The press exists to hold the powerful to account; to make sure they keep their word, and to demand answers when promises aren’t kept. So, with that in mind, full marks should be awarded to the Leicester Mercury for printing the headline ‘When will Gary Lineker present Match of the Day in just his underpants?’
Because, sure, Lineker might have done his best to forget the events of December 14th when, in a fit of regrettable bravado, he tweeted:
YES! If Leicester win the @premierleague I'll do the first MOTD of next season in just my undies.
— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) December 14, 2015
But the Leicester Mercury has not forgotten. And nor has the internet.
With Match of the Day about to return to our screens, Lineker’s pants have become a subject of outright fascination online, with people expressing fear and disgust and possible lust about the prospect of having to look at a pair of sweaty knickers in blistering HD. Even Walkers Crisps are in on the act now because, to paraphrase a popular philosophical thought experiment, if a man wears his pants on the telly and a subsidiary of PepsiCo doesn’t use it as a tool to leverage an existing market base, will anyone actually see it?
Nobody seems to know for sure whether or not Lineker is going to present Match of the Day in his pants. To be fair, it’s a real career-shaping quandary for him. If he goes through with it, he risks cheapening a television institution that has won respect around the world for half a century, all for the sake of a laddy bet. But if he backs out, 15 people on Twitter will call him a knob. Whichever path Lineker decides to take, he loses.
However, there are a couple of workarounds available to him. The first is the Paddy Ashdown cop-out. You’ll remember, when the 2015 General Election exit polls suggested a majority win for the Conservatives, Ashdown appeared on BBC News and said ‘If this exit poll is right, I will publicly eat my hat’.
To this day, he has not eaten a hat. His sidestepping tactic was two-pronged: first he allowed bigger news – in this case the outright decimation of his party – to overwhelm his promise; and then, to satiate the stragglers, he made a gesture of eating a slice of hat-shaped cake on Question Time.
The equivalent would be Lineker wearing his pants over his trousers like Superman, but that doesn’t feel forceful enough. Perhaps, instead, he should go for the failsafe: the Katie Hopkins option. During the London mayoral elections, the algorithm that Hopkins uses to churn out her terrible opinions backfired, resulting in a tweet that read:
If Sadiq Khan wins London, I will run naked down Regent Street with a sausage up my bum in protest #LondonMayor2016
— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) May 4, 2016
To date, Hopkins has yet to streak across London, rectal sausage in place or otherwise. And here’s the thing – nobody minds. Because the only thing worse than the thought of Katie Hopkins running nude through crowded streets with banger up her bum is the sight of Katie Hopkins running nude through crowded streets with banger up her bum, and then reading the inevitable column about how many homeless people she had to jump over and how it would be better for everyone if homeless people were moved on to a floating prison and then set on fire.
The point is this: the public is willing to forget about a silly dare if they know it’s going to torment them psychologically until the end of time. This is currently Lineker’s best and only way to get out of this. All he needs to do is add a sausage amendment to his promise and all this will be forgotten.
