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

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 e...
Post a Comment
Read more

SPAIN AWAY EURO 2012

Never was the phrase “championes, championes, olé olé olé” more appropriate than between 2008 and 2012, when Spain won the 2008 and 2012 European Championships and even managed to claim their first ever World Cup victory in 2010 despite Nigel de Jong trying to kick Xabi Alonso’s lungs out through his back during the final . An astonishing period of international dominance, then, and here’s the shirt that they wore while winning Euro 2012. Okay, so it’s an away shirt that they wore once in the group stages, but here it is. Sky blue and black isn’t a colour combination you see all that often on football shirts, which is a shame because it’s a good pairing. Perhaps black and blue are so inescapably associated with Inter that other teams tend to avoid it, but Spain went with it for this away shirt. The black trim feels rather disjointed on this shirt, with the Adidas stripes not going all the way down the sleeves and the cuffs not being black all the way around. It’s all a bit...
Post a Comment
Read more