As I gaze greedily at Andy Murray’s girlfriend Kim Sears, or Djokovic’s other half Jelena Ristic, I feel absolutely nothing.

I’m trying to reconstruct that aspirational, needy hunger that I felt so keenly when the WAGs first arrived on the scene, and I just can’t. There’s a vortex of interest where my incessant need for style icons should be.

I mean the real WAGs, of course: Vicky B, Cheryl, Abbey Clancy, Ellen Rives. The troupe that clattered down the streets of Baden-Baden during the World Cup in 2006, off their collective nut on Jaegerbombs, trailing hair extensions, boho skirts and statement belts worth £30,000 a piece in their wake, boosting the spa town’s economy in one fell swoop. The ones who then got told off by the FA for distracting the players.

I miss those girls.

They weren’t classy and they weren’t sophisticated. They weren’t even that fashionable. But they were some sort of fashion plate – people wanted to emulate them and their super-skinny kick-flares, ridiculous heels, Aviators and their It-bags. They were It-WAGS, and if the new incarnation of famous girlfriend represents how tastes have changed for the more quiet, the more tasteful, the less déclassé, then I don’t want any part of it.

Where are all the shopping bags (from Cricket in Liverpool, Flannels in Birmingham or Cruise in Newcastle)? Where are the boob jobs? Stuff your skirt suit and your charity work, at least tell me you got your tan on a sunbed.

Of course they didn’t – the new WAGs are too sensible and middle class. That’s why they’re so boring. It’s a really bad sign when you can’t even be bothered to dislike someone.

I worry that the fading of the original WAGs represents the fading of diversity in female role models. I worry about other things more, don’t worry, but as Wimbledon has been forcibly burned into my eyes for the past two weeks (nothing else on telly), I find myself pondering this particularly.

Okay, the Ur-WAGs were hardly the boffins or astro-physicists we should be encouraging girls to grow into, but they were loud and a bit gobby and they had attitude. The current crop of clothes horses and professional WAGs, Kate Middleton and her tribe, are retrograde and regressive: posh, submissive and worryingly safe and tasteful in their grooming routines.

It’s not so much the conspicuous consumption and Barbie doll stylings that I miss, but the feeling that at least those girls weren’t dead behind the eyes or lying back and thinking of England. If Andy Murray had given one of the 2006 crew that frigid peck on the cheek after winning Wimbledon, he would have got a thump rather than an adoring smile.