The BBC will go ahead with Saturday’s Match of the Day – but the programme is set to be 20-minutes long with no commentary.
Gary Lineker has been stood down from his role as Match of the Day presenter after criticising the UK government’s new asylum policy.
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And it has had a huge knock-on effect, with fellow pundits Alan Shearer, Ian Wright, Micah Richards and Alex Scott all taking themselves off duty in solidarity.
Even the commentators have unanimously agreed to withdraw from their posts around the grounds on Saturday, leaving the Match of the Day broadcast threadbare.
It had been suggested that producers of the show could use the Premier League’s global commentary feed.
But The Athletic have since reported that they will not be able to do so as the BBC do not have the rights.
It threw the scheduling of the program, set to go ahead at 10:30pm on Saturday night, into fresh jeopardy and the BBC considered scrapping it entirely.
But they they insists the broadcast will go ahead without any punditry, commentary or interviews, reducing it to 20 minutes.
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It follows the BBC’s decision to suspend Lineker following a tweet in which he compared the language used by the UK government in their new asylum policy to that of Germany in the 1930s.
The resulting backlash from BBC employees has seen TV shows Football Focus and Final Score axed, while much of Radio 5 Live’s football coverage has been abandoned.
And the BBC have had to apologise for the lack of sports coverage on Saturday.
A statement from the corporation read: “The BBC will only be able to bring limited sport programming this weekend and our schedules will be updated to reflect that.
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“We are sorry for these changes which we recognise will be disappointing for BBC sport fans.
“We are working hard to resolve the situation and hope to do so soon.”
But while chaos reigns at the BBC, talkSPORT has got you covered.
Having picked up the slack on Saturday after most of Radio 5 Live’s football coverage was binned off, we are launching ‘Game of the Day’ at 10.30pm tonight.
We’ll have every single Premier League game dissected, analysed and comprehensively covered… with a cheeky talkSPORT twist.
That includes our live commentary games, Bournemouth vs Liverpool and Tottenham vs Nottingham Forest.
And, of course, there will be no censorship of opinion on our airwaves… not when we have Simon Jordan in the house.
The show will be hosted by Sam Matterface, featuring punditry from ex-Chelsea defender Scott Minto, with more details to come.
Tune into talkSPORT from 10:30pm tonight for ‘Game of the Day’ as we look back on today’s Premier League action.
Listen on DAB, the TalkSPORT APP, ask your smart speaker to play TalkSPORT or watch live on the TalkSPORT YouTube page.
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