Old music: Baddiel & Skinner & Lightning Seeds – Three Lions

In the wake of England beating Spain 1-0, proof if it were needed that next summer’s World Cup is as good as decided, it seems apt to remember an old soundtrack to sporting hopes.

Three Lions is not, rationally, a good piece of music. The voices are monotonous, the music basic (and as dated as its Britpop origins), the lyrics utterly unimaginative. And yet its opening bars summon a spine-tingling sense of nostalgia no other song can come close to replicating.

I was eight in 1996, and that year’s European Championship – the first major international football tournament to be held in Britain since the 1966 World Cup – was the first time I could sense the mood of an entire nation being channelled without constraint into my sport.

During those few weeks in early summer, Three Lions became not only the anthem behind the starry-eyed hopes for the national side, but also the all-pervading background music to a more general mood of national buoyancy. England’s sense of excitement, expectation and optimism were striking even to me. The tournament itself dashed me headlong into a sea of emotions I had barely skimmed the surface of until that point: blind hope, beaming pride, foolish confidence, and inevitably, gut-wrenching despair.

Of course, that summer was also a significant moment for Britain at large, as popular culture, politics and sport were thrown together in a storm of backward-glancing and wildly misplaced hope. And Three Lions is as good an artefact of that as anything, its video featuring two laddish comedians, a 60s-fixated musician and Steve Stone lifting the World Cup.

But for all the song’s simplicity, the way it captures the England fan’s curious mix of entitlement, optimism and fatalism is nothing short of genius. There’s a reason it has endured.

In the end, David Baddiel’s defeatist forecast that “England’s gonna blow it away” turned out to be prophetic, and, despite all the fervour and excitement, the overbearing image of summer 1996 turned out to be Gareth Southgate stepping up to take that penalty.