What's in a name?

by MICHAEL STEVEN

WHAT'S in a name, you may well ask. After all if you barracked for St Kilda you'd be hardly interested in the fact that your football team was named after a frost bitten uninhabited piece of rock in the north Atlantic. And who cares if Essendon was originally a village in Hertfordshire, or Richmond was a village in Surrey outside London.

Other Melbourne based teams have also inglorious names with somewhat mediocre origins.

Hawthorn is an attractive plant species from the Shelterbelt in Canada which blooms in May.

Good old Fitzroy could well mean the Bastard Son of a King.

North Melbourne tried to avoid any association with anything other than its immediate locality. The only trouble is that it now has no locality and resembles a troupe of Bananas in Pjamas travelling through Israel.

The origins of Footscray have too been deserted, but they have retained their unfashionable British Bulldog and can be thanked for saving Collingwood from the ignominy of wearing the red, white and blue.

South Melbourne was once a football club south of Melbourne CBD. It was once supported by painters and dockers and other such left wingers. It's now a privately owned consortium which operates from Sydney. There are no communists to be seen in the red and white any more.

And then there is Melbourne. The football club was obviously named after the world's most liveable city but the demonic emblem would look better if it was dressed in RM Williams and imitation Harris Tweed coats.

No one cares about the Carlton Football Club. It was probably named after a lager, quipped one expert in the Peacock Inn late one night. But the absence of imagination which led to them being called the Blues is mind boggling.

And then there was Collingwood. Admiral Lord Cuthbert Collingwood that is.

We've all heard about Horatio Nelson and the battle of Trafalgar. But Nelson died mid battle. Like Weideman in 1958, Admiral Collingwood took over the leadership and led his troops to a glorious victory. Even before the main battle had begun Collingwood's Royal Sovereign engaged the fleet for an hour before the rest arrived. Again, like in 1958, the enemy was focused on attacking the perpetrator of almost lethal blows delivered at the start of the battle, allowing the rest of Nelson's fleet to concentrate on the game plan organised on the Thursday night before.

Born in Newcastle, which also wears the black and white, Admiral Collingwood rose from humble working class origins to world fame through major achievements of bravery, daring and skill.

What's in a name you may well ask.

Edtior's note: No, you haven't tuned into the Footy Show by mistake...

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