WHAT'S in a name? “Give us an S, give us a wubble-u”, you know what comes next and what the name means to you.

It’s the team you follow and for some, the place where you were born and raised.

The town of Swindon has a football team and so that’s the name the club uses - couldn’t be simpler.

Does a name mean something more? Can it affect your performance? Is teamwork better if you are United?

Do Rovers, Rangers and Wanderers drift about all over the pitch? Are City slicker?

If your name could determine how you played and performed, we would surely choose them more carefully.

Maybe this idea of nominative determinism was in the mind of the Sudanese club which named itself “Khartoum 3.''

By doing so they guaranteed that whenever the scores were read it would always sound like a victory, unless they lost by four or more, of course.

I wonder what went through the minds of the club in the Sudanese capital when they were trying to come up with a name.

Did they come up with Khartoum 1? Too low. Khartoum 2? Under-ambitious. 4? Let’s not get cocky, 3 it is.

Of course, names are often given after events rather than before and there is long-standing tradition of naming streets and places after famous battles and people.

Indeed, Swindon has a Sudanese connection itself with a street named after the Battle of Omdurman (the city across the Nile from Khartoum) where, in 1898, Major-General Kitchener (another Swindon street) defeated the Mahdi who had had killed General Gordon at the Siege of Khartoum three years earlier.

Gordon’s last stand was commemorated by the naming of Gordon Gardens.

This small Swindon street within earshot of the works’ hooter was where my father was born, though his birthplace is not marked by a plaque, only by the entrance barrier to the multi-storey car park which now sits on site of the row of terraced houses which once stood there.

Just a Yaser Kasim free kick away from Gordon Gardens is the only Swindon street (or a street anywhere, for that matter) named after a Town footballer, Fleming Way.

Swindon is not alone in having a road named Fleming. In Spain many towns have “calles” or “avenidas” bearing that name, and outside the “Plaza de Toros” in Madrid there is a statue to a man called Fleming.

No, Harold’s 11 appearances for England were not enough to spread his fame as far as the streets of Spain.

These thoroughfares are, of course, named after the good Doctor Fleming of penicillin fame.

Such was the importance of the discovery of the antibiotic to ordinary Spaniards - saving lives where people would have died of infections contracted as a result of simple wounds - that he is celebrated throughout the country – including by bullfighters in Madrid, who erected the statue to thank him from saving many of their number from the infections that inevitably followed a goring.

When some Spanish friends visited me in Swindon, they naturally assumed that Fleming Way was a similar celebration of the Scottish biologist, not of his footballing namesake.

Returning to the idea that you can influence outcomes or make things happen by name alone, it seems to happen outside football too.

A friend tells me a tale from his workplace where a job applicant had inserted the job title in the place where his first name should have been on the application form.

Either a canny ploy or just careless editing, but either way, Assistant Market Manager Robinson didn’t get the job.

So to commemorate a famous battle and ensure that the result of the same is always heard when the scores are announced at 5 pm on a Saturday afternoon, I suggest STFC seeks a suitable new name. “Swindon Town 1 Bristol City 0” has a ring to it.