If you’re unaware of David Squires, his new book is the perfect opportunity to catch up on some of his oeuvre; if you’re one of those for whom his Guardian strip is a weekly highlight, the book is a refresher on some work you might have forgotten – easy to do, given the consistency with which he produces top-quality output.
He’s also a kit-nerd. Little details in his previous books have already inspired articles and the new publication also had something which piqued our interest. In a cartoon comparing those involved in Brexit to scorers of great own goals, there was this:
Always a stickler for getting kits right, David’s inclusion of the Diadora ‘lozenges’ (as described by John Devlin) means we can date the kit to 2004-05, part of a period of our years of third-level education and the alcoholic haze that that brought, meaning we were blithely unaware of Tony Popovic’s marvellous effort.
While Palace had had white shorts and socks in the mid-1990s, we were unaware of instances where red shots and white socks had been used. Basically, that season they had red shorts and socks – the look we’d most associate with Palace, but one not seen since 2011 – while their away was white and blue (though, oddly, with black shorts numbers).
That meant that, for the trip to Fratton Park in September, the away wouldn’t have been suitable due to the blue sleeves so it was deemed best to wear the white socks with the home shirts and shorts:
For the return fixture on Boxing Day, Portsmouth opted to switch to their darker blue away kit – they did have white third shirts but the dominance of red on the Palace kit meant it wasn’t a problem.
Palace were relegated at the end of that 2004-05 season and their only league meetings with Portsmouth since then were in 2010-11, when they wore their sash away shirts with red shorts, and 2011-12, when all-yellow was used.
