Is Mark Lawrenson the worst pundit in football history?

For a highly-paid football pundit, Mark Lawrenson doesn’t half get a lot of things wrong.

Every week, the BBC website runs a feature in which their “Football Expert” Lawrenson goes up against a celebrity in predicting what will happen in the 10 Premier League matches.

The former Ireland defender’s selections don’t seem to be based on anything other than who he likes. Hilariously, he didn’t pick Liverpool to lose one game in the whole of the 2016-17 season.

Had his predictions come true, then Jurgen Klopp’s Reds would have won the Premier League title with 92 points, 27 wins and 11 draws from their 38 games. Lawrenson was just the 16 points, six defeats and three league places out.

He then repeated the trick in 2017-18, another big fat zero in the losses column with 23 wins and 15 draws leaving Liverpool in fourth place. And guess what? So far this campaign, he hasn’t predicted Liverpool getting beaten either. That would be a 97 game unbeaten run. We’ll have some of what Lawrenson is smoking, please.

With Lawrenson having made his name at Anfield, it perhaps should come as little surprise that he wants to believe Liverpool could be only the third team in the 130 year history of English football to go a season unbeaten. And then do it again the next year. And then the next.

What’s more surprising is the ire with which Lawrenson treats Brighton, another of his former clubs. Albion fans know that Lawrenson doesn’t care much for us, always preferring to talk about his time at Anfield or his spell with hometown team Preston North End when reflecting upon his glittering career.

That’s despite the fact he made over 150 appearances for the Seagulls, helped Alan Mullery’s side become the first in Albion history to win promotion to the top flight and is considered by many supporters to be the most talented player in the club’s history.

Lawrenson might try to airbrush the fact he was a Brighton player in the late 1970’s and he might have a complete indifference to us now, but his predictions when it comes to the Albion are nearly as ridiculous as believing Liverpool could go two-and-a-half-seasons without a defeat.

Plenty of pundits took a panning last season from some of the more sensitive elements of the Amex faithful for predicting Brighton would be relegated. Paul Merson in particular got a lot of abuse.

That was harsh. Of course a newly promoted side playing the first season of Premier League football with only one first team regular – Glenn Murray -with experience of top flight football would be predicted to struggle. The bookies thought so too. Anyone not wearing blue and white tinted glasses could understand that point of view – it’s sensible and logical punditry.

Lawrenson’s predictions of doom and gloom for Chris Hughton’s side smack of something more. Last season, he had us down as winning just four games and collecting only 25 points. Remarkably, in Lawrensonland, that was enough to avoid relegation with Swansea City, Watford and Huddersfield Town all dropping into the Championship.

Back in the real world, Brighton survived the drop comfortably with a 15th placed finish and some shrewd summer signings such as Bernardo and Martin Montoya meant that the Albion were hardly mentioned in most pundits predictions for those who would struggle in 2018-19.

Not Lawrenson though. If anything, he believes that Brighton are even worse this season than he thought we were last. He has predicted just two wins so far for the Albion and has us languishing in 18th place in his table with 11 points and a goal difference of -22. We’ve got over double the points total that the BBC’s “Football Expert” reckons we should have and are 17 goals better off.

In the Albion’s 59 Premier League games to date, Lawrenson has predicted we will a grand total of six times. The actual number – 16. Surely one man can’t be so thick as to so be so wrong in the face of overwhelming evidence that actually says this current Brighton squad aren’t bad my Premier League standards.

If Lawrenson is genuinely that thick, then he must qualify as the worst football pundit in history. And if he isn’t that thick and is simply letting some irrational dislike of the Albion cloud his judgement, then that also makes him the worst football pundit in history. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on the BBC’s “Football Expert”.

Anybody want to take a guess at what he’ll predict for Brighton v Liverpool this Saturday?