Skip to main content

AL-NASSR FC AWAY 2009-10


The name of Saudi Arabian team Al-Nassr FC means “the victory,” which feels a bit presumptuous. Fortunately for Al-Nassr they’re one of the country’s more successful teams and have presumably avoided their name becoming a target of ironic mockery. They certainly felt confident enough to wear a silver away shirt during the 2009-10 season, which is what I believe is called a “power move.”


I do mean silver, too. This shirt isn’t simply grey, and although it’s difficult to get across in photographs it’s very shiny and metallic-looking. Anyone wearing this shirt looks like they’re all wrapped up and ready to go in the oven for an hour at 200ºC, and I absolutely love it. A few teams have gone down the painfully ostentatious route of having a metallic gold shirt, most famously with an Arsenal away shirt in the early 2000s and a couple of seasons ago AC Milan had a gold keeper kit, but there aren’t many silver shirts out there. Sheffield Wednesday had a frankly astonishing silver and purple kit in the eighties that I highly recommend you check out and which is one of my most-coveted shirts, but this Al-Nassr shirt makes for a good back-up until I can rob a bank to pay for the Wednesday one.
The yellow and blue stripes are a nice touch. They make the shirt look a bit like it belongs to a team of Swedish cyborgs, but they’re actually a splash of Al-Nassr’s blue and yellow home colours. The yellow and blue represent the sands of the desert and the waters of the Arabian Gulf respectively, and I really like this “one stripe” pattern. It’s relatively uncommon and has some of the style of a sash while not being too “wacky” for a respectable shirt, if for some mad reason you wanted to make one of those.


The geographical basis for the club’s colours are made more obvious on the badge, which has a map of the Arabian Peninsula on it. Okay, “map” might be pushing it. If you were driving to Riyadh to watch Al-Nassr play this wouldn’t help much if you got lost.
A great shirt from a club I don’t know much about, then, although I did learn that a few famous names have been associated with the club over the years. During the time this shirt was in use the club was managed by former Inter goalkeeper Walter Zenga, who managed a bunch of clubs around the world before pitching up at Wolverhampton Wanderers. His first match in charge of Wolves was a 2-2 draw against Rotherham United. He was sacked three months later. More interesting is that Al-Nassr had former Colombia goalkeeper René “El Loco” Higuita on their coaching staff for a while. You know, the guy who performed the gleefully bizarre “scorpion kick” save against England that one time, an event I will never tire of bringing up. Getting Higuita in to train your goalkeepers is an, erm, brave move, so credit to Al Nassr for their boldness.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

US AVELLINO 1912 HOME 1995-96

  This was probably just me, but when I was a kid I did wonder whether the reason you saw so few football teams wearing green was the worry that they’d blend in with the pitch and thus become difficult to see. I don’t know how I thought this’d translate down at pitch level; maybe the players would just see floating shorts and hovering limbs. Look, gimme a break, I was a pre-teen. If wearing green does make it more difficult to pick out your teammates, here’s a shirt from a club that decided to take that risk. It’s Italian club US Avellino 1912’s 1995-96 home shirt! It’s a shirt that most definitely comes from the nineties. The abstract pattern and spray-brushed look of the sleeves and the Diadora logo woven into the polyester body of the shirt itself anchor the shirt very much in that time period – although the lace-up “granddad” collar and the embroidered badge do give this kit just the whiff of a bygone age, when the footballs were made from unrelenting leather and every
Post a Comment
Read more

ALGERIA HOME 2010-11

Last time I looked at a shirt from non-league English team Dronfield Town , so today I thought I’d get as far away as possible from that with a shirt from an African national team. Not physically as far away as possible, then (I suppose that’d mean a kit from New Zealand) but far away in terms of culture, climate and skill level. A treat for animal lovers, this one – it’s Algeria’s 2010-11 home shirt. Of all the colours for a football shirt to be, I’d say white is probably my least favourite. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Perhaps it’s because white is the definition of “plain” and I prefer the uglier, gaudier end of the football kit spectrum. Or maybe it’s because of the clubs I associate with white shirts: the arrogance of Real Madrid, the years of disappointment watching England teams wearing white, the fact that, as the saying goes, everyone hate Leeds. There are still plenty of predominantly white shirts that I do like, though, and this is one of them. The colou
Post a Comment
Read more

ROTHERHAM UNITED AWAY 1993-94

For Football Laundry’s inaugural post, it seemed appropriate to look at a shirt from the team I actually support. That would be Rotherham United, my home-town club, a club almost entirely without glamour whose most famous celebrity fans are the Chuckle Brothers . Still, I feel like Rotherham United punch above their weight a lot of the time, with the upcoming season being another one spent in the Championship - Premier League, here we come. Anyway, let’s check out Rotherham’s 1993-94 away shirt, shall we? Made by Matchwinner, this is perfect example of mid-nineties away kit design. While the home shirts were (mostly) kept fairly straightforward in deference to the traditions of the clubs and to avoid upsetting the fans, away shirts were fair game for experimentation. Yellow has been a pretty common colour for Rotherham’s away shirts over the years, and here it’s complemented - perhaps not the right word – by a swirling spray of black that could be intended to evoke tiger st
1 comment
Read more