Skip to main content

DRONFIELD TOWN HOME - UNKNOWN YEAR



Every now and then I stop and think about just how many football clubs exists around the world. “A lot” doesn’t quite seem to cut it. 737 teams took part in last year’s FA Cup, and that’s just English clubs that qualified. Multiply that by all the countries around the world where football is played at least semi-professionally (so almost all of them) and you have a mind-boggling amount of players, fixtures, results, small pennants with fringe around the edge, old blokes in pubs telling you that they were there for That Famous Match, badges and, yes, kits. Dronfield Town FC are definitely one of those teams, and here’s one of their home shirts.


Dronfield’s a small Derbyshire town located fairly near to where I live, which is probably why I managed to find this shirt in a local charity shop. I can’t tell you what year it’s from, but there’s not a huge window to chose from given that Dronfield Town were formed in 1998. I’d guess around the turn of the millennium. The Dronfield Town website doesn’t go back that far, though, and it’s difficult to find information about teams that play in the Northern Counties East League Division One, which is DTFC’s current home. Wikipedia tells me that’s the tenth tier of English football. I’ll take their word for it -  I’ll admit I get lost if I go any lower than the Conference. That means there's a good chance that this shirt was match-worn, because I can't imagine Dronfield Town are doing a roaring trade in replica shirts.
As for the shirt itself, it’s a classic striped number in red and black from Prostar that brings to mind Italian giants AC Milan and, because I’m a huge dork, a team of footballing vampires. This is definitely the kit that Transylvania Wanderers would wear.
Being as basic as it is, there’s not much else to say about it besides mentioning the stars that run down each sleeve, giving the shirt just a hint of USA-style razzmatazz. Not quite a shirt fit for Evel Knievel, but there’s the faintest hint of sparkle and stardust on an otherwise no-nonsense shirt.


The club’s badge, both this version and a slightly different one that they’re using these days, features Dronfield’s most “famous” landmark – the Peel Monument, a small structure that looks like a house for a cartoon witch. It was built to honour Sir Robert Peel for his part in repealing the Corn Laws, and that’s one of the most British-sounding sentences I’ve ever written down.
Speaking of history, Dronfield Town got a new footballing neighbour in 2001 when Sheffield FC moved to the town. Sheffield FC are famous for being the oldest football club in the world. They also play in red and black. I hope Dronfield Town didn’t feel put out by this.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

FLUMINENSE FC HOME 2001-03 (FAKE)

Today we’re looking at shirt from top-flight Brazilian club Fluminense, with their 2001-03 home shirt – a kit for which the word “striped” does not seem sufficient. Looking like stick of seaside rock in a variety of fruity flavours, it’s a bold design from Adidas that combines Fluminense’s traditional burgundy, green and white stripes with a thick red stripe across the shoulders, presumably included to give the famous three stripes of Adidas a clear space to work with. Despite the visual busyness of the kit I think it all comes together in a rather pleasing way, possibly because the relatively muted colours keep things calm even when you look more closely and realise that each white stripe has a very narrow red and green stripe down each side. There are herds of zebra with fewer stripes than this shirt. What I do like about it is that it has an exotic flavour to it. Personally, as a British football fan this is the kind of shirt that really does look as though it comes from ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"BRAZIL" HOME

If you were putting together a list of history’s most iconic football kits, the gold and green of Brazil would surely be right at the top. I mean, number one with a bullet. What else could possibly compete? It’s practically the uniform of the World Cup itself, the outfit of some truly legendary players, the merest hint of it summoning forth memories of incredible goals, incredible teams and, incredibly, a good television commercial . Yes, it would be wonderful if I had an official Brazil shirt. I don’t. I have this thing instead, I’m sure a lot of kids who were into football ended up with unofficial versions of shirts, cheap knock-offs and loosely club-affiliated “street wear” tops bought by relatives who didn’t know better or who (understandably) baulked at paying ridiculous prices for real-deal shirts. I definitely had some of these shirts growing up in varying degrees of quality, from a retro-style t-shirt based on Brazil’s seventies shirts that I loved so much I wore it ...
Post a Comment
Read more