What do we want from our pundits?

Last Monday my housemate and I stopped rolling midway through a pasta dough to watch in quiet awe as Jamie Carragher sucked air into the side of his mouth with a hissing sound then launched into an eight-minute not-quite-rehearsed-enough monologue about how Liverpool’s Mo Salah was a traitor and a disgrace.

I have long been obsessed with Carragher, and not just because I saw him in real life at Glastonbury last year wearing a “Democracy Manifest” T-shirt and a Liverpool-branded boonie hat he had clearly got in a goodie bag six seasons before.

It is curious that, out of every player who has ever performed in the Premier League and could feasibly go on television and talk with authority about it, he’s the one we’ve ended up seeing the most of. Carragher does Monday Night Football in a knitted shirt and an earpiece and steps over the tactics board in box-fresh white trainers.

He has that squabbling will-they-won’t-they partnership with Gary Neville, that has all of the grammar of banter without actually ever tipping over and becoming fully fun. He lingers on the shoulder of Micah Richards every Champions League night in a grey suit, perennially a yard or two away from Thierry Henry, making some of history’s weirdest jokes.

You remember when he spat at that car, yeah? The excruciating “Not to Malik!” thing he did on CBS? This is our guy? Him? Can no single other defender from 2003 hold a microphone and say things? Have we checked? Who’s got Hermann Hreiðarsson’s number?

Monday night’s rant has already gone triple-platinum in all the group chats I am in – the perfect “Have I ever criticised Mo Salah on the pitch?” / “Well, a couple of weeks ago you said his legs have gone” one-two with Sky Sports presenter Dave Jones guaranteed us that.

But I was personally struck by how strange the entire texture of the bit was: the eerie silence that can only come from being watched by a mute, cardigan-wearing James Maddison; the huge graphic of a metallic liver bird looming red and angry behind him throughout; the bit where Carragher’s earpiece pops out and just dangles there like one of Zig and Zag’s ears; the undeniable “you and two other guys you don’t really know are waiting at the pub for your funny mate to turn up” energy of the whole thing.

In recent years, football analysis on British TV has seemingly focused on two things: “starting conversation”; and a clip that can be uploaded really quickly on to YouTube – and ideally the person saying it is wearing a button-up item of clothing that is entirely devoid of logos.

Monday Night Football is the jewel in the crown of Sky’s hyper-glossy interpretation of a trillion-dollar sport: why is it so often just a man in a jumper looking at his hand to keep checking what he’s mad about this week?

But then what do we, as a viewing public, want from our football coverage? I personally would like just to know what channel or service the game I want to watch is on – each studio, be it Paramount or TNT or Sky Sports, as hallucinatorily similar and 4K brightly lit as the last, your head spinning as you try to figure out where you are, based on whether Michael Dawson is there or not – but that seems impossible.

In many cases, I use the broadcast time dedicated to analysis to do something else entirely – visit the bathroom, or put a load of laundry on, or something – but that feels like an effect not a cause. I want to stay here and talk about the game, but none of the pundits want to play at an interesting enough level.

“What do Sunderland have to do in the second half?” “Well, they’ve got to score, it’s as simple as that.” All right, cheers, thanks.

Listening to a guy who won the Premier League three times say that shouldn’t be less entertaining than whatever my mates are saying on my phone.

Maybe I feel sorry for punditry. I often watch football in a pub and, as soon as half-time rolls around, the audio is cut and five songs are played at a loud volume while a screen shows Theo Walcott silently making hand gestures in front of a panoramic view of the pitch, and I feel a bit bad for him: he did his topknot up fresh just for this. But then I don’t think I’m missing much from him anyway.

Though I never really liked the dinosaurian “he’s got to do better than that, fire and brimstone but make it a bit knackered” shtick of, say, Graeme Souness, I’m not sure the milquetoast “a midfielder you sort of remember is being very, very fair” style that has eclipsed it really works, either.

(I do consider the fact that they made the entire Stick to Football podcast just to paint Roy Keane as a reasonable human being was a red blaring signal of social decline. Let him be grumpy!)

With The Overlap’s Fan Debate, Sky has experimented with getting a lot of fans who collect football shirts in a room to talk and sort of argue with an ex-footballer and that’s fine, I guess, but it always makes me suspect I’m actually quietly being sold a Groupon for a two-night stay at a golf course. And nothing I truly think about A League of Their Own can be confidently published in a family-friendly paper.

But it doesn’t really matter what the show is, or which channel you finally flick on to and find the game: the studio is lit the same, the Tottenham defender (2005-08) talking is basically the same, the hand gestures made next to wrists wearing sports watches are identical, the analysis of the game feels similarly hollow and nothing-y.

Television has taken the temperature of what we all want and told us that it’s basically a bowl of lukewarm Huel and a Jamie Redknapp advert for Skechers. A thought that has haunted me through my bouts of insomnia recently: what if it turns out football is just really, really boring?

But it can’t be that. When Idrissa Gueye got sent off for slapping Everton team-mate Michael Keane the other day against Manchester United – objectively one of the funniest red cards ever given – the cameras barely showed the replay. “This is the best angle we can get,” Gary Neville said, as I squinted at some blurry CCTV footage taken from outside the stadium – you have captured every atom of this game in 4K! Give me the good stuff!

Lucas Paquetá’s red card against Liverpool was off-this-planet ludicrous, and not a single person on mic made a joke about maybe the Premier League should just let him go and play baseball for two years until he calms down.

Though they had their flaws, we have now gone two years without Soccer AM and one without the doomed reboot of Fantasy Football League, and there’s something missing for it.

Why is it that television makes one of my favourite things to do – talk, think and ethereally speculate about football – so lacking in interest and fun?

A personal plea, to whoever out there is listening: can you make some televised football coverage that doesn’t feel like I’m in a conference room being told that “the company is doing really well but there won’t be any Christmas bonuses this year”?

Thanks. Appreciate it.