"He's Almost Hit it Too Well" – A Rogues Gallery of Football Cliches

Being a football pundit is simultaneously the best and worst job in the world. On the plus side you get paid a ton of money, are provided with a shop window in which you can display your genitals to the nation (thank you, Jamie Redknapp's trousers), and can immerse yourself entirely and indulgently in the beautiful game.

The downside is the inevitable hatred you'll receive on social media from armchair fans (like me), the problem of saying something new about an already overexposed game, and the considerable risk of being bored to death on a panel with Michael Owen (or worse, wishing you were actually dead while working with Robbie Savage).

To survive in this turbulent environment, pundits retreat into a world of meaningless metaphors, careworn clichés, and lifeless platitudes. Sure, there are some good pundits out there. But, by and large, TV and radio is now dominated by ex-professionals who play golf together and whose sole qualification is that they can successfully dress in that douchebag style politely known as smart-casual.

As a form of self-help therapy I've compiled a list of my 11 most hated crap pundit clichés. Why not add to your enjoyment of a nil-nil thriller by playing spot-the-lingo bingo with your pals, or turn it into a potentially fatal drinking game?

This word slipped in a few years ago, around the time that everyone became obsessed with the notion of the Premier League's supremacy. As a word it is an elixir, one that can be used to explain almost anything. The difference between two teams? 'They just had a bit more quality.' That new signing? 'He'll bring a touch of quality to the dressing room.' That box of sweets you got for Christmas? 'Quality Street.' You get the idea.

As with most of the words on this list, in and of itself it isn't meaningless, but its overuse has rendered it so. Yes, some players do have a defter touch, spot more incisive passes and generally have that aura of 'quality,' but as former professionals on big money media deals we should expect pundits to paint us a more detailed picture.

Anything done with simplicity and efficiency can, and is, called clinical. The result: a word robbed of all meaning.

A favourite phrase that became flavour of the month last December following the dismissal of Jose Mourinho by aimless Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. It conjurs up the image of Mourinho walking down endless corridors looking for his players in a manner akin to Spinal Tap searching for a stage.

What it tells us is that the players did not believe in Jose Mourinho anymore. But why? What happens between a manager and his players to cause such a situation? As fans who have most likely never played beyond the confines of a local park we can all guess that someone has 'lost the dressing room', but former players must surely have some greater insight and experience into these power dynamics.

It seems to have calmed down a bit, but there was a time in the 2011-12 season when anytime anyone did anything good they immediately took up residency in the fictional town of 'dreamland' (which for a footballer is probably a cross between Bedford Falls from the film It's a Wonderful Life and Wilmslow in Cheshire).

Unfortunately, as dreamland has fallen away its evil arch-nemesis 'nightmare' has risen, sticking its talons into any negative situation so that the words 'he's having a nightmare,' and variations thereof, are now as ubiquitous in football as a short back and sides.

This one is just really annoying.

Not strictly a lexical issue this one, but more to do with the delivery technique deployed by many pundits, and also popular among footballers in post-match interviews. The trick is to raise your eyebrows, furrowing your forehead and widening your eyes while you speak. This gives the impression that you're either saying something particularly interesting (you're not), or that an unseen burrowing insect has just entered your underpants and you're doing your best to be British about it and carry on regardless. Martin Keown and Steven Gerrard are especially fine exponents of this method; you might say they do it with a touch of quality.

Just as anything to do with size can only be understood in terms of football pitches, so good footballers can only be comprehended via direct comparison with Lionel Messi: Ryan Gauld becomes the Scottish Messi, Marlos Moreno the Colombian Messi, and Joe Cole the Early Learning Centre Messi.

Pundits love hyperbole (more than life itself), and comparing someone to the artful Argentinian gives them a chance to indulge in their favourite pastime. It also means they can later act shocked (furrowing their brows) when yesterday's Messi has a nightmare and turns out to be today's David Bentley.

They didn't. Why? Ex-footballers have an alarming tendency to view their former peers as perfect machines incapable of human error. When errors do occur they sound shocked and issue stock statements like 'he's got to hit the target' instead of discussing how or why mistakes might happen. Or they comfort themselves with robotic talk of fractions such as, 'nine times out of 10 he hits the target from there,' which seems to soothe their mechanical souls.

This need for human perfection is also something they expect from referees, whose mistakes roughly equate with the worst actions of a concentration camp commandant.

Born from the school of thought that anything a famous manager says must be repeated ad-infinitum. When Alex Ferguson uttered this it was humorous and well observed but now, thanks to pundits giving it the kind of energetic overuse they normally reserve for one another's wives, these days it's just irritating.

Stick this alongside Jose Mourinho referring to himself as 'a special one,' Kevin Keegan's infamous 'love it if we beat them,' rant, and Bill Shankly's more than a matter of life and death quip in the pile of things we don't need to hear ever again.

From the desk of Andy 'bleedin' obvious' Townsend comes this piece of paradoxical punditry. Supposedly it explains how a shot didn't end up in the net, but swap it into any other sport and you'll soon see what a load of old bollocks it really is. How about 'He's almost run that race too fast.' Or maybe, 'She's almost hit that serve too well.'

You might even say, 'He's almost made that punditry too meaningless.' And you'd be right.

@andersonstuff