Frank Lampard

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The Ferdinand-Gerrard-Lampard axis has carried BT Sport through its Champions League campaign in some style, and though it will presumably be hoping that Gerrard’s decision to dip his toe into managerial waters ends with Nevillesque haste, it has so far retained the more essential duo. Lampard also has plans to move into management, but in the meantime approaches his commentating duties with diligence and speaks with confidence and authority.

Pat Nevin

Radio commentators are inevitably less noticeable than those who work on television, partly because we never see their faces and partly because we often give the television our undivided attention but listen to the radio only while driving and/or being loudly instructed by other members of the family to turn on something more interesting instead, ideally involving Camila Cabello. But Nevin is always a good listen and earned additional respect after revealing this year that he was once accosted by a knife-wielding football fan and used a flying fist and the winger’s familiar turn of pace to make good his escape, leaving him only a few rungs below Spider-Man on the crime-fighting ladder.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pat Nevin is always a good listen on Radio 5 Live. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

Gary Neville

Since retiring as a player in 2011 Neville has never been absent from this list and his glorious run is not about to end. It remains puzzling that no rival broadcaster has sought to copy the format that makes the first 50 minutes of Monday Night Football so compelling and illuminating, but though he has started to focus a little too much on furiously criticising footballers whom he spots walking, often but not always Mesut Özil, he remains enlightening before and during matches.

Ian Wright

If there were an award for most improved pundit, Ian Wright would take it. There was a time when he appeared to believe his brand of matey bonhomie was all it would take to indefinitely earn a living out of punditry, and that an absence of actual analysis would go unnoticed amid all the joshing, chuckling and unexpected use of flat caps. This was very much the tactic also used by Alan Shearer, only he stripped away the geniality and headwear to leave something that was neither animated nor insightful nor thermally insulated. Both have managed to reinvent themselves, and Wright – who has never previously been mentioned in our review, not even mockingly – is now something of an up-and-comer.

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Chris Sutton

Curmudgeonly and over-opinionated, Sutton operates as if having consciously decided that the fastest and surest way of standing out amid a heaving morass of aspiring pundits was to aggressively irritate everyone. Sutton has a particular shtick, and it is not to everybody’s liking. Thus when the Mirror ranked every television football pundit in regular action earlier this season, Sutton was at No 37 (out of 39, one place ahead of Garth Crooks and two above Michael Owen). He is, in his way, like a cut-price Robbie Savage, only without the preening narcissism. However, I find him entertaining. So there. “I watch a lot of TV and find some of it extremely tedious and boring because people don’t want to say the things they should be saying,” Sutton says. “I am not always right, but I think it is important to have an opinion.” It certainly helps.

Graeme Souness



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The leaf miner moth presents a serious threat to that most beloved of British trees, the horse chestnut. These tiny mites have attacked one particular breed of tree and done so with such cruel efficiency that it has rendered the future of conkers in Britain tragically uncertain. Meanwhile ash dieback is a fungus that attacks its prey with savage speed, killing juvenile trees with the efficiency of an assassin. In the 1970s Dutch elm disease destroyed millions of elms across the country. So if it can happen to trees, what if some foreign critter crept into the country undetected and started to attack football pundits? Granted, this is scientifically impossible, but go with me here. Let’s say that, as soon as the problem was identified, a house was built within a totally safe exclusion zone but only big enough to house one pundit’s ego. Who would you put inside? I would unhesitatingly send in Souness, whose tactical acumen is strong, who hands out praise and condemnation with even-handed sense and whose range of exasperated facial expressions is second to none.