall Tories humiliate themselves again, this time by pretending they watched “episodes” of Match of the Day in the first place, then I’m only too delighted.

What’s not to like, Scott? What indeed…

So tonight I will be “singing” the “words” to the tune in my head, over the top of trying tell my Gabriel Magalhaes-es from my Gabriel Martinellis without the BBC’s help.

At least I will only hear talk of one “United”.

Match of the Day. I love Match of the Day.