Cherry Red Records is calling on musical fans of the England football team to pen a song for their side ahead of this year's World Cup, and to send it to them. They are planning a digital-only album of original England-supporting football-referencing songs, following an announcement earlier this month from the FA that there would be no official team anthem this year.

The footballing body said it was not intending on backing an official song this year because the England team's management "wanted to be fully focused on the football" this time. Yeah, like that's going to happen. The fact that the official FA-backed song has been awful for at least three World Cups now may or may not have been a factor.

Noting that the official all-star single '(How Does It Feel To Be) On Top Of The World' totally failed to capture the imagination of either music or football fans in 1998 when pitched against an unofficial re-release of the Lighting Seeds/Baddiel & Skinner hit 'Three Lions', and then remembering the tedium that was Ant & Dec's official football chant in 2002, the Cherry Red blurb says: "We don't even recall the entries from 2006. So this leads us to believe the world (and more importantly the England Squad) needs a new great World Cup anthem for the coming summer in South Africa. And seeing as Cherry Red Records already has the world's largest collection of football related repertoire, we thought we should be the ones to kick things off!"

Any bands interested in making a football-themed song should send it and some contact information to worldcup@cherryred.co.uk by 31 Mar. More info at www.cherryred.co.uk/football/world_cup.htm