Arsenal’s bruising re-encounter

Yesterday saw the launch of the new Arsenal change kit for 2019-20.

Unsurprisingly, it is yellow and navy, the colour-scheme used by adidas for their four away strips in their first stint with Arsenal, and, as hoped for and expected by many, the basis for it is the 1991-93 ‘bruised banana’.

For those of us of a certain age, it seems strange that this kit has acquired such street cred of later, given that it was rather unpopular when released and spent the 1990s populating ‘worst kits’ lists.

However, adidas haven’t gone for a straight facsimile of the original, instead using elements of it and reworking them for an original offering.

It’s an understandable approach, as to just do a copy would have been quite lazy, even it would probably ensure popularity. Progress must be shown – it would be great if my son looked exactly like me, but better if he also had some of his mother’s features.

In addition, modern-day designers no doubt would consider themselves superior to those of three decades ago, so that talent has to be illustrated. A good example of this is the new Coventry City kit, which we will hopefully look at fairly soon, or last year’s Germany change strip, which had its roots in the 1988-91 style but which was fully new.

The new Arsenal third kit will be navy shirts and socks with black shorts – for our money, yellow shorts would have been better so as to allow the two strips to be mixed as needed. While there may well be yellow shorts available for trips to Southampton or Sheffield United – as was the case with the original bruised banana – perhaps Arsenal are planning a retro nod to the first adidas era practice of away shirts with home shorts?