Fear not, John Terry – even if the Badger had a smoking hot wife, two kids and was a father of the year, he’d hit that…

Your average football fan colloquially uses them in discussion. They are some of the most common sayings down the pub, and even Jamie Redknapp has invented his own. Football clichés are a scourge on society, most often projecting those people who use them as fools with no grasp of common sense, let alone football.

There are particular hackneyed phrases that the Badger detests, and your TB-ridden chum enjoys picking on people who try and adapt them into their frivolous debates against the all-knowing and perfectly faultless Badger (well, perfect apart from the aforementioned traces of the consumption).

Racking his brain for 800 words on the most common clichés, the Badger cannot place them in any sort of inane order, let alone pick which of the many Proverbs for Dummies he hates the most. Many maxims involving Liverpool Merseysiders rile the Badger. One mightn’t think that a badger would have many friends who are Liverpool fans, but being constantly reminded that Mali’s epic comeback versus Angola in the African Cup of Nations was similar to “that magical night in Istanbul” doesn’t exactly rub the Badger up the right way.

It is no coincidence that this first cliché is directly associated with the Badger’s most hated club, and it is their most closet-inhabiting self-loathing fan, the Beeb’s very own Alan Green, who is the next target. Any speech picked up amidst this commentator’s intermittent spitting is usually an uneducated pile of horse porn, for the most part fabricated from his knowledge of the Norn Iron Anti-Taig All Protestants Windscreen Wiper Fluid Premier League.

What the Badger is, paradoxically, trying to portray is that Alan Green is himself a cliché: a lifelong monologue consisting of ridiculous statements inciting conspiracies like, “I bet you Platini loves this result,” and other daft remarks such as “who cares about the UEFA League or Europa Cup?” The world will be a better place when he finally admits his allegiances don’t just lie with Glentoran or Linfield, but with Liverpool.

Getting down to the real clichés and not just the Badger’s most hated football personalities, the Badger is particularly peeved by everyday English phrases like “typical forward’s tackle”, “he’s lost the dressing room” and “at the end of the day”. Please explain to this naïve old fool what possible definition “he’s lost the dressing room” could accurately hold: in recent weeks has longtime amnesia sufferer Rafael Benitez being wandering around the corridors of Anfield, desperately trying to find his mislaid changing room? Similarly, a “typical forward’s tackle” stereotypes all attacking players with the inability to dispossess an opponent for no reason.

Don’t forget, however, the cliché rolled out come win, lose, draw, or general buffoonery: “at the end of the day”. One would wonder what Steven Gerrard does with the hours of his day between 9am and 11pm because according to the Liverscumlians’ captain, everything occurs just before the day ends: “At the end of the day, we need to concentrate more”… “at the end of the day, John Terry is a great guy because it is usually around midday he cheats on his wife”… “at the end of the day, our fans rob our houses when we play away matches”.

A fitting end to an in-depth look at clichés in football would be appraisal of a God walking among us. Men want to be him, women want to be with him. He wears tight trousers to show off his masculine bits. Jamie Literally has literally created a new saying that has lamentably become a common word in most football cliques.

Strutting his stuff on Sky’s Super Mega Awesome Smashing Sunday With Ford football show, Redknapp has obviously misunderstood his primary school teaching on adverbs, and circumvented basic grammar to create his own meaning for a word that is in no way open to interpretation.

With Redknapp’s aversion to detail adding to the overall experience, we should never forget that the ball is “literally” glued to Messi’s boot, while the new football being used in the Premier League this year has the potential to “literally” explode off a player’s foot. Sometimes Jamie’s attention to detail delves too deep, into areas of the game that evade common public knowledge. Your average football fan, for example, could not be expected to know that Ashley Cole had to cut back inside onto his left, because he “literally” hasn’t got a right foot.

Really, where would we be without Jamie Redknapp? The Badger speculates that we would be “literally” sprawled out on the floor, literally dead, literally not breathing, literally soiling ourselves until we were literally covered in it, literally.