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...ba href=/drug abuse/a/b, rarely translate into football anthems.

'World in Motion', which was recently voted the best World Cup song in a poll conducted by Littlewoods Pools, is one of few exceptions that prove the rule.

Despite the John Barnes rap, the song improbably achieved chart success while maintaining street cred.

But New Order's classic track was more a luvved-up dancefloor hit rather than a singalong terrace anthem.

'Three Lions' is the only England song that was chanted on the terraces while managing to stay on the right side of naff.

But, while the 'football's coming home' chorus might have caught on amongst football fans, the lyrics themselves were far from uplifting.

Gone was the swaggering self-confidence of 'This Time', which spoke of 'marching on towards victory'.

Instead here was a song about perennial failure.

'Three Lions' succeeded because the countercultural themes of personal failure and self-hatred had converged with our diminished national sporting self-image - the imperial myth of British sporting invincibility having given way to 'thirty years of hurt'.

So, maybe those counter-cultural themes of self-destruction and failure aren't so out of place in a modern football anthem after all.

Instead of an upbeat happy-clappy footstomper brimful of vacuous platitudes about strength, courage, and desire, perhaps what we need is another miserablist aria that celebrates our very British tradition of heroic failure.

'So many jokes, so many sneers, but all those oh-so-nears ...

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