OT - Can we speak American now?
Now that we are on the verge of becomming a respectable soccer power, can we now please talk about the sport in our own language?
Can we stop assuming that we have to pretend we are British when we talk about football soccer?
I believe that we have now earned the right to not have to call the field the "pitch", the teams the "sides", a zero-zero score "Nil-Nil", speed as "pace", the uniform the "kit", and how the USA are is improving.
I'm pretty sure that they are not required to use these British terms in Germany or Italy or Argentina, but rather they are free to use the German or Italian or Spanish terms for them.
Sounds too much like souldongpunchbowl, which is something Satan drinks out of.
Well, I'm all for using the American terms with which we are familiar for soccer (teams instead of sides, field for pitch, zero instead of nil) but I'm also split because I think the British terms are quaint and fit with the foreignness of the game to us. I think we'll get used to it the way it is now, rather than adapting to the American dialect
Hockey has most of its terms taken from its beginnings in Canada. I can't think of any major differences because I'm just so used to the words they used. Maybe something like "power play" sounds weird to hockey players in other parts of the world, and I know i can set off a huge argument over whether hockey pants are called shorts or breezers.
This may be somewhat controversial to some, and I don't mean to be insensitive, but basketball has introduced some inner-city, "black" terms to sports. I don't think the slang like "slam dunk" and "trey" for a three-pointer were a part of the game when it was white guys in Kansas, but as the game evolved, the street-ball words were brought into what we now consider normal basketball parlance. It's another example of listeners getting used to the terms used by announcers during a foreign sporting event.
Im not a terribly big soccer fan, but I sort of like the nomenclature like "pace", "quality", "kits", "sides", etc. I especially vastly prefer "booked" to "penalized".
Also, just saying - if you watched ESPN, you saw Ruud Gullitt (who is Dutch) and that gnomish EPL manager (who I thing is Latin American) use these same terms.
so I get like 1/2 credit for that, right?
...you need it, yes. [gives interwebs pat on the back]
I know when I was growing up playing soccer I always had coaches refer to the field as the pitch. "Keep the ball on the pitch" and so on. "Pace" makes sense, and again, growing up coaches always said to have more pace on the ball or play the game with better pace. I mean, we use terms like zip (for a football pass) or tempo (for running the offense). If a team over in Britian were playing our football, and their coaches were using those terms (because that is how they learned it), then it would probably be caught on by those players and so forth.
So, in regards to soccer, "pitch", "pace", "sides", "nil" are just the termonology of the sport. It's like "love" in tennis, or deuce, games have their own termonology, and I think when talking about soccer it's ok. But the moment someone regards the Michigan Stadium turf as the Michigan pitch, then I guess shit is allowed to hit the fan.