Leighton James, the former Swansea City and Wales forward, has lost his job as a pundit with BBC Wales “for the foreseeable future” after saying that he hoped Cardiff City would lose their FA Cup semi-final against Barnsley a week on Sunday.

James, who played 88 times for Swansea in a career that included spells with Burnley, Derby County and Queens Park Rangers, made it plain in his column in the South Wales Evening Post that he retains his loyalty to “his” Welsh club. “To see Cardiff in the final would be hard to take for Swansea fans,” he wrote. “So, to be brutally honest, I think I'm behind Barnsley on this one.”

However, James is not the only former top-flight goalscorer to discover this week that punditry has its pitfalls. Paul Merson, the former Arsenal and England playmaker, can expect a word from his employers at Sky Sports after remarks he made about John Coleman, the manager of Accrington Stanley, during coverage of his team's 1-0 defeat by Milton Keynes Dons on Monday.

Merson joked that Coleman should be kept in a cage after the Accrington manager was sent to the stands for the second successive match, but Coleman is considering lodging an official complaint. “I've requested a tape from Sky and if I feel the comments he made are disparaging then I will make a complaint,” he said.

Pundits, though, have been putting their feet in their mouths for as long as there has been punditry, most notoriously in 2004 when Ron Atkinson made derogatory remarks about Marcel Desailly, who was playing for Chelsea at the time, after he thought that the microphones had been switched off.

Players are always claiming to have been misquoted when they open their mouths before engaging their brains - or, these days, to be the victims of mistranslation after revealing their real feelings to media outlets in their native countries. Georgi Hristov, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia striker who once signed for Barnsley, is alleged to have said: “The local girls are far uglier than the ones in Belgrade. Our women are far prettier and they don't drink as much beer.”

Only this year, Lassana Diarra hardly endeared himself to supporters of Portsmouth when he said, only hours after completing a move from Arsenal to Fratton Park: “The people at Portsmouth know I will not spend my life at this club. If I shine, if a really big club wants me, I know already that everything will go well.”

But perhaps the most memorably unguarded comments were those of Douglas Hall and Freddy Shepherd ten years ago when they were Newcastle United directors, to the effect that fans of the club were gullible for buying overpriced replica shirts and that Geordie women were “dogs”. What a shame that the “Arab sheikh” they were talking to in a Spanish lap-dancing bar was an undercover reporter.

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