On Saturday afternoon, Arsenal look to get back to winning ways in the Premier League when they travel to Elland Road to take on Leeds United.
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The Gunners will be in their blue second kit and we can assumed that the change was mandated by the league, like last season’s north London derbies.
Mikel Arteta seems to prefer that they play in red and white as often as possible – they wore their primary outfit in six out of eight games in the league phase of the Champions League, for instance – but incidences like these do technically allow for some of the Gunners’ contingent to wear the club’s traditional main colour.
While a red goalkeeper shirt would never be functional for Manchester United or Liverpool – or Bayern Munich, one would think, but that happens quite a lot – one could be utilised by Arsenal when the white quantities on their home kit cause an issue.
It has only happened once in the Premier League era – and the second game in the first season of the ‘whole new ball game’, at that – the trip to Blackburn Rovers in August 1992.
The new main goalkeeper shirt that season was blue, which obviously couldn’t be used, and the green backup fell foul of the league’s decision to go with green as the main colour for match officials.
A grey version of the new adidas design ended up being worn for much of that campaign but that too was not considered suitable against Blackburn’s white halves and so, just once, a red version was worn by David Seaman.
A decade previously, there was also a red goalkeeper shirt in the kit-room to accompany the green and navy change kit and in the 1950 FA Cup final, when Arsenal changed to old gold with Liverpool in white, manager Tom Whittaker decided that goalkeeper George Swindin should wear a deep crimson jersey as a nod to the usual red.
Could they revive a similar approach for games such as today’s, where they need to change kit but the opponent isn’t in red?
I do believe the grey shirt in 1992/93 wasn’t yet available – case in point, Liverpool also didn’t have it as an option early in the 1992/93 season, which resulted in blue (!!!) being used for one game, hence the unusual use of a red shirt. Soon after, adidas added the grey shirt and that ended up being a second-choice shirt for both clubs.
To me, and yes I’m an old traditionalist fart… but changing kit when there isn’t a clash is something that irks me, therefore goalkeepers should just stick to reasonable colour choices. Little wonder Twitter had accounts such as Pointless Away Kits doing the rounds.
Though in my opinion, having a goalkeeper jersey colour that is very much the home shirt colour is just plain daft… though Aston Villa seem to be blurring those lines with at least one of their colour options this season (I’m looking at you, trefoil-badged “plum” goalkeeper kit used alongside the white third kit… it’s almost claret!).