Its infantile, its embarrassing, it should be the name of a childs toy.
Its not a proper name for a national team about to represent us at the worlds biggest sporting event.
The name is a relic from a different age. It was invented in 1967 by journalist Tony Horstead who coined the moniker while covering the national teams tour of Vietnam.
It was probably cute at the time and no doubt it caught on among players and fans. But that was a time when the game was a fourth rung attraction in the national sporting scene. It was an oddity. A game mainly played by foreigners and Australians of dubious manhood.
Sure, other teams at the World Cup have naff nicknames. They range from the optimistic (Cameroon styles itself as the Indomitable Lions), to the vaguely threatening (Slovakia is known as The Fighting Jondas), to the merely dull (Holland is the Oranje, which begs the question do they become the Whites when they play in their away shirts).
Then there is the plain inappropriate. England goes by Three Lions, which is weird because they usually play like pussycats at big tournaments.
But none of the other 31 nations has a worse nickname than the Socceroos. Although that may have been different if Scotland had miraculously qualified. Scotland has been known to go by the Bravehearts, which is just wrong on so many levels. Not the least of which is William Wallace was torn to shreds at the end. Although on second thoughts
