Such was the post-match mantra of former England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, whose team often set off in pulse-raisingly promising fashion, only to fold like the garden furniture of Terry & June. (The relative merits of this approach were thrown into stark relief when his successor's ineptness made David Brent resemble a management guru.)

We're not here to discuss football managers (although Swedes are welcome), but Eriksson's oft-repeated assessment can be applied to lyrical couplets penned by the great, good and gormless. There's no talent bar on the ability to turn out a memorable phrase – songs written by monosyllabic monkeys may contain a few key words which stick in the mind – but, as with great singles and albums, it's not what you do, it's what you do next: how to follow up that fantastic phrase without sounding like a rhyming dictionary on autopilot. And even some of the legends of what we call rock, in texts which will be dug up by future generations and regarded as holy words, have fallen foul of the brilliant line which is followed by an absolute stinker.

Consider The Who's Substitute, as excitingly concise a pop song as you're likely to hear. Riff established, chorus reached and enjoyed, there's a pause for breath before the second verse starts with "I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth", a 60s-perfect synthesis of class pride which can't be bettered. But Townshend has to go somewhere, and sadly he goes everywhere at once: "The north side of my town faced east and the east was facing south". Preposterously wordy and not half as clever as it thinks it is, its saving grace is that it only lasts a second and it's gone, buried in a welter of music and (better) lyrics.

Then there's Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, rightly lauded as a fantastic album (although I could probably survive a fair few months on a desert island without hearing Any Colour You Like). Nestled toward the end is the corking "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way", something akin to a mission statement for the country. Sadly, what it nestles incongruously amongst is some bang-average wittering about time and writing, like Ted Hughes' The Thought-Fox revisited by a tired deadline-pressured hack with a sixth-former's eye for words, so the song ingloriously collapses into the teeth-grindingly self-referential situationist joke of "The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say." So did I, but you've let me down, and if that's your point, it commits one of entertainment's biggest crimes by being obvious and dull.

And as that's not something I want to be accused of, I'll shut up.