Soccer, the good, the bad, and the British....

Here is a little primer on Soccer:

No matter how much we Murkins (that's Americans to you that aren't from the south) continues to emerge as a competitive World Cup nation,there is little doubt that the international perception of American soccer will always be looked down on.

Why? Because Murkins don’t even call the sport by its proper name, of course.

We don’t call it “football.” They call it “soccer.”

Here in the good ole USA, "football" is that game that dominates the fall and the winter each Friday night, all day Saturday and most of the day after church on Sundays......and these days it seems to also be on Tuesday's and Thursday's as well .....and "football" features men so large they should come with their own zip code, so fast you have to use instant replay to see them move, so graceful that you could imagine them dancing in a ballet - but I digress.

Elsewhere, football is football. The round-ball sport, the beautiful game, with its biggest prize, the World Cup to be handed out on July 11.

Soccer? Pah, a silly American term created by a nation that has its own national obsession.

No country has been snootier toward the USA’s use of the term “soccer” than England.

Before the opener between the USA and England, the Sun newspaper even ran a spoof front page urging the English team to win the “soccerball world series.”

But let’s agree British humor is different than ours and take a halftime break here.

Coupled with their team’s humiliating exit from the World Cup it might be another rude awakening to the Brits that soccer isn’t an American term, it is actually an English one.

And it isn’t some modern fad that shows disrespect to the world’s most popular sport either. Nope, it dates back to the earliest days of the game’s professional history.

Indeed, until the last few decades, even Englishmen would routinely refer to their favorite pastime as soccer, just as often as they would say football.

Clive Toye was an Englishman who moved to the U.S. and became known as the father of modern American soccer. He is the one that brought the Brazilian legend Pele to play for the New York Cosmos.

Here are his thoughts on the matter:

“Soccer is a synonym for football,” said Toye, who helped launch the North American Soccer League in the late 1960s. “And it has been used as such for more years than I can count. When I was a kid in England and grabbed a ball to go out and play … I would just as easily have said: ‘Let’s have a game of soccer’ as I would use the word ‘football’ instead. And I didn’t start it.”

But if that's not good enough for you,you can check the etemology and find that to get to the beginning of the origin of “soccer” we must go all the way back to 1863 to a meeting of gentlemen at a London pub, who congregated with the purpose of standardizing the rules of “football,” which was in its infant years as an organized sport but was growing rapidly in popularity.

Those assembled became the founding members of the Football Association (which still oversees the game in England to this day). And they decided to call their new league "Association Football", to differentiate it from Rugby Football.

Still with me? Because now we must go back to the English humor.

A quirk of British culture/humor is the permanent need to familiarize names by shortening them. “My friend Brian Johnston was Johnners,” said Toye. “They took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer.

So there you are.”

So forget that English condescension and carry on calling it soccer, safe in the knowledge that you’re more in tune with the roots of the sport than those mocking Brits.

God Save the Queen!

Pace