After an alleged gouging incident in a League fixture in the 1994-95 season, the accused front row forward waxed indignant, protesting that he was known to one and all as the 'Gary Lineker of rugby football.' While this provoked considerable hilarity, given the player's known proclivities, it said far less about him than about Gary Lineker. No other player in soccer, perhaps in any sport, has had a higher reputation for sportsmanship - for true and blameless personal integrity.
It's hard, in fact, to think of any other sportsman whose clothes that rugger player would have tried to don. In essence, integrity like Lineker's is intensely personal. But it communicates itself to others in any kind of team and is an essential element in leadership. Without integrity, there's no trust and therefore you can't have credibility - the foundation on which all leadership skills are built. But integrity is also the foundation of individual achievement. The magic words come from Polonius in Hamlet: 'to thine own self be true.'
In Lineker's case that Shakespearean truth extends to admitting that, in terms of natural ability, he was not the most gifted footballer who ever played for England. He lacked the sublime touch of the great naturals: he lacked the flair and daring of those who struck their goals from afar. Yet his tally of 48 equalled Bobby Moore's England record and proved, beyond doubt, that Lineker was among the most clinical and efficient scorers in football history, home or abroad.
The origins of this prolific goal-scoring ability, according to Lineker, are a slight mystery even to him. As a youngster, Lineker was superbly quick, an excellent sprinter who caught the eye of one or two athletics scouts. But only football caught Lineker's own attention when at Leicester Boys Grammar School - and one aspect of the game in particular: scoring goals was what inspired and excited him, and drove him on to his achievements. The exterior stayed famously calm, but inside, 'even as a young lad it was scoring goals that excited me. I just had this hunger to score goals - that's all I wanted to do.'
Lineker's football apprenticeship began at Leicester City, cleaning boots, washing kit, helping out on the ground. Honest and unassuming, he never believed he would make it even to the City first team. His chance came at 18, when he played a handful of games out on the wing. That reflected the club's appreciation of the youngster's speed, but the position also spoke of his lack of touch and ball control. Lineker had a clear appreciation of his own strengths and weaknesses, however - and that's the foundation, in sports and management alike, of both integrity and success.
The great asset, of course, was sheer speed, reinforced by basic coaching in sprint training. But Lineker was also beginning to recognise his ability to anticipate correctly where space would appear in the penalty box. The major weakness was touch - striking the ball at the right time with the right degree of force. That was still letting him down. So in his early Leicester years (he played for the club between the ages of 18 to 25), Lineker devoted endless hours to developing this vital attribute. The pursuit of excellence became a theme of his footballing career.
At each training session he would concentrate on trying to improve his first-time touch on the ball, watching and analysing players with greater skills and seeking to imprint these on his own play. Lineker has never been one of the assiduous and obsessive trainers; it's another mark of integrity to prefer quality to quantity. Quality training duly paid off at Leicester: he broke into the side permanently and became a goal-socring sensation - reaching a century of goals in only 215 appearances.
Not surprisingly, he was eventually snapped up by Everton, where his goal output was even more remarkable - 57 matches, 40 goals. After just one season with the Liverpool club, he became an international in 1984, winning the first of what became 80 caps before he retired from international football eight years later. Stardom came very early in this distinguished career. Going with England to the 1986 World Cup in Mexico as a relative unknown, the 26-year old Lineker returned from the tournament as its leading goal scorer, world-famous, an overnight sensation.
But there is nothing overnight about such achievements. In almost all cases (as business biographies usually confirm), big personal breakthroughs reflect long years of preparation - like the hard and thoughtful training at Leicester as Lineker the apprentice developed his skills, or the rapid absorption of new lessons in the first year at Everton. Typically, Lineker also credits chance: in the World Cup, he recalls, the ball ran for him. But you need more than the run of the ball to score a hat-trick in the world's premier tournament - and to add further goals in every match.
Lineker's relentless work on his touch was paying off. As always, his pace left defences floundering, too. But the ball service received from his colleagues in a side of very experienced and well-drilled players was also a decisive factor. Lineker was their spearhead, and he knew it. But he also knew (as many players would not have done) that leading all the world's players in scoring World Cup goals wasn't enough. Integrity takes in not only uprightness, but wholeness and honesty. Being honest about yourself is its foundation-stone.
Retaining his objectivity wasn't made easy by the inevitable public adulation. Lineker, instantly recognisable and hugely popular, was feted wherever he went. He moved from Everton to the cauldron of football-mad Barcelona. The new recruit arrived as a hero, carrying immense expectations - the fans naturally expected a stream of goals. Lineker, however, stayed honest and level-headed through all this attention and adoration: stardom hadn't made him any less aware of his shortcomings, or of how much his all-round game needed improvement.
Emulating the best of expatriate business managers, Lineker immersed himself in the language, culture and life of Barcelona. His time there with his wife Michelle widened the experience of life and football alike for these children of Leicester: born, bred and married there. As a player, he believes, his learning curve reached its peak in the Catalonian city. He experienced man-to-man marking and the sweeper system for the first time - techniques literally foreign to the English football of the day.
In the high-pressure and highly skilled environment of Spanish football, Lineker needed to learn new techniques of acquiring space: his touch had to improve dramatically as well. How does a super-star set about improving? Lineker found a simple and straightforward answer. He studied the great players around him, above all Hugo Sanchez - a man for whom he had enormous admiration, not just as a goal scorer, but as a genius in making time for himself, for creating space for both himself and other players.
Lineker also watched as much football as possible on TV, studying the movement, the lines of running, and the use of speed adopted by successful forwards in this new playing environment. His open mind and honest appraisal of his own qualities left him free of arrogance and able to learn from others. That's a crucial ability in sport as in management: yet in both fields, and in most other walks of life, many people find it hard to accept their own limitations and to transcend them by learning improved skills from associates who are more adept.
By now, managers have mostly learnt that they should be coaches: but they have been slower to accept that they also need coaching themselves. Without that acceptance, not only is your ability stuck, like a fly in amber, but you cannot then urge others to train and learn without displaying an obvious lack of integrity. Lineker had the humility you require to be great. Sheer pragmatism reinforced the internal drive for improvement. What he did was common sense: he wanted, not simply to adjust to the new environment, but to extract the greatest possible personal benefit from the move to Barcelona.
That early, insatiable goal-hunger demanded no less. To score more goals, he had to overcome his playing limitations and develop experience of the Spanish field formation. Intelligent business managers do an honest SWOT analysis on their firms, asking what are our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats - and asking the same questions about themselves and the competition. Likewise, Lineker observed and digested the strengths of the players around him in the intense and claustrophobic Spanish atmosphere, and also analysed their weaknesses.
His reward (and that of the Barcelona fans) was 54 goals from 140 matches between 1986 and 1989. Lineker returned to the World Cup stage in Italy in 1990, the year he became England's captain. In his own mind, he was a far better player than in Mexico. His experience was much greater, combining the lessons of Continental football with the hard physical patterns of the English league game. Now a universally feared striker, he again proved to be England's deadliest finisher. His equalising goals against Germany in the semi-finals gave hope to millions of English fans - hopes dashed by defeat in the penalty shoot-out.
An older and wiser footballer, Lineker returned to Britain and Tottenham Hotspur as a super-star, and thus also a highly marked man. He had distilled all his lessons into the basic art of scoring goals. He was on the field to finish movements for his team, to put the ball into the net. That's a very elementary viewpoint. But this simple desire to score gave Lineker his focus and developed the end-result he sought: 'I was on the field to score goals, so I saw no reason for running back and wasting my energy defending in our own half.'
Rather, he needed 'to save all my energy for making sharp, incisive runs around the box in order to score those goals.' Many strikers, he says, are less disciplined and waste valuable time and effort in trying to defend, rather then finishing their side's moves by scoring. Lineker directed total mental and physical alertness towards seizing his scoring opportunities. He couldn't best serve his side by running up and down the field, alternating between defence and attack. All his attention was focused on attack - on the penalty area.
This intense focus played a part in building the image of a squeaky-clean player of deep personal integrity. Never sent off, never booked for any offence on the field, Lineker simply saw no point in reacting to fouls or attacking his attacker. How would that help? Fierce reaction, lashing out at the player who fouled you, didn't serve your purpose in playing. On the contrary, it ruined your concentration. Forcing a free kick, on the other hand, was doing your job, creating an opportunity for the team. Lineker's best policy was to get off the floor and move to a position where he might capitalise on the opening.
Many people would see Lineker's restraint as unnatural. How can you not react angrily when some dangerous, illegal footballing thug cracks your legs from beneath you? Wouldn't you have to be some emotionless, unflappable robot to keep calm? Not according to the American psychologist, Dr.Wayne W.Dyer. According to him, anger is a choice which you don't have to make - and shouldn't: 'Anger gets in the way. It is good for nothing...anger is a means of using things outside yourself to explain how you feel.'
In other words, your abuse and retaliation won't stop the fouling player from fouling again - and certainly can't prevent the foul that's already happened. Anger might well 'immobilise' you, though: and the last thing you want in a game is an immobilised athlete. Would getting angry improve Lineker's ability to score goals? That was his only objective. It required unbroken focus and concentration on his own game - how to draw defenders away from another striker, how to dummy and feint to create space himself. Where would the next ball come from? Where might it be deflected?
Lineker wanted always to be half-a-yard ahead of the opposition, which meant that he couldn't let himself be distracted by foul play. Of course, he felt like reacting at times. But luckily that only happened when he was actually injured. He couldn't get up, anyway: and by the time he'd been restored, the flash of anger had passed. That helped to create and prolong the myth of the unflappable, saint-like Lineker. He does indeed have a very calm and even temperament. It isn't easy to make him lose his temper. But his demeanour when provoked on the field was also entirely logical.
Is breaking into shouting, aggressive fury a behaviour compatible with integrity? As Dyer says, 'the expression of anger is indeed a healthier stance than suppressing it. But there is an even healthier stance - not having the anger at all.' Many players use the negative emotion of anger for wholly negative purposes. To quote Dyer again, 'You can excuse losing or poor performance with a simple fit of temper.' But that doesn't help you to win games.
The angry manager is a bad manager, who has lost control of both means and ends. It was Lineker's ability to keep control of both what he was doing and why, to be a whole player at all times, that raised him above the norm of England strikers. He was no robot - no unthinking machine that managed to jab the ball over the line from a yard out - but a creative, deeply thoughtful sportsman. Nobody understood the penalty box better: which lines of approach to use, which angles to take, which areas to exploit to attain his goal (or rather goals).
Few footballers have ever used the space available to such great effect, or made chances look so simple - though the simplicity actually arose through sharp awareness and great anticipation. Even fewer footballers have been able to conduct their careers with such dignity and poise, or to cope better with success, or to sustain their achievement over so long a career. In his 139-appearance service with Spurs (including a winning FA Cup Final in 1991, and ending in 1992), Lineker scored 80 goals - a strike rate of 58%.
That percentage was better than Lineker achieved in his years with Leicester City as a young player, and was only bettered in the phenomenal two years with Everton. When he left British football in 1992, aged 32, Lineker went off to the Nagoya club in Japan. He left behind him a record that was remarkable in athletic terms and unblemished by any hint of foul play or misconduct. Maybe that should be regarded as the norm in professional sport. But career-long demonstrations of ethical conduct are uncommon in sport - and for that matter in business. They shouldn't be.
Integrity, though, isn't a halo worn only by saints. It embraces practical necessities that managers need just as much as sports players. They include:
1. Knowing at all times what is expected of you - and what you expect of yourself
2. Knowing what your true resources are - and how to enhance them
3. Being aware of the opposition - and outperforming competitors by superior quality of preparation and performance
4. Experimenting, innovating and analysing success - to keep ahead, not just for the present, but into the future
5. Being true to yourself - standing up for your beliefs and for your team fellows.
Above all, people with integrity set the standards and, because of that, are always respected. Whether they are captains or players, chief executives or second tier managers, they can't manage well without that attribute. Gary Lineker had only a brief spell as appointed leader - and the captain of an English soccer side has limited influence compared to the team manager. Throughout his career, though, he led by example. That can be done by anybody at any level: and integrity achieves goals. Not 322 of them, perhaps, but more than enough.
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