Lynam's cool helps journey back to the comfort zone

'I said from the start the great danger is to try too hard. You have a proven formula: all you do is put adverts in it'

On Tuesday week, the very day that ITV1's Champions' League coverage gets under way with Valencia v Liverpool, Des Lynam turns 60. He still has a year of his ITV contract to run, but won't say, insists he doesn't know, whether he will choose not to renew it.

That's assuming a new one is offered. For in the past 12 months Lynam has had to get used to the unfamiliar sound of brickbats being thrown. The Daily Mail was at it again earlier this week, declaring that an "increasingly despondent" looking Lynam has "been eclipsed by his former protégé, Gary Lineker... and rumours persist that Gabby Logan is waiting in the wings to give The Premiership a much-needed facelift".

He doesn't look despondent on the morning I meet him. He looks fit and, as always, almost preternaturally relaxed. Which is more than can be said for me. Let me explain. A few years ago I got a call from Lynam's agent. He'd liked something I'd written and wanted to meet me. Could he buy me lunch? "No thanks," I said. "Des is not really my cup of tea." Actually I didn't. Des was, is, something of a hero. I said yes, hoping it would not come out as YESSSSS!!!!!

I was to meet him at 12.30pm at the Café Royal in central London, and set off with hours to spare. But for reasons too complicated to share with you here, rather surreally involving London Underground and Jimmy Hill, I was five minutes late and sweating profusely, having run the last few hundred yards. He, by contrast, was sitting, arms outstretched along the back of a banquette, the epitome of cool.

This time, I tell myself, I must on no account be late. We arrange to meet at a café in west London, near his home, at 10.30am. I arrive at 9.57am, buy myself a celebratory croissant, and wait. By 10.36am Lynam has still not arrived, which is when I catch a glimpse of the café's name on a menu. I am in the wrong place. So this time I am 10 minutes late and sweating profusely, having run the last few hundred yards. And he again, is looking as if sweat is a stranger to him. He is sipping a cappuccino, not always a great strategy for the moustachioed, yet, needless to say, there is no extraneous froth.

However, Lynam's celebrated calm has been ruffled these last 12 months. By the time most broadcasters reach 60, they have experienced plenty of professional criticism. Not him. For Lynam – in his latter years with the BBC an institution scarcely less revered than the Queen Mum – it is all fairly new and decidedly unwelcome.

It reached its height this time last year, when The Premiership, ITV's Saturday night highlights programme, was roundly – and to some extent rightly – panned. When the ITV director of programmes, David Liddiment, rescinded his own decision to transmit The Premiership at 7pm, replacing it with Blind Date and shifting the football to 10.30pm, Lynam copped most of the scorn.

"It was a difficult time for me," he admits. "I said to them [the executives], you're going to get on the front page of [the trade journal] Broadcast, but I'Il be on the front page of every newspaper." And sure enough I picked up the Sun one morning, and if they had found Bin Laden the headline couldn't have been any bigger. It said Cilla 1, Des 0. I was taking all that sort of flak.

"I know that if you're the front man you take the plaudits and you also take the backbites, but seeing myself described as a flop took a bit of understanding. I'd never had that thrown at me in all the years. And so I had to make the decision whether to go on with it." He considered resigning? "Yes, I debated it. It was a tricky one for me. I thought: 'I'm the guy fronting it, should I fall on my sword?'

"Then I thought: 'Well, I didn't make the decision [to move the time slot]. I'll make headlines saying brave old Des for a couple of weeks, and then I'll have to earn my living'.

"So I took the pragmatic view. And in my arrogance, I thought 'this isn't me, the show isn't a flop. The timing of it might be, and one or two ideas, but I don't think I've suddenly lost the plot'. Had I thought that I would have legged it. So it wasn't a hugely difficult decision to go on, but I did think about it for a couple of days."

And how did he feel, I wonder, about the much-derided gimmicks that have mercifully been jettisoned, notably poor Andy Townsend's tactics truck, and the Pro-Zone toy with which Terry Venables wrestled nobly, but in vain?

"Well, I said from the start that the great danger is to try too hard. You have a proven formula: all you do is put adverts in it. But, of course, bright, young ambitious people with a new toy, always give it a bit extra.

"And the bit extra didn't quite work. I couldn't see the point of the tactics truck, to be quite honest. If you do analysis, you might as well sit in the studio. So I was not for it, but I didn't argue too strongly against it. I'd already been negative about a few other ideas, and I didn't want to be negative about everything. They'd have said: 'Old Des, he did it that way, well, we want to do it this way'.

"As for the time slot, I had a meeting with Liddiment in June, when he said: 'We're going to go at seven. I said: Are you? That's great. It's ambitious, and dangerous, but it's great'.

"But by the October they'd decided they needed another million or two [viewers] to make it viable, so they moved it. And I came up with phrases like 'next week we go to our new improved time', little things like that, trying to put the tongue in the old cheek a bit.

"Anyway, at 10.30 we're now in comfort zone, and what we've got is Match of the Day with adverts, more or less. We don't have the baggage we had last season, so I don't think people will write about it, although Ron Atkinson [the studio replacement for Terry Venables] always gets press. He's box-office, old Ron. Not everybody loves him, but we do. And he's managed. I think you need a guy who's done management, as well as the ex-players. The BBC don't have that, do they?"

It is still odd to hear Lynam taking cheeky little swipes at the BBC – when The Premiership cameras caught Lineker at a match, he remarked: "Of course, he's free on Saturdays now". Which was certainly not what either man anticipated when Lynam left the BBC in August 1999. Match of the Day, then, looked impregnable. Lynam left because (with the added persuasive qualities of a reported £5m contract) he wanted to present live football, in particular the Champions' League.

Although it was presented as Des 1 Gary 0, when ITV snapped up the Premiership highlights rights from a shell-shocked BBC, some of us ventured at the time that perhaps Lynam was quietly a bit peeved, perhaps he had rather fancied his Saturday nights back.

"I did," he admits, "have mixed emotions. I'd moved for live football, and suddenly I had the recorded highlights again. But then Saturday night is the worst night to go out, the restaurants are full, everybody's wandering about. And Saturday afternoons, when I sit in with the guys and watch all eight matches, is the best afternoon of the week. It's a very closed shop, the two pundits, myself, the editor, the producer, the stats man, Rick Waumsley, who's the executive producer. We go in for lunch, then we adjourn to a screening room. We bet, we roar, we scream, it's great fun. [Head of ITV Sport] Brian Barwick, the boss man, comes in just to see it."

None the less, for all the roaring and screaming, Lynam firmly believes that the Premier League is a two-horse race between Arsenal and Manchester United.

"I was looking at the odds before the season began. United were 5-4, Arsenal about the same, while there were other clubs in the Premiership that were 2,000 to 1. The competitive element has gone, to a large extent. Years ago a Nottingham Forest came through, a Derby, a Man City, but you can't see it happening now. The only thing is that the bottom teams can still beat the top teams, like Sunderland beating Leeds the other week, but you won't find Sunderland winning the league."

For true competition and quality of football, he thinks – not entirely surprisingly – the Champions' League is beyond compare. "It's the best football around, better than the World Cup," he says.

On which subject, briefly, what did he think of ITV's World Cup coverage? "Well, we're like Avis in the hire-car business, we have to try harder. We know that when we go head to head with the BBC, we're going to get skinned. For one of the England games we had eight ad breaks, three minutes each, that's 24 minutes. But when we had the matches to ourselves I'd say we did just as well, in fact better. We had better production values in my view. I would say that, wouldn't I, but I truly believed we had better conversation and opinion. Of course, we also had Gascoigne, who was deemed not to be a success. He's a lovely boy, and we all put our arms round him, but he was very nervous. To give his opinion in articulate fashion he found difficult."

Who on earth thought that he wouldn't find it difficult, I wonder? "Both ITV and the BBC," says Lynam, shortly. "They both pitched for him. But he chose ITV because [Ally] McCoist is a friend, Andy Townsend shared a flat with him, and we had his old managers [Venables and Bobby Robson]. He loves them."

Getting back to the Champions' League, next week's anniversary of the 11 September atrocities reminds Lynam that on the fateful day last year, he was en route to Athens, to present the following evening's fixture between Panathinaikos and Manchester United. While Uefa, European football's governing body, dithered over whether or not to abandon the match (they did), he spent the next morning discussing world affairs with Sir Alex Ferguson.

How, I ask, does he find the United manager? "Very personable, although I've never been in a situation where I've had to confront him. I did say to him that I couldn't believe he was getting rid of [Jaap] Stam, and he said: 'You haven't effing seen him play for the last few weeks'. Of course he couldn't say that publicly because he had to sell him.

"Otherwise, the only time we've had a falling-out was years ago, when we kept asking Ryan Giggs, who was then about 19, to give an interview to Match of the Day, just to say hello. I said to [Alan] Hansen: 'Even 16-year-old tennis players come on and talk to us'. Ferguson didn't like that very much. He wrote me a letter, saying: 'Don't tell me how to run my football club'. Since then it's been fine. I have great regard for him. He's made a lot of enemies, but anybody who's ever obtained anything in life makes enemies."

Including him? "Sure. Mr Dyke [Greg Dyke, the director-general of the BBC] became an enemy. He gave me a kicking, I gave him a kicking back, so now we're square."

Valencia v Liverpool, on 17 September, is live on ITV1, with Arsenal v Borussia Dortmund live on ITV2.

Des Lynam: The life and times

Name: Des Lynam.

Born: 17 September, 1942, Ennis, County Clare, Ireland.

Age: 59

Occupation: Main presenter of ITV's football coverage, including Saturday highlights show The Premiership and the Champions' League. Was the face of ITV's coverage of Euro 2000 and the World Cup 2002.

Lives: London, with partner of 17 years, interior designer Rose Diamond.

Career: After leaving Brighton Grammar School, worked as an insurance salesman until he was 27. He then turned his hobby of presenting on local radio into a career. Joined BBC radio in 1969, starting as a boxing commentator before going on to anchor Sports Report on Radio 2. Moved to BBC television in 1978 and was their main sports anchor man for more than 20 years, fronting Grandstand, Match Of The Day, numerous World Cups and Olympics, as well as Wimbledon and the Grand National. Also presented Holiday and the lifestyle programme How Do They Do That?. Made a high-profile switch to ITV in 1999 saying he "felt stale" at the BBC. Has a four-year-contract reputed to be worth £25,000 a week.

Nicknames: "The housewives' favourite", "The silver fox".

Highlights: Five-times winner of the Television and Radio Industries club Sports Personality of the Year. Male Television Personality of the Year 1989. Was voted the BBC's Top Television Presenter in 1996 in a poll to mark the channel's 60th birthday. Recently voted Britain's 23rd coolest person.

Lowlights: Originally rejected by the BBC management, for lacking "background, experience and personality".

He says: "Going down the pub is not yet an Olympic sport, but beach volleyball is", "More football later, but first let's see the goals from the Scottish Cup final".

They say: "Des is the ultimate class act in sports broadcasting. As long as he wants to remain No 1 he will". Brian Barwick, Head of ITV Sport. "There are only three great white entertainers ­ Presley, Sinatra and Lynam" Fellow presenter.

Did you know? Lynam was persuaded to bring out a 22-track CD of poetry, read to full orchestral accompaniment, that was released after the BBC had been bombarded with requests for a copy of Des reading Rudyard Kipling's If, as he did at the end of the World Cup in 1998.

Research: Kevin Costello