Woke, plus 100%

God, who was that, then? Some total bell end like Laurence ‘Loozza’ Fox? Nigel Farage? Virtually anyone who writes for the Daily Mail? No. It’s Mark Lawrenson talking about the BBC. According to ‘Lawro’, he was axed from his pundity role on the Beeb because it’s ‘woke’. Not just a bit woke, but “top of the woke league”. Not that there is some kind of woke league, or indeed that being woke is actually a very good thing. It clearly hasn’t occurred to him that perhaps the reason he was not offered a new contract was that he was a shit pundit.

I don’t think I was alone in feeling dread when the Radio Five Live announcer said before a commentary, “And with Mark Lawrenson it’s (insert name of commentator)“. It was a classic “Oh shit, no” moment, as I contemplate the grisly prospect of Lawro’s tiresome pun-filled interventions punctuating the game. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if you were a great player, as Lawro unquestionably was, that you’d be a great co-commentator, which Lawro unquestionably wasn’t.

My feeling is that, with the odd clunking exception – Jermaine Jenas, I am looking at you, as well as Danny Murphy – the BBC football pundits are routinely knowledgeable and informative. I enjoy Alan Shearer and Micah Richards’ efforts because I genuinely learn something new or interesting and they make me think. Boring old Lawro just made me want to think about switching off.

It is true that many commentators and pundits move aside before they grow old. There are exceptions, of course, like the late, great Jimmy Armfield, who was as astute a pundit in his seventies as he had been all his life. If Lawro had a quarter of Armfield’s talent as a pundit and broadcaster, he might well still be there, who knows? But whoever it is at the BBC who decides upon contracts clearly thought as many of us did, that he was a dinosaur who made himself extinct and now he has come back as a complete wanker.

Doubtless, Lawro will now disappear down the same rabbit hole as others who routinely use the word woke as a term of abuse, he will adopt a MAGA baseball cap and soon he will be earning a crust alongside his fellow former footballer David Icke in asserting that the world is now being run by lizard people, or simply becoming an anti-vaxxer. Trust me when I say that these are all the same people.

It would be wrong for me to accuse Lawro as a racist because he has made a point of implying things and not saying them. If he’s been axed because he’s an old white man, he believes he has been replaced by a young black woman and she cannot be as great as he is. At best, it’s lazy, casual racism.

Maybe there is something in it? We’ll never know. We’re not arguing on the basis of facts, just what we think. The BBC has history of encouraging folk from BAME communities to work for it, to make the Beeb look a bit more like the rest of the country. If Lawro, or anyone else, thinks recent appointments were tokenism – and I reckon he probably does – then let him name the names of those at the top of the shop, who are all Tories, by the way, who are discriminating against him. He won’t, of course, because he is shooting his mouth of about what he thinks has happened and hasn’t paused to wonder if he is actually the problem.