Match of the Day review – without Lineker, this is just 20 minutes of shameful, joyless TV

‘G ary Lineker’s the best in the business,” said the BBC director-general, Tim Davie, on Saturday, during a hostile interview with his own organisation in which he insisted he would not resign. “That’s not for debate.”

An eerily simplified edition of Match of the Day, truncated to just 20 minutes in length, underlined his point.

Only 32 hours previously, viewers had been expecting the best football highlights programme there has ever been to appear as normal. Its host, Lineker, had been criticised by government ministers and their media outriders for tweeting that the Conservatives’ dehumanising language about refugees was reminiscent of 1930s Germany, but the storm would surely blow over soon. Then, however, the BBC pulled out a shotgun and aimed it shoewards. On Friday afternoon, it announced it had suspended Lineker for breaching impartiality guidelines.

When regular MotD analyst Ian Wright posted that he had chosen not to participate in the programme in “solidarity” with Lineker, it sparked the wildest few hours on Twitter since David Cameron was accused of porking a pig. By the end of the evening, every possible replacement host and pundit had tweeted to rule themselves out of filling in, the show’s commentators had pulled out en masse, and even the players’ union had said there wouldn’t be any post-match interviews. So it was that, the following night, with the BBC now deep in crisis, an embarrassed continuity announcer was forced to intone, “Now on BBC One, we’re sorry that we’re unable to show our normal Match of the Day … ”

Impatient football fans have for some time been able to circumvent Match of the Day and watch cursory three-minute highlights packages of Premier League matches, for free, on YouTube. That