The shoulders that used to drop effortlessly as he drifted nonchalantly past one witless defender after another are now hunched over and suspicious. The eyes that used to glimmer with an otherworldly blueness are now fixed distractedly on the ground as he buries his head in the collar of his coat.

On a weekend when pestilence and plague seemed to be stalking the land, this intrusive image of the greatest footballer this island has ever produced brought to his knees by alcoholism was the one which news editors and picture editors chose for their front pages.

The grainy quality of the Best picture belied its shabby origins. Since his return to the Ards Peninsula, Best has had to cope with intermittent flurries of media interest in both his general health and his drinking. Of course, there have been times when this was something one of modern football's first great self-publicists clearly invited.

Best has been on the local chat show circuit here and seemed to have carved out a niche for himself as an analyst with both the BBC and Sky Sports. All that was fair enough and there are few who would begrudge his attempts to guarantee some financial security after half a lifetime of excess.

This was a sporting figure who was unusual in that he utterly transcended his chosen sport to become a part of mainstream popular culture. From this earliest days at Manchester United you can see this in the shameless advertisements masquerading as interviews to showcase a new bar venture or clothes shop. Best didn't just know the promotional game inside out, he practically invented it.

It turned out ultimately to be a Faustian pact in which the only loser would be Best himself. Best's life since his footballing skill scorched everything in its path with its effortless grace has been a cautionary morality tale on the perils of growing up and declining in public. He can probably accept that.

But what he should not have to accept is the prurience and intrusiveness with which this phase of his life is being treated. George Best is a chronic alcoholic struggling with demons most of us can only imagine.

It should surely be taken as read he does not need to have his condition paraded for public consumption courtesy of a press photograph clearly taken from some considerable distance and without, one presumes, his explicit or implicit consent. By no stretch of the imagination should this be how the media behave in a civilised society.

George Best's alcoholism and health problems are not matters of significant public interest and neither the media nor the public they serve have a right to any information above and beyond that which Best himself chooses to impart. That is the simple, immutable bottom line.

Nor was it only the newspapers, both tabloid and "quality", which were caught up in all of this. In the space of a few hours on Monday afternoon phone-in programmes on two radio stations carried interviews with Best's doctor in which attempts were made to glean extra slivers of information about his condition. The doctor, to his professional credit, kept his counsel and at least one of the presenters had the good grace and humanity to express a degree of unease about going down this line of inquiry in the first place.

For anyone with even a passing interest in or genuine concern about how the media in this country go about their business it was a thoroughly depressing and cheapening chain of events. It was something George Best did not deserve and the whole sorry episode unfolded without even the slightest hint of journalistic explanation or justification. If the ultimate aim was to provide help or support for George himself, it is impossible to conceive of a more wrong-headed way to go about it.

The timing of all of this probably doesn't help. The Northern Ireland team is in a sustained trough of mediocre results and substandard performances on the pitch and after the Neil Lennon affair is faring even worse off it. The shameful and degrading treatment of Lennon in the friendly against Norway propelled Northern Ireland football into the popular consciousness for the first time in almost 20 years, but unfortunately for the Irish Football Association it was for the wrong reasons.

The "will he won't he" story of Lennon's international football future was hard copy, generating genuine public interest while the Northern Ireland team itself muddled on without any apparent direction or focus.

The paucity of ambition that now surrounds the Northern Ireland set-up seems a lifetime away from the 1980s sides which dragged themselves through qualification campaigns for major tournaments thanks in large part to an unstoppable drive and unshakeable determination.

The Lennon episode and the overwhelming ordinariness of the Northern Ireland team of 2001 go a long way to explaining this enduring obsession with a player who performed only fitfully for his national team and whose best days were behind him long before he hit 30. George Best is a symbol of time and a culture when things were different for Northern Ireland football.

The local clubs were much stronger. Huge crowds came to stand on the terraces of Windsor Park to watch Northern Ireland play. And in Best they had a player of such untouchable talent that he effortlessly straddled the sectarian divide to become someone of genuine iconic status for both sides of the community.

The verbal lynching of Neil Lennon was stark proof of the way that togetherness has disappeared forever. A public front may have been cobbled together last Saturday afternoon, but the hounding of George Best shows Northern Ireland football is more comfortable with sepia-toned memories from the past than it is with facing up to the future.