Once upon a time, at the end of a long and wearisome day, Desmond Lynam flagged down a London taxi. As he flopped into the seat, collecting his papers and searching for his spectacles, the cabby stared at him through the driver’s mirror. Eventually, he addressed his passenger. “All right,” he said. “Give us a clue.” Lynam smiled, and did his best to blush. “Well,” he began: “Grandstand, Match of the Day?” The driver shook his head. “Olympic Games, World Cup finals?” Another shake. “Grand National?” suggested Lynam. Then, more desperately: “Countdown?” The driver turned and looked over his shoulder. “Look, mate,” he said. “I just want to know where you’d like me to take you.”

As a modest man, Lynam has frequently told the story against himself. But as a realist, he was surely surprised by the driver’s failure to recognise him. For Lynam was famous in a way that exceeds mere celebrity. At the peak of that fame, he introduced tens of millions of people to the best that sport can offer, and he did it with wit and great style. Indeed, there was a time when it seemed that they couldn’t start an Olympics or a World Cup until Des had said his piece to the nation. At the peak of his fame, Lynam was effectively as important as the people whose deeds he described.

And then something remarkable happened. Football happened. The billions which Sky was pouring into the Premier League started to turn even mundane performers into full-blown tycoons. No longer were the Lynams of sports journalism elevated to stardom by their shrewd, faintly ironic tones. Instead, those responsible for TV coverage found themselves some competent readers of autocue, supported them with a few passably articulate old pros, pointed a clutch of cameras at the whole affair and left the rest to the players. Voila! A new age of televised sport had dawned.

The old hands of television deplored the transformation. Journalists had been replaced by hucksters who were not covering a sport but selling a product. Criticism was out, superlatives were mandatory, and interviews now began with the words: “How pleased were you...?” It was all a long, long way from Lynam. Times have changed, said the old ones, and not for the better. I recall one producer reflecting that the golden age was dead, that artists had given way to the accountants, that the medium would never recover.

Ah, that golden age! For those of us in newspapers, it was a strangely familiar refrain. When circulations were measured in multiples of millions and the popular sports pages were decorated by the phrases of Peter Wilson and Desmond Hackett, the ancients told us that such times would never come again. And, in a sense, they were right. Writing at a time before television took control of sport, the giants of the profession described events that few had seen, and set the sporting agenda with the ferocity of their views.

No shared enthusiasm

Hackett was regarded by the Daily Express as the answer to Wilson. A roguish, twinkling, lovable Lancastrian with a splendid line in self mockery, Hackett was perhaps the last man in England to own a brown bowler, which he would threaten to eat if his forecasts proved false. Unlike Wilson, he enjoyed football but described it with tongue firmly in cheek. I once offered him some players’ “quotes” after a match at Arsenal’s Highbury Stadium. He scanned them politely. “Many thanks, my old commander,” he said. “But I might have to liven them up a bit.” It was Hackett who allegedly defined the art of popular journalism thus: “You get an idea and sort of draw the facts towards it.”

They had their small vanities, of course. On his frequent travels, Wilson would occasionally strike the pose of the Englishman Abroad. Arriving in New York to cover a Joe Frazier fight, he was presented with a baseball cap and instructions to wear it at ringside. Wilson exploded in a spluttering tirade. He had never worn such an object in his life and he was damned if he was going to break his habit. The promoter, a patient man, explained: “When the riot breaks out after the fight, and security starts cracking heads, they gotta know which heads they can crack. You get me, Peter?” That evening, Wilson sat at ringside, smiling self-consciously. At his neck was an Old Harrovian tie, on his head a baseball cap.

For his part, Hackett just wanted people to know he was around. When he went on foreign assignments, he would often have himself paged at the airport: “Would Desmond Hackett of the Daily Express please come to the information desk?” Passengers would nudge each other as he came striding forward to accept the planted call, pointing him out, fitting the face to the famous name. It was not only harmless but also strangely endearing, yet it revealed a hankering for celebrity that newspapers alone could never really satisfy.

The temptation, then as now, was to reach for the outrageous, to shout in order to make oneself heard. Henry Rose, Hackett’s Express colleague in the North, was a controversialist, a man of whom it was said: “His predictions were noted for being more consistently bold than accurate.” But he had a following greater than he knew. Rose died in the Munich air crash of 1958, which claimed the lives of so many of Manchester United’s fine young footballers and the reporters who followed them. They brought Rose home for burial, and vast crowds turned out to pay their respects on the six-mile route from the Express building in Great Ancoats Street to the Southern Cemetery. They may not have known the sound of his voice, or the tilt of his face. But just as they felt they had known Matt Busby’s young players, so they believed they knew Henry Rose and all the other men who had described their performances.

En route to Munich: Picture includes survivors Ted Ellyard and Peter Howard (both Daily Mail photographic staff ); Bert Whalley (Man Utd coach), and Henry Rose (Daily Express), both killed. George Follows (Daily Herald), who also died, is on the far right.

For many of the newspaper elders, one of the most poignant moments of the Old Trafford 50th anniversary commemoration in February was the sight of familiar names being flashed up on the boards surrounding the pitch. Alongside Duncan Edwards, Tommy Taylor, Roger Byrne and the rest of the fallen, there appeared the names of the journalists who had died with them. You could almost hear the old men quietly affixing a paper to each name: Don Davies (Guardian), Archie Ledbrooke (Daily Mirror), Eric Thompson (Daily Mail), George Follows (Daily Herald)... the list was long, the loss calamitous. The only reporter to survive the disaster, Frank Taylor, then with the News Chronicle, later recalled in his book, The Day a Team Died (Souvenir Press, £9.99), how he waved towards his press-corps friends seated at the back of the aircraft and shouted: “There are plenty of seats up here.” They declined to shift their handluggage and stayed in the tail, which is where most of the fatalities occurred.

One effect of Munich was to bring press and players even more closely together. There had always been a relatively easy relationship between the two groups, since they tended to come from the same streets, enjoy the same interests and earn the same kind of wages. In truth, the journalists were probably a touch more affluent, because they had expense allowances that bought drinks and even dinner for favoured contacts. Naturally, there were times when friendships were fractured and confidences were not respected, but by and large they rubbed along quite comfortably.

Even England’s victory in the 1966 World Cup did not change the essentials of the relationship. In his autobiography, Jack Charlton tells how, following the formal dinner after the final, he met his friend, the journalist James Mossop, in the hotel foyer. Mossop said he was on his way back to Manchester. Charlton had other ideas. “We’re going out, me and you,” he said. They took a taxi to a nightclub that served beer, then met a stranger named Lenny who invited them to a party in Leytonstone, East London, where they drank a good deal until, in Charlton’s words: “Jimmy and me slept on the settee.” When he returned to the team hotel, Charlton was met by his mother, who demanded to know why his bed had not been slept in.

Such an escapade was not unusual in that golden age, and certainly it would never have crossed Mossop’s mind to report it. The fact that it had happened on the most illustrious day in the history of English football made not a scrap of difference. Journalists needed access, and access depended on trust. It was at this time that Hugh McIlvanney, then of The Observer, used that kind of access to write a whole stream of memorably original columns on football figures such as the young George Best, Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, Celtic’s Jock Stein and all the other most compelling figures of the day. They were not paid for their assistance, nor did they expect to vet the material before it was published. They simply trusted that the job would be done with skill and care, and they were right to do so.

It should be remembered that, at this stage, the only “live” football to be seen regularly on television was the FA Cup Final. Match of the Day had started to show recorded highlights in 1964, but regular live matches were almost 20 years distant. The best writers on football – people such as Brian James in the Daily Mail, Ken Jones in the Mirror and David Lacey in The Guardian – were describing people who were scarcely more than romantic rumours. But things began to change and, in the view of this writer, that change was accelerated by an extremely bright idea from a television executive.

ITV had never succeeded in matching the BBC across a whole range of sports. They lacked both the contracts and the gravitas, and they could never quite decide if sport had a value of its own or was just another branch of show business. They agreed to cover the 1970 World Cup finals in Mexico in the full knowledge that the BBC would win the ratings battle with its customary ease. But John Bromley, head of sport for ITV and once a Daily Mirror sportswriter, hired a panel of pundits – ex-players such as Pat Crerand, the late Derek Dougan and the flamboyant Malcolm Allison, who did not fall back on guarded forecasts and inoffensive judgments. Instead, they spoke as they would have spoken to their football colleagues or to friendly journalists: frankly, scathingly, entertainingly. The format was an enormous success, and the public responded in unprecedented numbers. Bromley, of course, was triumphant. At one stage, the manager of the hotel where the panel was staying took him aside for a worried word. “Mr Allison’s champagne bill,” he said. “It’s getting rather high.” Bromley demanded to see it, looked at the bottom line and returned it with a dismissive cackle. “Not enough!” he said. “Not nearly enough!”

So television began to exploit the game’s characters, men such as Allison, Jimmy Greaves, Ron Atkinson and the late Brian Clough, and football writers had to reflect this new approach. There was a greater emphasis on systems and strategies and philosophies of how the game ought to be played. Sure, there was a fair amount of received jargon and tactical bluff, but increasingly the correspondents had to think about aspects of the game that their predecessors had largely ignored. And when the outstanding performers – the peerless Lacey, say, or Patrick Barclay of The Daily Telegraph – explained what they saw in front of them, our appreciation of the sport was hugely enhanced.

Football has progressed enormously

It is impossible to be equally emphatic about football writing. For one thing, some of the sports-writing superstars were never sufficiently captivated by its charms. Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail, who was not only relentlessly brilliant but was one of that tiny handful of sports writers who may truly be called “famous”, wrote about the game in his early years but was later repelled by its excesses. Simon Barnes, chief sports writer of The Times and one of the finest craftsmen of his generation, writes occasionally about football, but his interest stops far short of genuine ardour. And Frank Keating of The Guardian, who may well be the finest sports writer this country has ever produced, was never able to take it quite seriously; as football’s pretensions grew, so Keating’s attention wandered.

The football specialist writers of today have a desperately difficult job. They are faced with the competition of wall-to-wall, forelock-tugging, blissfully uncritical satellite television coverage. Instead of living in the same streets as the people they cover, the football reporter barely exists on the same planet, since £5m a year buys a privileged place in a gated community or on a country estate. The reporters have to contend with the concepts of product placement and copy approval, as well as the odious machinations of a platoon of grasping agents. By and large, they have little contact with the players unless they happen to write a major star’s life story, which itself will be sanitised in the interests of commercial blandness. And yet, in this writer’s opinion, they cope superbly; perhaps better than their predecessors could have imagined. Aware that television will inevitably set the tone, they work harder on difficult issues, they explore different avenues, they search for the reality behind the manufactured image.

Despite the size of their by-lines and the acres of space that they occupy, they are not famous, not even especially well known. Certainly no London taxi driver would spare them a second glance. In fairness, most of them do not hanker for celebrity or recognition. But day by day, across a whole range of newspapers, their talents stand up to the sternest scrutiny. As a definition of a new “golden age”, I’d say that gets as close as anything.