With seemingly every other song released at the moment an 'unoffical World Cup anthem', it's easy to forget that there's an FA-endorsed one out there as well. It's fair to say that Embrace aren't exactly an obvious choice to release a football song, and the feeling remains that the suits at the FA took one look at who was number one in the charts when they decided and thought 'yep, they'll do'.
So is it as bad as everyone's been making out? Well, not exactly. It's a typical Embrace song to be honest - anthemic, not too memorable and features Danny McNamara with his usual off-key vocals. The problem is that it's not a football song - the chorus of "with the world at your feet, there's no one you can't beat" is impossible to belt out on the terraces, and there's no real hook to capture the public imagination, such as Baddiel & Skinner's "It's coming home" or New Order's classic "we're singing for Ing-ler-land" moment.
Without wishing to damn with faint praise, its no worse than the Spice Girls' official effort in 1998, which was so unspectacular that absolutely nobody can remember it these days. For an Embrace song, it's not too bad, but for a football anthem designed to inspire the national team, it fails woefully. In fact, if it was a footballer, it would be Owen Hargreaves rather than Wayne Rooney - steady, rather plodding, does a job but you can't help but wonder what they're doing there.
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