There is always a precise point, during the self-induced decline of a great sporting hero, when men become helplessly misty eyed and women completely lose sympathy both with the cause and those who do the lamenting.

We saw it with George Best and we are seeing it again with Paul Gascoigne, the former football star who has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, allegedly after a two-month drink and drugs bender in a series of four-star hotels where he has been resident.

The immediate response, from Britain's excitable male, middle-aged sports commentators - and I exclude my colleague Simon Barnes from the list of shame - was to tell us all the sordid details and interpret Gascoigne's fall as the latest episode of a Greek tragedy. For the rest of us, however, there wasn't anything the least bit epic about it.

Funny, isn't it? The female sex, which adores romance in all its forms, and melts with desire for your average fallen titan, especially if he's called Mr Rochester, simply isn't touched by the drama of this shattered genius.

That's largely because we don't perceive Gazza as a shattered genius at all, but as an alcoholic predictably ruined by his own addiction. Along, it has to be said, with several hundred thousand other people in Britain, many of whom had many fewer chances in life than he had.

There is sympathy. Of course there is. At a human level, one can only feel sorry for a man so sick and isolated that he lives alone, long term, in posh hotels for as long as they will have him, playing computer games and drinking to the point where his behaviour becomes unsustainable.

But what there should not be is lionisation. Or lack of honesty. What troubles me about the whole Gazza saga, which will surely run until the poor chap is finally at peace, is the extraordinary sense of denial by football fans over what has brought him to this new low.

The answer, I have little doubt, is alcohol addiction, the most bog-standard, unglamorous, mundane, miserable, destructive, grievous kind of affliction you can get. The one as common as the common cold.

The one people shy away from discussing because it's often just too close to their own domestic circumstances. Understandably, but wrongly, those who seek to romanticise the catastrophe of the great star Gazza don't want his plight to be due to anything as ordinary as booze. But it is.

What depresses me about the focus on the fact that he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act is that this will become the red herring, the get-out clause. Ah, Gazza's mad, that's the problem. He's had a breakdown. He's psychotic. It's his demons.

In other words, it's nothing to do with alcohol; it's because he's got something wrong with his head. Ergo: we can go on drinking as much as we like.

I know no more about Gasgoigne's health than I read in the media. But I doubt that this is a story about sudden mental breakdown. Instead, this is the common-or-garden story of what happens if you spend your life, as Gasgoigne has famously done, constantly drinking double and treble measures of spirits at various points in the day in order to acquire the desired level of anaesthesia.

The anecdotes tell of how he would sneak into the boardrooms of football clubs immediately before the big games and throw double whiskies down his throat. On the occasion when he confessed to beating up his wife in Gleneagles Hotel, leaving her with broken fingers and a black eye, he had spent the night drinking treble brandies. And over the years, as his youth and fitness declined, and his body refused to cope any more, he went to be dried out several times.

When chronic drinkers get to 40, as Gasgoigne is now, many are showing signs of brain damage. alcohol related brain damage (ARBD), the doctors call it, when years of heavy drinking start to attack the nervous functions. Research shows that 82 per cent of down-and-outs, of whatever age, have cognitive impairment from alcohol.

Everyone knows someone. Everyone can look among their own contemporaries to those who drank heavily when they were young but forgot to stop. Or listen to young, deranged street drunks, many of whom are now displaying symptoms of ARBD in their twenties.

“Pure dead mental”, as they say in Glasgow, admiringly, of deranged, alcohol-induced behaviour. Is it any wonder that the Rangers fans recognised Gazza as one of their own? In their terms, long before the psychiatrists examined him, he was “pure mental”.

ARBD is characterised by volatile behaviour, short-term memory loss, failure of reasoning power, inability to store information or monitor repetitious talk and inability to take control of one's life. Nobody has to be an expert in alcohol, in other words, to understand that after years of alcohol abuse people's personalities start to disintegrate.

Personally, I see no Greek tragedy in Gasgoigne's chaos. I feel as sorry for him as I do for any damaged, addicted person. The man had great talent and must, at his peak, have earned enough to buy out the local bank. But he was weak, not heroic. He lacked either a sense of responsibility or the inner resources to tackle his illness.

Everything, as is the case with every alcoholic, has always been someone else's fault, not his.

So we should not waste pity on Gasgoigne, on the ground that the man has probably manufactured enough of his own to last a lifetime. All alcoholics do. Is he any different from anyone with a serious drink problem and the classic pattern of behaviour - benders, appalling behaviour, violence; then, in the cold light of dawn, self-immolation, threats of suicide, pleas for forgiveness?

I hope psychiatric help and rehabilitation come to his aid. Like George Best, however, it may be that all Gasgoigne wants to do is quietly continue his path of slow-motion self-destruction. If so, respect him, and respect his right to choose; but please do not sensationalise his illness.

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