Tag Archives: Celtic

Celtic, Hibernian and the overall clash

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Change kits, Clashes, Football kits, Kit history

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  • Credit to The Celtic Wiki for having the relevant information for us to work with.

Colour-clashes and how to solve them – or not – has long been something of interest in these quarters.

In yesterday’s Midweek Mashup, we mentioned the ‘overall clash’. Effectively, this is a situation where two opposing shirts may not clash directly with each other, but the colours of the shorts and socks can have a big impact in how easy or difficult it is to distinguish the two kits.

As we mentioned in this piece on Newcastle United’s Asics kits, a ‘classic’ striped or hooped shirt can be worn against a full kit in either of the stripe colours – once the opposition’s kit is a solid block.

Newcastle were able to wear their home kit away to all-white Leeds United in 1994-95, while the same shirt, with white shorts and socks, also worked away to Wimbledon, who were all-navy.

Which brings us to Celtic and Hibernian, two Scottish clubs with Irish roots and who both wear green and white as a result. Nowadays, in an era where teams change as much as they can, the away side changes when they meet – and both changed in the 2001 Scottish Cup final – but until the late 1980s, both clubs wore their home kits.

April 1987 is the first example we have of Celtic wearing an away kit at Easter Road (they wore hoops there in November of that season). From the summer of ’87, Hibernian partnered with adidas and for the next six seasons their change stripes would be white shirts and green shorts, making the situation more awkward at Celtic Park.

As a result, we’ll look at a specific example from May 1989. These were the clubs’ two home kits:

With good intentions, Hibs wore their away shirts and shorts, as well as the home socks to avoid a clash with Celtic’s white pairs.

Now, there are those who look at kits as three separate elements, and who feel that once each team has each element in a different colour to the opposition, everything is fine.

This match-up ticks those boxes, but in practice it didn’t work – there was too much of a mesh of green and white. The custom is of course that the host team’s first-choice kit is worn in its entirety, but if Celtic had worn green alternative shorts and socks and Hibs had worn all-white, it would have been the optimum solution, short of The Bhoys wearing their yellow away.

The bottom two combinations would have resulted in the same problems, however.

What actually happened on the day in question was that Hibs sought to change at half-time – from their away shirts to their home. It created a block of green while Celtic’s shorts and socks made for a white overall look for them, and the sleeves were distinguishable too.

Not the best solution in the world, but the best available at the time.

 

 

Midweek Mashup – Real Madrid, 1967

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Clashes, Midweek Mashup

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  • Apologies for the lack of an MWM last week, holidays took priority!

In our very first instalment of this series, we looked at Celtic wearing orange socks against Leeds in 1970, having been given a choice between those or blue ones.

That wasn’t the first time they refused to wear garments in the colours of their rivals Rangers, however – and the compromise reached meant a break from a very strong tradition.

Like Arsenal (except in 2013 against Fenerbahce) and Liverpool (apart from their trips to Watford in the early 1980s), Real Madrid hold their classic look very dearly, and prefer to wear a change kit rather than messing with the all-white.

Notable deviations have been after winning the Champions League final in an alternative kit and putting on white shirts for the presentation, as in 2000 and last May. For Alfredo di Stefano’s testimonial 50 years ago, however, they paired white jerseys with dark shorts on the pitch.

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Newly-crowned European champions Celtic were the opposition, and the sides actually emerged in both of their first-choice kits, but the referee sought differentiation in terms of a shorts change.

As the hosts, Real asked Celtic to wear their away shorts but as they were blue, Jock Stein point-blank refused, as he would three years later at Elland Road. With a minor psychological victory achieved, Celtic backed up their status as the best on the continent as Bobby Lennox scored the only goal in a 1-0 win.

Midweek Mashup – Celtic, 1970

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Change kits, Clashes, Football kits, Inconsistencies, Kit history, Midweek Mashup

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Don’t worry – Fantasy Kit Friday isn’t going anywhere, this is a new weekly series to complement it.

We’ve taken the ‘mashup’ term from our friends at Hull City Kits – basically, it means any kit which is worn with elements different to its default setting. While many of those featured across the series will be one-offs, it’s not a prerequisite that that is the case, just that the kit is memorable, for whatever reason.

We begin with a very notable example worn by Celtic against Leeds United in the 1969-70 European Cup semi-final first leg.

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It’s not totally unknown for Celtic to wear their famous hooped shirts with alternative shorts or socks, but nowadays, they tend to prefer to wear a change kit when such clashes arise.

While West German referee Gerald Schulenberg had no problem with the Bhoys wearing green and white tops at Elland Road on April 1, he did insist that there be a change of socks (it’s interesting to note, though, that when AC Milan met Marseille at the quarter-final stage in 1991, their game at the San Siro saw both teams in white shorts and socks).

Celtic hadn’t travelled with any alternative socks (their away kit at the time was all-green) and there is a story that Leeds indulged in a bit of gamesmanship, offering them either red or blue, with the following quote ascribed to Celtic manager Jock Stein:

We’ll wear the red stockings. Under their floodlights, they’ll show up more orange than red and our supporters will think that we’re wearing the colours of the Irish tricolour. That’ll please them.

We certainly don’t recall Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal ever looking like they were wearing orange in old footage, and the Celtic Wiki states the socks were in fact orange, presumably taken from Leeds’ by-then-unworn third kit (featured here by John Devlin in a True Colours Kit Cupboard article, a series which is an ancestor of this).

There are further eye-witness accounts here confirming that they were orange. Certainly, they look orange in this picture of Celtic, compared with Leeds in the second leg, when the socks worn were definitely red.

We’ll defer to former Celtic player and manager David Hay. In his autobiography Quiet Assassin, he touches on how Leeds tried to build a fear-factor and mentions the sock situation too.

As he would have seen them in the dressing room before the game, without any perceived floodlight discolouration, his view has to be taken as definitive.

Leeds also had this hard-man image. Norman ‘Bites Yer Legs’ Hunter, for a start. What sort of nickname is that? And, sadder still, he seemed to revel in this juvenile, daft moniker. Do you think for a split second his reputation meant a thing to the likes of Bobby Murdoch or Bertie Auld? Or me, for that matter? Don’t get me wrong; Leeds United were a good team. Excellent, even. But they weren’t at the same level as us and we knew it. They, too, would soon come round to our way of thinking.

The off-the-field shenanigans went on right up until the kick-off. We were informed they had complained about our white socks to the referee. They were same colour as Leeds’, of course, but no-one made any mention of it until just before the start.

As our kit men hadn’t packed alternatives, we had to borrow orange socks from our opponents. If that, too, was designed to faze us in any way, shape or form, it was another error on their part. We could have played in our civvies that night and still won.

Celtic won the game 1-0 and then, at Hampden Park a fortnight later, beat a red-socked Leeds 2-1 to advance to the final. Sadly for them, they would be denied a second title in four years as Feyenoord beat them 2-1 in the final after extra time.

Fantasy Kit Friday 2016 – a look back

29 Thursday Dec 2016

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Hopefully, you’re aware of Fantasy Kit Friday, our weekly attempt to dress a team up in a historical style different to that which they actually wore. Tomorrow, December 30, will be the final instalment of the year, so we felt it an apposite time to collate all of the offerings together.

While the concept of a weekly edition only manifested itself this year, the idea itself is actually just over two years old, as we road-tested it with four Irish Gaelic games teams in classic adidas:

 

They got a fairly good response, albeit to a limited audience, but other things got in the way of it becoming a regular feature. Even when we gave it a name in April, it was still ad hoc – though, unoriginally, the template was becoming fixed:

It would be nearly a month before another attempt:

We were getting some ‘engagement’, as the digital marketing bods call it, but there was an inherent fear that our adidas bias was unhealthy. We threw it out to the floor, though, and the first request for the now-hashtagged #fantasykitfriday was still from Herzogenrauch, though of a later vintage.

Another break of more than a month ensued – we were learning how to draw on Adobe Illustrator – but this one kick-started a regular weekly flow of higher-quality renderings.

Where possible, we liked to be topical:

And then, occasionally, surreality prevailed (there was a break of a week due to holidays).

At the end of July, work took us to Leeds for a few days, so inspiration was taken from that.

Some of our favourite kits have been the ones that you know could never have happened but still look great.

There’s always time to return to the classic look.

Other times, we feel generous enough to give a two-for-one.

Request are accommodated as much as possible, as it saves us having to think.

For September 9, we conferred with our old sparring partner Andrew Rockall, a massive Tottenham Hotspur fan, to come with a whole suite of Spurs kits and we published them all here. If you can’t be bothered to check, this was the home:

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Some kits can meet opposition from traditionalists…

…and others that you might be unsure about turn out to be well-received.

It’s often fun to use a team’s current (or, in this case, soon-to-be-former) maker and go back to before they had them.

And there are others that are very out there.

This one worked a lot better in our heads than on the screen, sadly.

If we had time, every week would feature a home, away and third as well as goalkeeper kits. Unfortunately, we don’t, but it does make these ones more enjoyable.

As far as we can see, this is the only instance of a team’s own home kit being recoloured.

Looking at these again, one almost has to do a double-take and remember that City didn’t actually have Hummel.

Their rivals switched to Umbro in 1992, but might have looked like this if they did it sooner.

Just after drawing this, we were very pleased with it. Until it was pointed out that Germany’s leisurewear in 1996 was just like this, so that’s probably where the idea subliminally came from.

Another request, more on which you can read about at the wonderful Hull City Kits.

The bias is very much towards the past, so it’s no harm to mix it up every once in a while.

And it’s not all top teams we do either. Any suggestion will be considered.

Collaborate with a friend for an idea, if you want.

But be warned, we can be selfish when we want.

Edit: For completeness, here is the final one:

On-Screen Kit Inaccuracies, Part 1 – Playing For Keeps

24 Monday Oct 2016

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Never let it be said that we don’t give the people what they want:

We accept that film-makers have more pressing issues than getting kit details right, but at the same time it’s not hard to research what was worn at what time, especially given the easy access to information nowadays.

It’s important, to our minds, to chart the examples where laziness has crept in. If it saves only one reader who might otherwise have been traumatised having picked a film out on Netflix some night, all the better.

First up in 2012 film Playing for Keeps, starring Gerard Butler as a washed-up former pro who seems to be in some kind of a love quadrilateral as well as getting caught up in shady dealings with Dennis Quaid’s character (we didn’t have to watch it all, thankfully, as most of the kit issues are at the start).

As cold opens go, ‘footage’ from the career of Butler’s character George Dryer isn’t a bad idea. The beginning of this featurette is the first scene:

Ignoring the ‘flipped’ screen, you have to give marks for effort here. The makers, we are reliably informed, bought a Celtic 1989-91 shirt from Classic Football Shirts, and it would be churlish to point out that the caption in the opening screen says, ‘George Dryer 1993’ and that his shorts are devoid of the large numbers Celtic had at the time, eschewing shirt-back numbers until 1994. The logo on the replica is also slightly smaller than on the actual player-worn shirts of the time.

All those things are moot, however, as the cross from which Dryer scores what we are informed is his third goal (“The 83rd minute here at Celtic Park, the phenom George Dryer looking for his second hat-trick of the tournament.”) comes from six years into the future via Colin Healy in the 1999-2000 NTL-sponsored kit:

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https://twitter.com/celticretro1888/status/790570445703634947

Celtic surely scored one goal in the early 90s that they could have used?

The next clip of George transposes him into this Robbie Fowler goal for Liverpool against Everton from 1995-96.

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We’re being fair, so we’ll give marks for the right shirt – only worn by the Reds for one season – the correct adidas numbering and the mud on him, given the conditions in the real game. We shall be returning to this, though.

Fast-forward to 2005 and George is now playing in the MLS, for DC United.

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Well-digitised once more, but it appears that the kit is wrong. Again, no biggie as we had to look that up to verify so the casual observer wouldn’t mind.

As the film gets going properly, we realise that things haven’t gone all that well for George since his retirement and, with his landlord demanding rent payment, he visits a sports memorabilia shop, hoping to offload some mementoes.

First up is what he describes as the shirt when he “played against Porto in the UEFA Cup final”:

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Now, first of all, Celtic didn’t actually wear their 1991-93 away kit when playing Porto in the UEFA Cup final in Seville in 2003 (they wore a very rare variation, but that’s beside the point). This piece of information also raises questions as to the timeline of George’s career, as we saw that he was with Liverpool in 1996 – did he do a Frank McAvennie on it and have two spells with two clubs?

There’s an out for the makers in that he didn’t specify a year, so maybe in this alternate universe Celtic played Porto in around 1992. The next item he’s trying to sell is clearly stated to be from “Liverpool-AC Milan, 2005” (he must have joined DC United straight after that).

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Yes, that’s right, it’s the same Liverpool 1995-96 shirt. Again, if we’re looking for ways to absolve the makers, it might be that George is a bit of a wideboy and isn’t selling his best stuff but trying to pull the wool over the would-be buyer’s eyes. Four medals and “the boots I wore when I scored against England when I played with Scotland” are also part of his proposal, though. One wonders why he didn’t go to an auction house or even eBay (or sold to them all back to Classic Football Shirts), however, as he’s offered $300 for the whole lot.

Clearly trying to give the American audience a reference-point, we then have the store owner asking, “Is that you and Beckham?”

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It is, and it can be dated to the 2000-01 season, providing further uncertainty regarding the dates of his transfers. The picture is quite well done, but George replies that it is him and Beckham, from “the quarter-final of the Champions League. That was a great game.”

As it happens, 00-01 was actually the last year before Liverpool would return to the European Cup/Champions League for the first time since the Heysel ban. They have yet to play Manchester United in it, though, and last spring in the Europa League was the clubs’ first meeting in a continental competition.

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Our final example is just mean, but we’re on a roll now.

George’s son – who wears a modern DC United shirt at various times in the film – drew this. We’ll leave it others to properly critique children’s drawings but just look at George in his Celtic kit – stripes (we’ll assume that it’s not a retro shirt), green shorts and the number on the front. Come on son, Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to get back together if you’re always that lazy.