History will record that the 1998 turf wars started when Fats Humphries made a harmless comment about football affiliations one Monday morning while getting his head shaved. The next Saturday, while going about his citizenly duties, he was almost taken out by Ma Hannigan, who was witnessed using a sawn-off quotes book and shouting "this one's from Giggsy".

Fats never made comments about football affiliations again. Nor did he continue to have his head shaved.

This, though, was how it became open season in the column wars, a period so bloody that even solid folks working the legitimate side of the street began to fear for their wellbeing. At least one column asking the GAA to honour the Black and Tans was quietly shelved in The Irish Times newsroom. Fats Humphries, meanwhile, became crazed and began writing about Sport On TV, a flagrant infringement of rival turf.

Anyway, shag the begrudgers, said Fats, there's a war on. And he proceeded to drag Des Lynam out and set about him with a baseball bat. Just as a warning to others.

So why Des Lynam? What has changed to make Des a target?

There was a time when all those little jokes about Des being the Smoothest Mayor which Smoothville had ever seen had some foundation. Even sports hacks came out in a hot flush when they watched him. One little twitch of his silvery moustache and we'd be swooning and palpitating with the blue rinse brigade.

Now, it is not our place to get all huffy about Des Lynam's battles with wrinkle cream and comb-over techniques. Unlike Today FM, we lack the courage to take a fearless stand on the issue of male vanity or the practice of male hair dying. It's just that seven years ago, when this column interviewed Des, he said he had five years left on screen before he starts frightening the kids.

Des, the kids are under the bed whimpering.

Des was a guest on the whimperingly bad McCoist and McCauley show this weekend. The show was recorded in Vicar Street, Dublin, a venue which has attracted more old bores in the space of the last week than Liveline gets in the space of a year.

McCoist can consider himself lucky that it is Des Lynam we are dealing with this week. Ally McCoist, scourge of papes everywhere for a decade-and-a-half, has been condemned to TV hell for his sins, and rightly so. Not since Cromwell have we been made to suffer so much.

Ally's punishment is to spend the rest of his life in the shackles of new lad land. Little winky jokes and nudge nudge references make him the post-modern Jimmy Tarbuck. Suffice to say, a Celtic player would never have done it.

Back to the show. McCoist and McCauley, having dealt comfortably with the intellectual challenges offered by Vinnie Jones and Sarah Cox, saved Des to the end of the show. His seniority and beauty demanded it.

Now, back when Des was passing himself off as genuine matinee idol currency, saving him to the end of a chat show made sense. This was the man who made us pray for rain at Wimbledon so we could savour his suave ad libs as he filled in for the afternoon with anecdote and a better class of blather than we get on RTE.

That was then. Des arrived out of the audience looking like something just dredged up from the Titanic. The shock of white hair was artfully combed over vast acreages of hairless scalp, the best strategic use of a small amount of thatch on view outside of a Fianna Fail ard fheis.

Des immediately proclaimed his Irishness and got a beery cheer for his troubles. We are all sufficiently mature these days to desist from mugging people who wear poppies and to not flinch when English sports journalists patronise us by using the words "black stuff", "priests" and "rosaries" in the first paragraph of any report issued from here.

But Des? Des, whom we have watched cheering on every true blue little Englander from John Barnes to, erm, Greg Rusedski? Does he really have to patronise us with his flimsy Oirishness? Does he really know no better?

McCoist, plucky little blighter that he is, got stuck in with an early tackle. Des, apparently, was the victim of a tabloid kiss-and-tell sting last summer. McCoist reminded Des that he should have stuck to his company on the night of the Iran v USA game during the World Cup: if he had, the fateful sting would never have happened.

We have no interest in hearing anything about Des Lynam's private life, and roundly condemn the rotters who foisted such details on an unsuspecting public. But nothing soured us on Des so quickly as his reaction to the whole business.

People who kiss and tell are just hookers who defer payment, he said, all flushed with anger. Then, bristling with indignation, he got stuck in to the Press Complaints Commission and condemned them for their toothlessness.

Probably he had a point, but what happened to the King of Smooth? Bitter ranting like this was never part of his schtick.

The old Des had class. He didn't stick his mug on the front of wearisome sports trivia books, he didn't plod around the B grade chat show circuit and he didn't host gammy programmes explaining bits of elementary science to dumb-bells. Yet in his autumn Des has done all these things.

He suffers not just from the heartbreak of the ageing process which has robbed him of his debonair charm, but also from the changing nature of the panellist game. Time was when Des was required to spar only with Jimmy Hill. Fencing with Jimmy Hill is the sort of thing a windmill is equipped for.

Now Des has to cope with panellists who know a little about the game and can lay on the smoothness pretty well themselves (not Trevor Brooking. Don't write in.) and he is no longer the eighth wonder of the world by mere virtue of not being a prototype Alan Partridge.

The remainder of the McCoist/McCauley interview was all soft lobs for Des to smash down in his jaded way. We were unimpressed.

Sports presenters are an unfortunate breed. Des was the first on this side of the Atlantic to experiment with irony and wit. He was brave and cutting edge, but sadly it never caught on. We are still getting the same lantern-jawed dullards on the box earnestly selling us the product while the Yanks (what a nation of boobs!) enjoy genuinely bright and funny presenters who can't just talk the talk but can sift the dross just as well.

Des has had his day. His style was faintly imitated by less smooth mortals, but we have settled into an era of Dan Quayle lookalikes presenting sport. We are resigned to it, and crumbling Des only serves to remind us that the best sports people get out early.

Des Lynam, you're time is up. Come in Des Lynam.