WAGs
The WAGs acronym came about following an increasing focus on the coverage of athletes' partners in the late-20th century, and it came into common use during the 2006 FIFA World Cup to refer to Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole, although the term had been used occasionally before that.
[3] Susie Dent's annual Language Report for the Oxford University Press (2006) capitalised the entire acronym as "WAG" ("wife and/or girlfriend") .
We're individuals",[15] Others, such as Girls Aloud member Cheryl Cole, have similarly rejected the eponym and to emphasise their credentials as career women in their own right.
London Lite[18] and Metro[19] used the y patronising acronym "WABs" ("wives and birdies", the latter a pun on the term for a one under par score for a hole) with reference to the partners of the European team as they arrived in Ireland for the 2006 Ryder Cup at The K Club, Straffan, County Kildare.
"CWAGs" (Cricket Wives and Girlfriends) was applied to partners of the England cricket team in the series of Test matches against Australia that began in Brisbane in November 2006: for example, "Jessica the Cwag knocks Ashes Test crowd for six"[20] (the subject of this headline being singer Jessica Taylor, of the group Liberty X, fiancée of batsman Kevin Pietersen).
"WAG" had previously been applied in the context of cricket: for example to model Minki van der Westhuizen, who had been associated with the South African captain, Graeme Smith.
[33] Other imitative acronyms to emerge in 2006 included: Interest in the partners of footballers dates back at least to the late 1950s when the long-serving England captain Billy Wright married the singer Joy Beverley.
During the 1970 World Cup in Mexico the England manager Sir Alf Ramsey (1920–99) expressed concern at the effects on the team's cohesion of the presence of the wives of four players,[40] a view that seems to have been shared by some other members of the squad.
[41] England's quarter-final defeat by West Germany in that competition has been widely attributed to goalkeeping lapses by Peter Bonetti, whose pre-match nerves were thought by many, including Ramsey himself, to have been accentuated by rumours circulating about the alleged behaviour of his wife Frances.
[41] By contrast, during the 1966 World Cup, their wives drove themselves to Wembley and the FA booked them a single function room in the Royal Garden Hotel at Kensington.
Keane blamed United's loss of form on some of his teammates' fixation with wealth, claiming that they had "forgot about the game, lost the hunger that got you the Rolex, the cars, the mansion."
Earlier in the season, Keane had publicly advocated the break-up of the Treble-winning team[43] as he believed the teammates who had played in United's victorious 1999 Champions League final no longer had the motivation to work as hard.
[44][45] When Keane became manager of Sunderland A.F.C, he complained about the difficulty signing players to the city in northeast England, as their wives or girlfriends insisted they only move to teams based in London.
"[46] During the 2006 World Cup the press gave increasing coverage to the socialising and shopping activities of the wives and girlfriends of English footballers based in the German town of Baden-Baden.
"It was a circus", Rio Ferdinand claimed, alleging that distraction caused by the women in Baden-Baden badly hampered England's 2006 World Cup finals campaign.
[47] Prominent women at Baden-Baden included Victoria Beckham, wife of then England captain David Beckham, whom the New Yorker described as "Queen of the Wags"[48] and the Sunday Times as "the original Wag";[49] Cheryl, née Tweedy, of the group Girls Aloud, who shortly afterwards married Ashley Cole ("Wag weds"[50]), from whom she was divorced in 2010; Coleen Rooney, née Mcloughlin, who married Wayne Rooney in June 2008 and who was variously described as a "chavette" and, by the end of the year, listed by the Times as a "national treasure";[51] and fitness instructor Carly Cole née Zucker, wife of Joe Cole, described by Susie Whally in the Sunday Times as a "new WAG on the block [who] has set the tone for the season's most wanted muscles".
[52] Other women that aroused considerable interest included Melanie Slade, due to her relative youth – she was an A-level student at the time – girlfriend of Theo Walcott, who, at seventeen, was himself the youngest member of the England squad; Abbey Clancy, girlfriend of Peter Crouch; Steven Gerrard's fiancé Alex Curran, a model frequently featured in tabloids and fashion magazines; and Spanish former waitress Elen Rives, the then-fiancée of Frank Lampard.
[57] These were mostly the implications of "over-exposure" of certain styles: for example, that the Hermès "Birkin" bag had become less desirable as a result of being de rigueur among the women in Baden-Baden[58] (a development dubbed by Shane Watson as "baglash"[59]); or that reaction to the excessively coiffed hair and "vacant perfection" had perhaps been the "tipping point" for a revival of fashions of the 1980s, commended by Armstrong as "the last era of anti-slick".
[62] Sunday Times columnist India Knight observed, while waiting in an airport queue, that "it's as if a low-level wannabe footballer's wife vibe that is neither aesthetically pleasing nor edifying has become the norm ...
[37] Among other features, Knight identified "enough pink glitter to satisfy the girliest of five-year-olds", massive handbags and huge designer sunglasses.
Reflecting on sunglasses as an accessory, Sunday Times Style's senior fashion writer Colin McDowell suggested that, whereas women had been sure that the poise of Jacqueline Kennedy (1929–94) and Audrey Hepburn (1929–93), style icons of the mid-20th century, had been due to their shading their eyes, "Wags ... far from using dark glasses to encourage others to leave them alone, treat them as a weapon to attract and excite the paparazzi".
[63] In the Estelle song "American Boy", Kanye West raps the lyrics; "But I still talk that ca-a-sh, Cuz a lotta WAGs wanna hear it".
The separation of one of the contenders, Michaela Henderson-Thynne, from her erstwhile partner, Middlesbrough midfielder Stewart Downing, raised some issues of principle and terminology.
[67] As if to emphasise the perceptive opinion of former England full-back Jimmy Armfield that there was "a real international flavour to this World Cup",[68] the Sunday Times published during the 2006 tournament a photograph of the wives of French players Thierry Henry and David Trezeguet with the caption "French Wags Nicole Henry and Beatrice Trezeguet share a smacker [i.e.
