We are a soccer family. We’ve played it, coached it, and now we watch it. Especially with the World Cup going on! Over the years, I’ve shared many soccer terms here, including nutmeg, pitch, hat trick, and even how soccer got its name. It’s time to add another: brace. Pause your scrolling, Word Nerds, to learn about an essential soccer term.
According to Sports Illustrated, Cristiano Ronaldo holds the record for scoring the most braces. He’s had well over 200 of them. But what does that mean?
The word brace, when used as a noun, comes from Middle English and Anglo-French. Brace means a clasp, pair, pair of arms, or support. It derives from the Latin bracchia, the plural of bracchium, which means arm. (Thank you, Merriam-Webster) In soccer, if a player scores a brace, that means he or she scored two goals in one game. Considering soccer games usually have low scores, this is harder to accomplish than it sounds.
But scoring a brace is easier than scoring a hat trick, which is three goals in one game. By the way, hat trick comes from British cricket. When a player retired three batsmen with three consecutive balls, the club gave him with a new hat to honor his accomplishment. You can read more about hat trick here.
So now, when you are watching the USA match tonight, if a player scores a brace, you’ll know exactly what all the chatter is about! We’ll be watching, because we kinda love the sport around here. See this clip from my favorite show, Ted Lasso:
Sidebar: Since I paused our YouTubeTV subscription (It’s so expensive! We pay for Oct-May to watch Premier League Soccer and college basketball), we’ve been watching the latest world cup matches via Telemundo on Peacock. Quote from my daughter: “I’ve never heard anyone say GOAL for that long in my life!” 😉
Are there other soccer terms you’d like to learn more about? Have you figured out what off side means yet? Perhaps that should be another post…
Thanks for getting nerdy with me!
