We’re always loath to use the phrase ‘worst-kept secret’, but, certainly, the composition of the new Liverpool third strip, launched on Tuesday morning, had been well-known among kit aficionados.
Still, for Reds fans of a certain vintage, it’s a special moment – the completion of a good set of kits and a reunion, after 34 years, with the adidas trefoil logo.
It’s fitting too, that a kit featuring green shirts and white shorts should be the one to carry the mark which was so associated with the club’s dominance in the late 1980s, as that was the format – albeit in a different shade – of the change kit when they premiered the adidas Equipment logo in 1991.
While Premier League and Uefa regulations around the size of manufacturers’ markings mean that a straight copy would not be feasible anyway, adidas have still done well to reference the past without merely imitating it.
The colour is more like the 1992-93 variant, albeit different. The wrapover crew-neck style is of course similar to that which appeared on the Liverpool home kits from 1987-91, while the ‘shadow stripes’ that appear on the new shirt are in fact made up of small eyelets in the fabric – the same as on the 1995-96 home kit (which was the basis for a recent Fantasy Kit Friday offering).
Incidentally, the 1991-92 and 1992-93 green kits were worn with green shorts far more often than white – Liverpool tend not to wear change shorts of their own volition nowadays, so any alternatives would only have a chance of being seen in the Champions League
One missed opportunity, we would argue, is opting for black as the colour for the complementary goalkeeper kit that will retail when there is a yellow/black option available, as was used in 1991-92 – yellow may yet be seen in action, though.
Overall, though, the reaction has been positive – one might say that that’s inevitable, but it’s very easy to get these things wrong. Equally, one could be sniffy and say that exactly the same colours and design repurposed as a Newcastle United away, say, would not receive the same acclaim, but that misses the point.
The strip is being judged emotively rather than purely objectively – it need not be a bad thing for kits to matter so much.
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See here for the 1991-92 InterSport catalogue, featuring the then-new Liverpool kits, among others:
