Who could replace Gary Lineker on Match of the Day?

Just when you thought you couldn’t handle any more depressing news, Gary Lineker has started dropping hints that his days in the Match of the Day presenter’s chair may be drawing to an end. I know. It really puts things into perspective.

‘I’m ancient,’ Lineker said, Aslan-like, on the latest Match of the Day podcast, ‘my time is nearly up.’ The most powerful man at the BBC – and football’s most famous Gary – then seemed to anoint his successor by giving the nod to the endlessly anodyne former Tottenham and Newcastle midfielder Jermaine Jenas.

‘He’s probably drifting toward my role,’ Lineker told presumably astonished co-hosts Alan Shearer and Micah Richards. ‘He’s doing it really well, doing The One Show.’

Will that be enough to see the famous torch passed to Jenas? You’d have to say on the strength of recent evidence – in which Lineker apparently does what he likes and the BBC capitulates – it probably will.