Football by any other name ...

* David Penberthy
* From: News Limited newspapers

IT'S an irony which would be lost on the train-spotter soccer purists who love nothing more than prattling on about 4-4-2 combinations and whipping themselves into an indigant lather if you dare describe the round ball game as anything other than football.

But right now the incredibly successful and spectacularly entertaining 2010 World Cup is being hosted by a nation where everybody calls football soccer.

Get in a cab, buy a souvenir, ask for directions, order a beer, talk to absolutely anybody on the streets of Joburg or Durban or Cape Town and to a man they ask you where you're from and whether you're over here for the soccer.

The fact that they dare to use the s-word does nothing to diminish their love for the game.Soccer has united black and white South Africa like nothing else before.

There's a palpable sense of pride that the Cup is going so well, that the beat-ups in the international media about crime and violence have failed to materialise, that the hundreds of thousands of visitors are clearly having such a great time.

And despite cruelling its chances against with a 3-0 thumping at the hands of Uruguay, the national team Bafana Bafana continues to enjoy the support of the nation as it faces its third and probably final match against France next week.South Africans love their soccer.

Australian soccer fans, in contrast, seem pathetically hung up on nomenclature, and would rather natter about semantics than really throw their heads back Bafana Bafana style and get on with celebrating the national team and enjoying the game.

Many of the great champions of soccer in Australia – men such as the late Johnny Warren, brilliant SBS front man Les Murray, and a number of soccer journalists I've come to know over the years – have come to regard the soccer versus football question as all-important in the Australian context.

Having been reporting from the World Cup in South Africa for the past fortnight, I've found myself checking back on my copy and making sure that I haven't inadvertently written "soccer" instead of "football" in the pieces I've filed.It all seems such a silly side issue.

It's also a complicated one as it serves only to confuse Australians, and annoy them, as our loyalties are divided between so many forms of football in Australia that the last thing we should do is render our sporting discourse incomprehensible by kowtowing to the soccer tragics.

As a kid growing up in Adelaide I had a couple of close school mates whose parents were Italian, and in the ethnically-driven days of soccer in the 1970s, I would often get along with them to the Hindmarsh Stadium to watch Juventus (who later became Adelaide City) play Hellas (West Adelaide).

We all referred to it as soccer because, obviously enough, if we were talking about going to to the footy, it meant one thing and one thing only – watching the Aussie Rules in the local SANFL competition.Having been a Sydney resident for more than a decade, football in NSW means just one thing – rugby league.

If I'm talking to mates in Sydney about going to the footy it will only ever be in reference to seeing the Tigers play at Lecihhardt Oval.

If we are going to watch the Swans play, which given my hard-wired bias towards AFL is a much more frequent proposition than attending a league game, we would only ever refer to it as "Aussie Rules" as otherwise no-one in the Harbour City would know what you are talking about.

As Australia bolsters its bid to host the 2022 World Cup, and with the A-League trying to maintain its growth, it seems a massive waste of intellectual energy for the soccer mafia to keep banging on about how we must all call the game football.

In a radio interview with Melbourne's Steve Price the other night, Price started asking me whether, in light of the 4-0 thumping the Germans had just handed the Socceroos, we should all concede the Australia's soccer experiment had failed, that the World Cup bid was a $45 million waste of government money, and that we should only ever refer to this apparently fringe sport as soccer anyway.

The cynicism Price displayed is pretty widespread and I think has been fuelled in no small part by the niggardly demands of the soccer set, and probably also the confusingly-named Football Federation Australia, in demanding that we all ditch the s-word for the f-word.

The greatest stupidity of all is that regardless of what we call the game our national team is still known universally as the Socceroos.

Until they change their name to the Footballroos sticking with the s-word makes much more sense.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/sport/world-cup-2010/football-by-any-other-name/story-fn5epm5d-1225881683942