Match of the Day is back and, for the first time in a quarter of a century, without Gary Lineker. That’s the good news. Saturday night’s anchorman, Mark Chapman, is so much better than his smug, virtue-signalling predecessor. Perhaps it’s because he’s a professional broadcaster rather than an ex-player. This means he asks questions that fans want to hear answers to, rather than share some anecdote about when he was playing the game.

However, not even this could save MotD’s return from being car crash TV. No matter how good Chapman is as a host, there remains a problem: Wayne Rooney. Now carrying even more timber than he did in his playing days, he sat rigidly in his seat like a man facing a firing squad.

Great footballers do not always make great pundits (nor do bang average ones such as Jamie Redknapp and Robbie Savage) but are often hired because they have played the game at the highest level. Not unreasonably, one would expect them to be able to provide some kind of insight into the mind of the professional player, how managers work and so on. But the BBC would have got more out of Mickey Rooney than Wayne Rooney, who is being paid an estimated £800,000 of licence-fee money. He was a great........

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