Aaron Ramsdale is taking the goalkeeping situation at Arsenal with good grace

HE hadn’t been drinking as he was driving, so we must assume Jamie Carragher knew exactly what he was doing in 2018 when he decided the best way to deal with a bit of banter from a 14-year-old girl was to lean out of his car window and gob out a big ball of stringy spit.

He later explained how horrible the shame of this was for him, briefly losing his spot on Sky Sports. “Even though we’re in the public eye, we’re not the royals, Beckham, big stars you read on the front page,” he said. “When it’s you, everywhere I went I felt like people were looking at me.”

No doubt they were looking at him; stopping to gawp at a man who hocked a loogie at a kid and her Dad just because his team lost to Manchester United.

It’s all saliva under the bridge now of course and Sky’s market researchers must have found a survey somewhere that says you – yes, you reading this, the general public – wanted him back on our screens to provide thrilling analysis of the match you thought you were going to enjoy.

As he hates it when people look at him during a difficult patch, you might wonder if he could have been kinder during the north London derby on Sunday. The best he could say about Aaron Ramsdale’s magnanimous applause for a save by his replacement David Raya: “I thought it was like the Oscars, and they start clapping and smiling for the other person… I was laughing when I saw that. He’s absolutely devastated with that really.”

We could dwell on the irony that Sky were having a pop at somebody for allegedly playing to the cameras, when they were the ones keeping a lens permanently fixed on Ramsdale. But let’s return to ol’ Phlegmy Catarrhigher, who couldn’t have been clearer here. He just said it: he was laughing at a man for being devastated.

In fact, Ramsdale is dealing with this unusual situation with grace, unlike the man cackling at how upset he may be.

Lest not forget, the spitbot was so irate at the professional wind-up traders on Talk Sport in 2007 – those radio anglers with a never-ending supply of obvious bait – that he himself rang up and started remonstrating with Adrian Durham that he should come to Liverpool’s training ground and say the same things about bottling an international career.

The trouble is that the man with the golden mucus, on both Sky and CBS, sets himself up as a man who likes a joke. The absence of any real insight for viewers means he has gone down that other route: if in doubt, guffaw.

Nobody, of course, can outrun Micah Richards on this score but there’s a golden rule to punditry in 2023 – namely if you laugh loud enough nobody will notice you’ve not got much to say. You’ve got to be able to take it if you spit it out though.