Skip to main content

SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY AWAY 1993-95


I must start this article with a confession. While I support Rotherham United now, I was raised as a fan of Rotherham’s closest rivals, Sheffield Wednesday. “Closest” for Rotherham fans, anyway – Wednesday don’t give much of a damn about Rotherham, in my experience. It’s hardly in the same league as switching allegiance from Celtic to Rangers, I know, but I admit I still feel the faintest twinge of guilt over my fondness for Wednesday. No such fond wishes for Sheffield United, of course. I’m not a complete monster. Anyway, today I’m looking at a shirt from that Wednesday-supporting period of my youth, with Sheffield Wednesday’s 1993-95 away kit.


A very nice shirt it is too. Yellow and black is often a good combination, and the yellow pinstripes give the kit a nice balance, breaking up what would otherwise look an awful lot like a referee’s shirt. Actually, I believe Wednesday went with a black away kit in 1993 because the rules around Premier League referee’s shirts changed around that time – the officials switched from black to green, freeing up clubs to experiment with kits that exude a certain amount of menace. More menace than an all-yellow shirt would, at any rate.
I’d hesitate to use the word “classy” to describe this (or any other) football shirt, because I wouldn’t want to propagate the idea that it’s fine to turn up at your friend’s wedding reception in a replica football kit. It’s not appropriate attire, or so I’m told. There is something about this shirt that’s bit more elegant than many of the period, though. Perhaps it’s the connotations of wealth and success that are attached to pinstripes, or the colour scheme.


Or maybe it’s the fact that the shirt has KING printed on it a hundred times. No, it’s definitely not that. It’s on there to promote Puma’s ‘Puma King’ brand, but it still comes across as a bit vainglorious. Another way of looking at it is as a tribute to Wednesday’s then-defender Phil King, who did indeed play some matches wearing this very strip.


Then there’s the badge, and even if I hadn’t been raised as a Wednesdayite I’d still rank it as one of the best club crests ever to appear in English football. Designed, so the story goes, by a local art student and now sadly replaced by a more “traditional” heraldically-styled badge, the minimalist owl just works. It’s immediately recognisable, easily replicable by anyone bored curing a school lesson or business meeting, unique and stylish. I suspect many Wednesday fans are attached to this badge because the team were wearing it during their most successful modern period – playing Premier League football, winning the League Cup in 1991, reaching both cup finals in 1993 and the like. For me, it immediately reminds me of the footballers who were my heroes as a pre-teen, players like Chris Waddle, Des Walker and Kevin Pressman. It’s always the ones from your childhood that you remember best, and I’ve definitely got happy memories of wearing this shirt down the park, refusing to have it tucked in because that was how Chris Waddle wore his shirt. Sadly the only other thing I had in common with Chris Waddle was that I got injured a lot. I was a clumsy child.
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