Gary Lineker is many things: The friendly face of condensed football TV highlights; Britain’s most prominent and respected crisp salesman; The scourge of the Daily Mail and Piers Morgan on Twitter; Former footballing great. It is the latter – Lineker’s brilliant football career – with which he seems to be less associated with these days. Despite the fact we all enjoy watching him give Piers Morgan a kicking on Twitter, it really does seem that we have forgotten just how good a footballer Gary Lineker was.

Lineker’s case is strange though. At first glance, there are no iconic goals or celebrations. Nobody talking about this or that Lineker moment. In fact, if you close your eyes and try to picture a famous Lineker football memory, many of us will conjure up the image of Lineker miming ‘Gazza’s tears’ to the England bench at the 1990 World Cup. Indeed, Lineker only really makes cameo appearances in iconic England memories.

But, those World Cup goals. Those 10 World Cup goals really should mean that Lineker is held in higher regard. It is, by all objective measure, a remarkable achievement. Statistics can often be misleading, but the fact that we can view great players’ records, such as Diego Maradona (8 goals, 21 games), Mario Kempes (6 goals, 18 games) and Uwe Seeler (9 goals, 21 games), demonstrates what a feat Lineker’s 10 goals in 12 World Cup games was. He was no Oleg Salenko either; six of Lineker’s World Cup goals came in the knockout phases.

Even with the modern greats, Lineker’s record looks like it will be hard to emulate. Take Cristiano Ronaldo, who is the 17/10 favourite for the Golden Boot with Karamba football betting after scoring four goals in the opening two games. That took him up to seven goals (so far) in his World Cup career. The other modern phenomenon, Messi, has just five in 17 appearances for Argentina. It is probable that neither of those two, both regarded among the greatest goal scorers in history, will catch Lineker in the charts.

Optimistic England fans will, of course, hope that Harry Kane (7/1 currently to be top scorer in Russia) is the man to break Lineker’s record. As it stands, Lineker has at least double the World Cup goals of any other England player, with Geoff Hurst his closest rival on five. Kane, however, has got off to a wonderful start in Russia, but bringing that consistency at a major tournament is a quality that has eluded modern England strikers.

So, why is Lineker not an iconic England player? In the sense that he is not synonymous with the England ‘brand’? Part of the reason might just be the manner of his goal-scoring. The original idea for this article was to rank all 10 of Lineker’s World Cup goals, but on watching them back it becomes clear that they are nearly all the same: A perfectly timed run into the six-yard-box sees Lineker stretch out a leg, often with a defender on top of him. He connects with the ball, usually in a sliding motion. The back of the net ripples.

Of course, some of his goals were penalties and he did score a header in the ‘Hand of God’ match, but by and large Lineker’s goals were similar. A ‘goal-hanger’ is the term Piers Morgan uses to mock Lineker on Twitter, but the former Leicester man wears it as a badge of pride. And, so he should. The timing of those runs, being in the right place at the right time, is a special skill, a certain type of genius. Lineker deserves a bit more credit, not just as a great English player, but as a great World Cup player.