Unlike any other facet of football – from playing to coaching, commentating to hard print journalism – there has never been a golden age of punditry. Some may stake a claim for Clough and Allison back in the day but in truth they trolled verbal-tweets for the cameras forty years ahead of their time. As for the Hills and Hansens of the nineties they alienated rather than informed, their otherwise solid contribution to the artform looked back on with rose-tinted spectacles due to the dumbing-down that followed after.
There has never been a golden age because it’s a discipline that lends itself best to biased opinion and ego while allowing the worst practitioners to settle a few scores along the way. It’s a discipline where thoughtful insight gets shouted down by forthright attention-seeking. In fact, when placed under a microscope, it’s hard to figure out why it’s needed at all.
Yet there can be little argument that even by punditry’s traditional low standing it has fallen face-first into a cesspool of nonsense and noise of late. We didn’t ask for the five ‘experts’ below to pollute our airwaves and we deserve much, much better.
Paul Merson
The only logical conclusion as to why this mess of a human being is allowed to slowly decompose into a mush of strangulated vowels before our very eyes is because Sky wanted to prepare us for the emergence of Donald Trump. While the rest of the world has been rendered dumbstruck by a psychopathic man-baby being given the keys to the Oval Office, Soccer Saturday viewers have witnessed a former player who is unable to pronounce words or names and has less knowledge of the game than a freshly clipped toenail having his opinion sought on Pep Guardiola’s tactical strategies.
In comparison the Donald becoming the most powerful man in the free world is small-fry.
Robbie Savage
This poodle in a scarf is another who requires a far-fetched theory to explain his prominence. Unless Savage is an avant-garde artist undertaking a subversive project to illustrate the futility of a profession then all hope is lost.
Why do I suspect this to be the case? Because the highly decorated midfielder wilfully reduces his role to paint-by-numbers simplicity, dispensing with any actual substance whatsoever. He reveals its pointlessness; exposes punditry for the con that it is. In Savage-world something is either ‘brilliant’ or a ‘disgrace’; no in between because that would require a degree of insight and certainly no explanation as to why he has chosen one extreme over the other. In truth, most of the time he doesn’t need to as he sticks rigidly to stating the bleedin’ obvious. That amazing last-ditch tackle? Brilliant. That six-yarder blazed over the bar? He needs to have a word with himself.
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By this measure I’m a food critic for giving a thumbs up to the perfectly grilled bacon I had this morning but decreeing the burnt toast was terrible. Give me a column in a national paper.
Elsewhere if a team is doing well, he says they are doing well. If they’re struggling he lambasts them using one of the three negative words he has in his limited vocabulary. For this he has gained the reputation for being outspoken.
As Johnny Rotten once asked, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Danny Mills
Even the Shredded Wheat-haired buffoon Mark Lawrenson had his fans, no doubt aware that his entire knowledge of players was sourced from a dog-eared copy of Match magazine left in a dentist’s waiting room yet still endeared to his world-weary dad-quips.
It is, however, virtually impossible to imagine there is a single, sane, non-dribbling individual out there who champions Danny Mills’ cause. Seriously ask around and win a prize because locating any member of the British public who would compliantly choose to hear the bitter, dull tones of this bitter, dull man as he grumbles out his bitter, dull thoughts is like a fixed Where’s Wally competition where there is no Wally.
The BBC is surely aware that even Mills’ reflection scowls back at him but unpopularity has worked well for them in the past. Here though, they have made a big miscalculation. Being universally disliked is not enough to prompt social media engagement; we have to also care – even slightly – what is being said by that person.
Jamie Redknapp
Flash suited and with legs so far apart you can see he’s due a colonoscopy Redknapp utters words that evaporate into irrelevance before they’ve even reached the screen. There is no pundit – other than the comedy turns like Dwight Yorke – who openly display more bias towards their former clubs than Little Prince Spiceboy and you can add regular sniping at any club who has previously slighted his ol’ fella too. Which would all be rather annoying were it not for the fact that we all collectively fall into a stupefying trance when he speaks as we await someone who knows more about football than we do to pipe up.
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