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Gary Lineker reacted angrily to what he perceived to be a slight against BBC’s football coverage by Sky Sports News earlier today. Except it wasn’t Sky Sports News at all.

The often smug presenter took offence to a picture posted by an account that he believed belonged to Sky Sports News earlier today, a picture which detailed some of the insults delivered in the direction of Italian striker Mario Balotelli during the BBC’s coverage of Euro 2012.

While there is all sorts of criticism that could be levelled at the Beeb – the lack of the personality of some of their pundits, for a start – this centred on words such as ‘petulant’, ‘liability’, ‘nutter’ and ‘daft’ directed at the Manchester City striker at various stages of the tournament by the BBC analysts.

Only minutes after the picture was posted, Lineker responded with a tweet of his own, which blasted the lack of focus on the compliments paid to Balotelli by Lineker and his cohorts.

Except, as you can see in Lineker's tweet above, it wasn’t Sky Sports News that posted the original tweet, but well-known parody account Sky Sporks News, who describe themselves as ‘The nation's favourite source of football jokes and sporting propaganda. (parody!)’ and have nearly 60,000 followers.

It didn’t take long for people to point out to Lineker the very embarrassing error of his ways and instead of trying to make out that he knew what was going on all along – which is the response we expected – he admitted that he had been had.

Lineker can be entertaining at times on Twitter – his response to Piers Morgan about never having hacked anyone was genius – but like on television, he can also come across as annoyingly smarmy and smug at times.

We dare say he’ll be taking more care in future after this embarrassing yet hilarious episode.