Gary Lineker news: Match of the Day star says ‘great to be here’ as he returns to BBC

Former English football captain Gary Lineker returned to host the BBC’s premier football show on Saturday, a week after his suspension for criticizing the government’s immigration policy sparked a row over the broadcaster’s impartiality rules.

BBC executives reversed their decision to suspend Mr Lineker, the broadcaster’s highest paid presenter, after his colleagues refused to work in solidarity last weekend and forced him to broadcast football matches without normal commentary.

The controversy shocked public broadcasting, which is funded by a levy on nearly all UK households with televisions, and has often been accused of bias across the political spectrum.

“It was a very difficult situation for everyone involved,” Alan Shearer, co-presenter for Mr Lineker, said in a brief statement to viewers ahead of the BBC’s broadcast of an FA Cup quarter-final between Burnley and Manchester City .

“And through no fault of their own, some great people on TV and radio got into an impossible situation, and it wasn’t fair. So it’s good to get back to some sort of normalcy and talk about football again,” Shearer said.

Mr. Lineker said, “I echo those sentiments.”

Host Mark Chapman is tonight’s host Match of the day Longtime presenter Gary Lineker was the Etihad for the FA Cup quarter-final.

“Before you ask, I was booked for this weeks ago,” Mr Chapman joked as he introduced the programme, referring to Mr Lineker’s suspension last week for his criticism of the government.

The expert was joined in the studio by former Wales player Ashley Williams and former Manchester United player Dion Dublin.

The marches, organized by Stand Up To Racism and the STUC, took place in London, Glasgow and Cardiff on Saturday afternoon. According to the organizers, thousands of people took part in the action against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism and the extreme right.

Maria Frazier, 75, said she was protesting the government because she agreed with Gary Lineker’s comment comparing some of the language used around immigration policy to that of 1930s Germany.

Outside the BBC’s central London headquarters, she said: “Lineker was right when he said there are shadows of the German Reich in the methods they use.

“People are coming out because they are extremely angry with the way the economy is being run and the hardships that exist while the rich people in power are making themselves richer.”

The BBC’s decision to withdraw Lineker from its flagship football highlights program last week sparked a pundit boycott and sent producers scrambling to keep the show alive.

The independent was told the BBC hierarchy, above BBC Sport, wanted Lineker to agree to a public statement that would essentially amount to an apology and a statement that he would be more careful on social media, which sources close to the situation said they would have been rightly seen as the presenter “humiliating” himself.

George Lineker has welcomed the return of his father Gary to the BBC.

The younger Lineker revealed earlier this week that he had suffered the effects of his father’s suspension when he shared an offensive message he received on Twitter about the incident.

Children’s author Michael Rosen echoed the comments that got Gary Lineker suspended, condemning the government’s illegal migration law and comparing its rhetoric to that of 1930s Germany.

Speaking at a protest outside Downing Street, he told the PA news agency: “I think it is very important that we assist refugees and oppose this law that the government is introducing to criminalize people arriving here as migrants and refugees.”

“I think this government is playing a very dangerous game, they are fueling the fear of the people, especially the fear of the foreigner,” he added.

“This is a very old game of scapegoating and blaming people – vulnerable people – and saying to people who are poor and people who are unhappy, ‘the cause of your poverty and the cause of your unhappiness are these people who are in small boats arrive.

“This is what the government is doing to strengthen power, they are very, very nervous that they are going to lose power.

“It was a game that was played in the 1940s. There was a word that circulated around fascists in the 1930s, a German word, ‘fremdmoral’, meaning strange morality.”

Alan Shearer was given most of the responsibility for tackling last week’s controversy Match of the day go ahead without presenters.

Watch below as the pundit tells viewers about the “impossible situations” in the football world after Gary Lineker was suspended for comparing the government’s language regarding small boats on the English Channel to Nazi Germany: