Football pundits to make you reach for the remote
Most sports fans will have their preferred football pundits but it’s the annoying ones that get people talking – usually in anger.
Just weeks into the latest season, the following football pundits may already have you reaching for the off button.
Martin Keown
The former Arsenal centre-back is out on his own for terrible punditry. Football is called ‘The Beautiful Game’ but you can’t escape that image of Keown snarling at Ruud van Nistelrooy whenever he attempts to put his point across. Keown’s words come out of his mouth like he’s not expecting any of them. By the time he’s finished, he’s not sure what he’s said and whether it made any sense. Answer – it didn’t.
When paired with Jonathan Pearce in the commentary box it’s the signal to mute the volume, start drinking to numb the pain and supply your own analysis of the big game.
Chris Sutton
If you look up the word ‘morose’ in the dictionary, chances are you’ll see a picture of this former Norwich and Chelsea striker. There’s absolutely no change in the intonation in Sutton’s delivery, except to get even angrier. Sutton once pulled out of an England B squad and it’s easy to see why his management career never truly took off either. The difference between equally angry football pundits such as Roy Keane, is that Keane raises good points.
‘Clem’
This is the moniker given to Mark Clemmit, who most Saturdays has a role of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ on BBC Sport’s Final Score programme. Regularly asked to tell us what’s happened in the Football League – while standing next to all the results on-screen. ‘Clem’ duly recites them again, off his bit of paper. This role is typical of football media not taking anything but the Premier League seriously. Not sure what he brings to the table that a bloke in the pub couldn’t stand there and do.
Owen Hargreaves
Never has a pundit overdone the superlatives quite like Hargreaves. But my biggest bugbear is his constant reference to a teams’ OFFense and DEfense. These letters are emphasised and spoken as though we’re watching sport from the US. Hargreaves was born in Canada but for UK football, just stick to UK words and pronunciations please?
Danny Mills
As one of many football pundits on radio, Mills is mainly heard rather than seen. Once said Luis Suarez should be locked up forever after a bite. Provides plenty of aggressive soundbites but little insight, proof there really is a job for anyone in football punditry.
And one of the lesser spotted football pundits… Andy Townsend
To be fair, Townsend doesn’t irritate as much as he used to. But that’s because he’s not on TV as much. Notably, he was the Townsend behind Townsend’s Tactics Truck on ITV highlights show The Premiership, which ran from 2001-2004.
While he did offer some interesting nuggets, it was his punditry clichés that really stuck. Indeed, such was the effect these clichés had on football fans, he achieved strange cult-like status with the Andy Townsend bingo game entertaining fans on Twitter.
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