“Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I do relentless amounts of puns, I’ve got dad joke tourettes, it’s that kind of thing.
“I do it on Match of the Day and I’ve done it for years and I actually ran it by a couple of women friends of mine who are actually real feminists and I said ‘is this OK?’ and they went ‘it’s absolutely fine’.”
Talking to ITV News, he added: “I think what happened is that some people didn’t see the game and didn’t understand the context of the nuance so therefore they just assumed it was some kind of sexist reference when clearly it wasn’t.
“I eventually took it down, not because I was bothered about it because I actually thought it was fine, and practically everyone did, but for those who didn’t see the game I don’t want them to read it the wrong way, so I did take it down for that reason.”
Mark Dolan Tonight airs weekdays from 9pm on GB News.