Tag Archives: Cork City

Midweek Mashup – Shamrock Rovers, 1995

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

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The new League of Ireland season started last weekend, and as yet, we’re unaware of any kitastrophes, but they’re never too far away. It’s far from a new phenomenon, though, as you will see with the latest edition in the Midweek Mashup series.

As we related in a recent article, Cork City caused some consternation to league officials in 1993-94, when they premiered a new black away kit. The first outing for that kit was a home game against title rivals Shamrock Rovers, who played in their purple away kit when theoretically they could have worn their usual green and white hoops.

The following season, though, Rovers turned up at City’s Bishopstown ground on March 24 with just their home kit – we’ll put it down to absent-mindedness rather than an assumption that City had permanently changed to black, given that they had played in the interim.

Generally in such cases back then, the visiting team would wear a change strip belonging to the home side – Cork City lent kits to opponents in 1990 (Dundalk), 1998 (Derry City), 1999 (Galway United) and 2007 (Bray Wanderers), Derry themselves had to come to Shelbourne’s rescue in 2001, while St Patrick’s Athletic helped out Sligo Rovers in 2008.

City could of course have worn the black kit as another option – perhaps it wasn’t to hand – but instead referee Tommy Traynor decided to allow a compromise – both teams could wear their home shirts (City in green, white and red stripes, Rovers in green hoops) once the visitors wore alternative shorts.

Despite City having worn both navy and red shorts with their kit that season, neither set was available and so kick-off was delayed for 15 minutes as a trip was made so that shorts could be borrowed from local junior club Glasheen. It certainly made for an unusual look for Rovers:

shamrock-rovers-matchwinner-1993-1995-home-kit-blue-shorts-cork-city-glasheen
Incidentally, at the time we thought that the diagonal line breaking the hoops was guerrilla marketing for sponsors Whirlpool, but their ‘loop’ goes the other way.

Unfortunately, we have no colour picture of how the two shirts with large elements of green and white looked together, but the game proceeded without any further trouble.

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Rovers won 1-0, Eoin Mullen’s goal putting them joint-top of the table with Derry City, but all of the chasing pack had games in hand and so by season’s end the Hoops were in sixth, one place ahead of City, whose bright beginning and middle to the season was undone by an awful end.

Cork City’s 1993 black away kit gave league officials the blues

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Change kits, Clashes, corkcitykits.com, Football kits, Kit history

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The start of the 1993-94 season signalled quite a change for Cork City in terms of kits, even by their standards.

Having worn green and white hoops from formation in 1984 until 1989, white shirts with green shorts were favoured for the next four years, taking in the 1993 League of Ireland Premier Division victory.

That league-winning kit would be worn in the early games of the 93-94 season but only as the new green, white and red home kit was being awaited. When it eventually arrived, most wished that the shorts had been forgotten, with the ‘pyjamas’ nickname soon coined.

Across their nine years of existence up until then, City’s away shirts had always been primarily red with white trim, but given that red featured on the new home, something completely new was needed for the new change shirt.

An all-black kit in the new adidas template, as used by Liverpool and popularised at the 1994 World Cup, was conjured up. A golden-yellow was used for the accents, meaning that the kit was a nod to Cork Celtic, one of City’s many antecedents. The fabric featured the City crest subtly repeated throughout.

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Given that this was only a few months after Manchester United had released English football’s first all-black kit, this was quite the change. In The Cork Examiner of Friday, December 3, 1993, Noel Spillane reported that the kit’s first outing would be two days later at home to league leaders Shamrock Rovers.

It is this writer’s clear memory of being told that, as a result of City changing, Rovers would wear their famous green and white hoops, but instead they played in an awful purple kit as the game finished 2-2.

That wasn’t the end of the issue, however. While the Premier League had introduced green referees’ shirts in 1992, officials still wore black in the League of Ireland. For that City-Rovers game, blue shirts had been used. However, luck played a part in the league finding out about City’s black kit, as revealed by a piece in the Irish Independent on Tuesday, December 7.

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(The arrow is pointing at a drumstick thrown at City goalscorer Pat Morley, something Rovers were to investigate)

Cork City’s controversial black strip has been given the red card by the National League.

Cork pulled the nylon over everyone’s eyes when they trotted out against Shamrock Rovers at Bishopstown on Sunday clad in black with gold trim – a throwback to Cork Celtic. Now, the champions have been told that they cannot play in their new strip against Drogheda United on Sunday.

Angry League secretary Eamonn Morris said last night: “We are most dissatisfied with Cork’s actions.

“They never even bothered to inform the league that they were going to change their strip. Their registered league colours are green and white so they had no right to change.

“A black strip is unacceptable to the league in that it clashes with the referee’s colours. I have been in touch with Cork and they say a letter of explanation is on the way to our officers. We will wait and see what they say before taking any further action.”

Only the quick thinking of Cork referee Pat Kelly averted embarrassment for match referee Oliver Cooney and his linesmen. Kelly spotted Cork’s new strip in The Cork Examiner last Friday and contacted Paddy Daly, the league’s chief inspector.

“This was the first I knew about it,” explained Daly. “I dashed off to O’Neills on Friday to get three jerseys made up that would not clash with the Cork colours.

“This is the first time I can recall that refs were forced to change from the customary black uniform. If Paddy Kelly hadn’t acted so quickly, Oliver Cooney and his linesmen would have gone to Cork with their black kit and it would have caused all sorts of confusion.

“We have 55 referees in the league panel and we have just finished a sponsorship with Dublin Bus. Does Cork’s new strip mean we have to pay out for 55 new sets of blue jerseys?”.

Shamrock Rovers knew nothing about Cork’s new gear either. They only brought their newly-registered away strip, purple jersey and shorts, to Bishopstown.

“With Cork in black, we could have played in green and white but the first we knew about their colours was just before kick-off,” explained club chairman John McNamara.

City would wear the ‘pyjamas’ at Drogheda the following week, winning 5-0, but some solution must have been reached as the black was worn for home games in December and then January 1994. While the green, white and red returned, the black remained the away kit until the end of the 1995-96 season.

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:

Cork City put kit style in the hands of the fans

24 Saturday Sep 2016

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Competitions to design teams’ strips are nothing new among what you might call ‘smaller’ teams – and adidas have got in on the act now too. At most clubs, the first-choice colours and style are constant and so don’t need to be set, but Cork City are different to most.

We’ll get the plug for our Cork City Kits site out of the way early for those who want to see every single combination (up to the start of the 2015 season, an update is overdue), but here is just a flavour of what the ‘home’ strips have been since 1984:

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Quite a few varieties as you can see. For us, it’s something we enjoy – once green, white and red are included, you know it’s City as no other league team in Ireland has those three colours. It’s like Bayern Munich or Glentoran or the Oregon Ducks – no matter the layout, the identity still shines through. To be fair, since 2002 – barring the 2006/07 shirt – it has generally been accepted that the home is green, with varying amounts of white and green.

Gerry Desmond is a former editor of the City programme and a font of knowledge on all aspects of the club, is of the view that a constant look for the club would be better and so he proposed a vote of members of Foras (the supporters’ trust which owns the club) on what it should be. While the original motion was made in 2014, the vote ended up taking place on September 23 and the options – created by Kobe Designs – are below.

Of the votes cast, just under 50 percent were in favour of ‘plain’ (as in body, as the example in the picture obviously has contrasting sleeves), with the sash style coming second.

One quibble we would have, though, is that the vote took a green base as the starting point. The club have recently released a retro version of the shirt worn when drawing with Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup in 1991, which has proven very popular. White was worn in winning the club’s first league title in 1992-93 as well as in the two successful FAI Cup finals, 1998 and 2007, so it leaves us wondering how the vote might have gone if the main colour was also up for debate (to our minds, red should always be the tertiary colour on the home shirt).

It was agreed almost unanimously that any future home shirts should have green, white and red where possible, so it will be interesting to see how this is reconciled with teamwear options which often only have two colours.

A new beginning

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

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Apologies for the hiatus on the update front, but hopefully it will prove to be worth the wait.

Cork-City-1989-1991-adidas-home-shirt

Above is what we consider to be the best kit ever (though some would only have it at 45th), rendered in our new template, brought about as a result of switching from Microsoft Paint to Adobe Illustrator for the primary drawing of strips. While there was a certain satisfaction in working in Paint, it was less bringing a knife to a gunfight and more bringing one to a nuclear war.

For comparison, here is the same kit the first time we attempted it, in 2005 as part of an insert on the official Cork City site (left) and then in what has become our standard set-up across all of our sites (right):

The hope is to re-do all of our sites in the new style, which will obviously take some time, so please bear with us while that is done. In the meantime, any new inclusions here will have the new look, beginning with a Euro 2016 piece in the coming days.

The League of Ireland, where things never change

09 Monday May 2016

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In the League of Ireland, kit problems never seem to be too far away. One might suggest that the LOI abbreviation might be better styled as Lesson Often Ignored.

For example, in 2007, Bray Wanderers clashed with two clubs in the Premier Division, Cork City and Shamrock Rovers. City wore green and white stripes that season while the Hoops were clad in their usual…hoops. Somehow, though, Bray were allowed to have a change kit of white shirts and green shorts.

When Bray made the trip to play Rovers in June of that year, both sides were in their away strips owing to a league rule which stated that the home team had to change if the referee wasn’t happy with the proposed kits. In August, Bray travelled to Cork but City refused to change and, as a compromise, Bray wore the Rebel Army’s away shirts with their own shorts and socks. Because they had technically broken the rule, though, Cork City were issued with a €1,000 fine.

Later that year, there were shenanigans before a Dundalk-Shelbourne game over goalkeeper strips and, on the opening night of the following season, the same referee caused a hold-up ahead of the St Patrick’s Athletic v Sligo Rovers match. In 2012, Cork City’s dark green home was deemed to be too close to Shamrock Rovers’ black away, so the home team wore red.

At the beginning of the 2016 season in March, your humble correspondent tried to contact the league, offering to create graphics each week, illustrating what each team and goalkeeper would wear, in a bid to ensure that no such problems arose. The idea was similar to what Arsenal have been doing for the past few seasons:

afc

The person in the media department eventually replied, saying that the competitions department should be contacted and email addresses were supplied for three different people. At the time of writing, none of the three have replied.

And yet, the problems continue. In the second round of games, Longford Town were forced to wear their yellow away kit at home to St Patrick’s Athletic as Pat’s red home and navy change strips clashed with Longford’s usual red and black stripes.

Drogheda United have a claret and sky blue home and a navy and sky blue away and that too has been problematic. UCD had to switch from sky blue to white…

…Drogs wore Waterford United’s away kit…

…and in the most recent set of games, Athlone Town were forced to swap their black and blue for orange.

The Bray-Bohemians game in April was also problematic. This season, Bray’s home is green and black stripes, but Bohs – normally red and black stripes – have a green away, so again we saw an away kit at home (thanks to @PaddayF for bringing this one to our attention).

Little wonder, then, that fans of League of Ireland teams like to ironically use the hashtag #greatestleagueintheworld when mishaps occur. Our offer remains open, but we’re not all that optimistic about its uptake.