Competitions to design teams’ strips are nothing new among what you might call ‘smaller’ teams – and adidas have got in on the act now too. At most clubs, the first-choice colours and style are constant and so don’t need to be set, but Cork City are different to most.
We’ll get the plug for our Cork City Kits site out of the way early for those who want to see every single combination (up to the start of the 2015 season, an update is overdue), but here is just a flavour of what the ‘home’ strips have been since 1984:
Quite a few varieties as you can see. For us, it’s something we enjoy – once green, white and red are included, you know it’s City as no other league team in Ireland has those three colours. It’s like Bayern Munich or Glentoran or the Oregon Ducks – no matter the layout, the identity still shines through. To be fair, since 2002 – barring the 2006/07 shirt – it has generally been accepted that the home is green, with varying amounts of white and green.
Gerry Desmond is a former editor of the City programme and a font of knowledge on all aspects of the club, is of the view that a constant look for the club would be better and so he proposed a vote of members of Foras (the supporters’ trust which owns the club) on what it should be. While the original motion was made in 2014, the vote ended up taking place on September 23 and the options – created by Kobe Designs – are below.
One of the things @ForasTrust members will be doing this evening is deciding the basic design of future @CorkCityFC home shirts. pic.twitter.com/2rjfrFK2Kv
— Niamh O'Mahony (@Niamh_OMahony) September 23, 2016
Of the votes cast, just under 50 percent were in favour of ‘plain’ (as in body, as the example in the picture obviously has contrasting sleeves), with the sash style coming second.
One quibble we would have, though, is that the vote took a green base as the starting point. The club have recently released a retro version of the shirt worn when drawing with Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup in 1991, which has proven very popular. White was worn in winning the club’s first league title in 1992-93 as well as in the two successful FAI Cup finals, 1998 and 2007, so it leaves us wondering how the vote might have gone if the main colour was also up for debate (to our minds, red should always be the tertiary colour on the home shirt).
It was agreed almost unanimously that any future home shirts should have green, white and red where possible, so it will be interesting to see how this is reconciled with teamwear options which often only have two colours.
