Always hailed as England’s greatest world cup song but……..

……there’s one bit of it that has always made me cringe. It is of course, John Barnes “rapping” about two and a half minutes in. Don’t you find it embarrassing too? It’s as if someone said, “Hey, this rapping’s pretty cool, isn’t it? We need a rapper on this record. John, you’re black, you do it”. Never mind that John Barnes was born in Kingston, not Compton and his father was a colonel in the Jamaican army. Never mind that he was as bad at rapping as he was good at crossing a ball. It always looked like he was forced to do it because of the colour of his skin. Different times. Wouldn’t happen now. Mind you, neither would almost beating Germany in the semi-final.