Well before Mile Jedinak's first goal had ruffled the net at Stadium Australia, the code wars had started to rumble again. After the first leg of the tie, a 0-0 draw on a sub-standard pitch in Honduras, veteran footy writer Mike Sheahan had described the spectacle on Melbourne radio as "rubbish". He was not alone in that view, though he was probably in a minority.

Before that match, soccer commentator and evangelist Simon Hill had complained that Australia as a country was not taking the qualifying ties seriously enough. "Cultural misunderstanding" blinded us to the fact that at stake was a place in "the most loved, most watched and most lucrative" tournament in the world's biggest sport. Elaborating on SEN, Hill said it was Australia's historical disposition as an upstart English colony that soccer "has to be kept down".

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There are issues here. One is that size alone matters. If it did, then we would all be into field hockey, volleyball and table tennis, too. Depending what metrics you use, all are in the world's top 10 sports. "Loved by the most people" is right, but that is not incontrovertibly the same thing as "most loved". Nor is biggest axiomatically best.

Another problem is the insulting idea that we are all yokels who for 150 years have allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by the forces of anti-soccer, resisting the one true sport because we know no better.

Historical forces, including but not exclusively anti-imperialism, uniquely shaped the evolution of ball sports in this country. The legacy is that soccer remains a middleweight sport here, and Australian soccer a middleweight presence in the world, forever weighed by bigger football codes in the next park and and bigger soccer nations on the next channel. That does not make the game or the Socceroos unworthy. They have their time in the sun, and it is now.

The codes watch one another; of course they do. None the less, it is risible to think that the AFL has a department of dirty tricks, aimed paranoically at soccer. What it has is a department of mildly dirty tricks, aimed at every other sport. So it is that next week's draft "coincides" with the first Ashes Test. On the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the AFL is on soccer's side.

Besides, if AFL hegemony is all a plot, how to explain the explosion of AFLW, which has taken even the AFL by surprise, unless to argue that women are even bigger dupes than men?

Really, it is all over-wrought. Last week, SEN radio conducted a poll on what soccer should be called. This has become the tiredest bone of contention of all. The high-handed insist that there is only one football. Clearly, there's not. They say its name is not soccer. Nor is Australian rules AFL, but most AFL people live with the nomenclature, for clarity's sake. If soccer insists on being football, it can be. Arguing about it is like arguing with a referee: you can talk until you're blue in the face, but no one's mind changes.

Everyone has their own set of blinkers. Hill damns Australian media for not covering soccer as the Honduran media does. Might it not be that in both countries, media coverage accords with interest? Or are they the enlightened, and we merely Malcolm Roberts-strength denialists?

On radio, Hill said others should not comment in ignorance on his sport, because he did not comment on theirs. In print, he asked scornfully how it was the Australia was the world's greatest sports nation: "In what? Rugby league? AFL? If the competition is the world's tallest pygmy, then yep, we're smashing it." He also belittles AFLW as a "suburban giggle-fest". Dale Carnegie, eat your heart out.

Personally, I can't have the rugby league world cup, because it is so uncompetitive. International rules is a breezy enough spectacle, but has no resonance at all. They're talking about taking it to the US: whether to export it or deport it, they should.

As to our own Midfield East, can I suggest we agree that every sport has its own dynamic and stamp, each appealing in its own way, that it is possible to be a fan of more than one, that by criticism a sport can know it is alive, that we're a broad enough country to dwell on each sport in its turn, the cricket now, the oblate ball codes now and then, the Socceroos when they get to the eastern front. Can I suggest the biggest, most loved  entente in the world?

Decoding the football wars between soccer and Australian rules