There have been a lot of - mostly - young - mostly - men on the web lately, all making the same point very loudly: it’s called “football”, in this country, yanks, not “soccer” (the real wastes of time will spell it “sawker” or some such at this point).

Even sensible people can fall into the trap, it seems:

And then there was his use of the “s” word: “soccer” this, “soccer” that. David, pet: we both know that’s not proper English, ain’ it? We both know you only said “soccer” to please the Yanks.

(Incidentally, I’m cherrypicking - the rest of Dave’s article is excellent).

There are plenty more examples where those came from should you really want to see some.

Two assumptions run through all of this, often at the same time.

1. It is in some way annoying or insulting that “soccer” is the coinage in the US, so much so that that annoyance or insult demands expression.
2. Those who will admit that “soccer” is a word of English origin will usually get around that by claiming that a group of people who can be written off as “toffs” came up with it, and that it fell into disuse before the World Wars.

In actual fact, the word has fallen into relative disuse in England, but only very recently. And the evidence is that it was, until recently, a “down-to-earth” “working class” word (I’m grinding my teeth here: can you tell?).

What’s worse for my army of young men is that the word is in common international use, and not just in the US.

Let’s start with some football annuals. All of the following are entirely British:

Charles Buchan’s Soccer Gift Book 1955-6:

Oh, Charlie: how could you use such non-English English? Surely lovely, plummy Ken Wolstenholme will put you right, ten years later? Or perhaps not…

“The Sun”’s a patriotic, working class paper. They’ll sort it out, come the ’70s. Won’t they? Oh…

Well, the England captain will show Becks up for what Dave Hill took him for (or, to be fair, didn’t). Or else he won’t.

Didn’t it all die out in the ’80s, though?

But those are just annuals. Proper soccer mags used “football” didn’t they?

It’s actually harder to find one with “football” in the title, to tell you the truth. They must have all been closet yanks; it’s the only plausible explanation:

I hate to tell you this, but even the FA are at it:

And the leading scholarly historical football journal? Say it ain’t so, to coin a phrase..

And we haven’t even got to abroad yet!

The French guard their language with an intensity we can only wonder at, but what’s this? Quelle horreur, army of young men.

But I’m sure my army of young men will want to raise an arm for the Germans, who are going through an insanely-anti-American phase at present.

But you can always join the neckless skinhead crowds in Spain and call it football there if you want to.

But, failing that, surely there’s Italy, unless you are going to be insulted by their calling it “Calcio”, which you really ought to be just for the sake of consistency.

Of course, the ancient rumour is that an Oxford student, Charles Wreford Brown, coined “soccer” from a contraction of “Association Football” to mimic the contraction of “Rugger” from “Rugby Football”, but in the eyes of my army of young men, Oxford students are untermensch, so perhaps they’d prefer Duncan Edwards:

Completely OT, but George linked to this video, and I’d like to raise him:

That’s all. Back to your pints and red-tops, gentlemen.

There is something repellant about the idea of Christopher Hitchens, of all people, having to waste his time in the company of “stop smoking” companies and the rest of the self-improvement industry. Waste your time on his account here and here.

I spent a year of my life researching the smoking problem, and I was a smoker when I started. When I mean “research”, incidentally, I mean that I read every peer-reviewed article I could lay hands on, and interviewed something in the order of one thousand smokers and ex-smokers. I’ve worked with smokers for almost a decade now.

So I can say right away now why Hitchens came away still a smoker.

Because he was right, and his “helpers” were wrong. Cigarette smoking went around the world in forty years, not because it reduces its users to the status of sad addicts, but because the psychological advantages to smoking are real and considerable. But for the unfortunate (and only partial, and only relative) threat to health cigarettes pose, smokers, living as they do in the same vale of tears as the rest of us, have the advantage over non-smokers.

The hardest smokers to help are the ones who’ve lost sight of what they were getting out of smoking - the ones who insist on berating themselves as weak fools.

What I learned from all those interviews was that smoking cessation tends to happen when stopping becomes of greater psychological value than smoking, and that it is very much a personal matter. The reason techniques that I disagree with often work - especially the Allen Carr route, which has a genuine track record - is, I suspect, because they succeed in tapping into this.

On rare occasions, I even meet someone who succeeded in stopping permanently whilst using Nicotine Replacement Therapy. (The idea here, of course, is that nicotine is “addictive” and that the way to proceed is to slowly wean the user off it. It’s rare to come across a proper study - try a BMJ search and see what I mean - which doesn’t point up a failure rate in the 85-90% band over one year, more in seven. But then, I think the whole “addiction” idea is due a major rethink. There are only so many such studies you can read without realizing that it is only assumed that we know what we mean by “addiction,” that there are quite a few ill-thought-through definitions of it, and how badly in need we are of a working definition of the term that is agreed across the board AND evidence-based. But that’s a big subject, and this is scarcely the place.)

I’ve altered the permalink structure to the blog so that post titles are used in urls, not post numbers. Ergo, every single link to the blog is now broken, but the requirements of omelettes etc., and there it is.

First Mourinho, now Jol. The most successful managers in their respective club’s recent history, sacked by wealthy club owners who expect too much. And want it too soon. Championship Manager Chairmanship, trumping potentially Champions League Management.

I’d be surprised if there was any fan, of any club, who didn’t in his heart of hearts believe that his team “belonged” in the Premiership’s top four. But the trouble with the top four is that there are only four of them. How close Jol came.

Jol, like Mourinho, is a victim of the “European” club structure - where the coach rubs shoulders and shares power with a “director of football” and, in this case, it seems, sinister others. Jol wanted a good centre-back to cover for Ledley King - and a defensive midfielder - and got Darren Bent. Both Bent and Jol deserved better.

The Premiership has become a difficult place for English players, for British players. Now it is becoming a difficult place for proper football management.

This in a week when Sir Clive Woodward, personification of the modern, forward-looking coach, criticized complicated management structures - “There can only be one leader in the dressing room.”

Management has always been an insecure job, of course. Recently, it looked as though some sanity had broken out - there have been fewer sackings of the traditional Sammy Lee variety, and managers were being given longer to develop their teams. But then, there were fewer appointments of the Sammy Lee variety.

What’s new is that we are seeing the slow, deliberate undermining of good, successful managers, by chairmen and boards, using European-style management structures as political tools. Jol’s situation, and Mourinho’s, was different from that faced by Rafa Benitez, behind whom the first carrion birds are beginning to circle.

Bolton should have waited another week..

Not this season, silly. I mean 1954:

In the old days, it was simple: you didn’t trust anyone who wore a tweed hat or a beard. But Jimmy Hill muddied at least the more saline of those waters. And you just don’t see tweed hats anymore, except in Norfolk.

There’s nothing to rely upon anymore. Except that anyone who says Americans don’t get football is a rotter. Positively motherless if they combine it with etymologically incorrect observations about the word soccer.

We, on the other hand, are passionate about the game. Only, not this passionate, and anyway, who needs all this fancy stuff? Here are two properly passionate men, the voice of one, the lettered grief of the other, and a breath of a football culture utterly unlike our own:

The commentator sounds like Jabba the Hut. Imagine Mark Lawrenson summarizing for him.

Socrates, whose cigarette smoke you can smell from here now that our pubs have cleaned up, was a doctor of medicine at this point. He’s a doctor of philosophy now too. Tony Adams is an intellectual because he’s learning to play the piano.

I refer, of course, to the 1981 Ashes Test Series:

Not as good as 1985, of course, but I don’t want to complain.

Holland’s route one football proves no match for Revie’s silky England as veteran striker Peters scores twice for his country:

Bamber Gascoigne leads studio discussion after the 2-0 win.

Away for a few days. Let me tell you about the Fords I’m giving away. (This is worth seeing through to the end, btw.)

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