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Should football pundits be axed to save journalists’ jobs?

I don’t know whether Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford is a football fan, but this blog post calling for star presenters such as Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen to be sacked in order to save the jobs of BBC journalists strikes me as brave and thereby worthy of a wider audience.

The feeling that highly-paid ex-sportsmen and women are being taken on to do jobs that might once have been done by trained journalists has been around a long while, although it should not be forgotten that some of our most revered former sports commentators – Dan Maskell for instance – were themselves former players.

But the question assumes a new urgency in these straitened economic times when journalists are facing the loss of their jobs. As Dominic says: "There must be dozens of talented sports journalists who could do what Lineker and Hansen do for a fraction of the cost."

What do you think?