Tag Archives: Manchester City

The one-offs – Manchester City third kit, 1989-90

06 Tuesday Feb 2018

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Manchester City fans have a lot of good kits upon which they can look back fondly, but this is not one of them.

In 1989-90, City’s first season back in the top flight, early away games saw them travel to face Coventry City and Wimbledon, with their maroon and white striped away kit worn. For the trip to Highbury to face Arsenal in the middle of October, they could have worn their home shirts, but there was a shorts-clash to deal with.

Sky blue shorts would be available later in the season, worn in the Manchester derby at Old Trafford, but they were not to hand on this occasion. Opting against pairing the home shirt with the away shirts – a look they would wear at Arsenal the following season – City instead went for the quick fix of a yellow teamwear strip (with mismatching shirts and shorts) with the club crest and brother wordmark applied.

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City lost 4-0 and rumour has it that club chairman Peter Swales saw to it that the kit was burned. How true that is, we don’t know, but it wasn’t worn again.

Incidentally, City would bring their tally of kits to four later in the season – with concerns over the striped away clashing with teams in white, a prototype version of the following season’s solid maroon change shirt, with a grandad collar like the striped kit, was used late in the campaign.

 

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Midweek Mashup – Manchester City, 2017

13 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Change kits, Clashes, Midweek Mashup, News

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When Umbro began to roll out their ‘Tailored by Umbro’ range in the late 2000s, they began to use a phrase which covered the reluctance of teams to wear alternative home shorts and socks, preferring to switch to a full change kit instead.

As you can see in this excellent piece by John Devlin, it mentions how clubs such as Manchester City and Blackburn were opting against mashups so as to preserve “the integrity of the kit”, i.e. not sullying the intended look.

To be fair, City’s 2009-10 kit was a corker, though they were forced to wear their black away socks with the home shirts and shorts in an FA Cup game at Stoke. It was a rare exception to the general rule though, as was the wearing of their 2014-15 sky-blue home shorts at the start of 2015-16 at Everton. One would imagine the rationale for that latter one was that the referee didn’t mind royal blue against sky blue once both sides didn’t have white shorts.

Another instance came in 2013-14 at Arsenal – thanks to Matthew Ashcroft for making us aware of this – and that season at Fulham they had the same combo (N reminded us).

By and large, though, City either wore their home kit in its original form or else changed fully – for instance, Chelsea wore change blue socks at the Etihad last season but City were in their third kit when the sides met at Stamford Bridge.

All of which makes it so odd that City wore sky blue shorts away to Shakhtar Donetsk in their final Champions League group game last week.

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In four of their previous five group games, Shakhtar had worn their home orange and black shirts with black shorts and socks – even forcing Feyenoord to wear white shorts and socks when they hosted the Ukrainians in Rotterdam.

The one exception was in Manchester, when they wore their away kit with black shorts, and then in the final game they opted for all-white.

Even then, either City’s maroon away or very dark green third would surely have been acceptable to UEFA and preferable to the club, but perhaps they only travelled with the home kit and the change shorts as a contingency.

They lost that game 2-1 – their first defeat of the season – but were back in white shorts as they won 2-1 against Manchester United on Sunday.

Fantasy Kit Friday, 24-11-17 – Manchester City adidas 1995

24 Friday Nov 2017

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Just over a year ago, we did a Manchester City/Hummel mid-1985s crossover.

Out of the replies to that came a request to do City in an early 90s Arsenal look, which you can see here, and it’s the three stripes we’re returning to today.

Back in July, Jordinho came up with a good idea – apologies for only getting to it now – of mixing City with Liverpool’s 1995-96 template:

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While white socks wouldn’t be our first choice – navy is our preference, probably because that’s what City had in our early days watching football in 1990-91 – but City’s last kit with Umbro before moving to Kappa had white sets.

They were of course relegated in 1995-96 – that surely wouldn’t have happened if they’d had adidas.

 

Wales’s changing stripes and other short stories

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

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

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Where practical, we always prefer when a team dons alternative shorts or socks to solve a colour-clash rather than changing their full kit (obligatory plug for examples of same here).

Therefore, it was good to see Wales wear red shorts against the Republic of Ireland in last Friday’s World Cup qualifier at the Aviva Stadium last Friday. Having been forced to wear their black and grey away kit against England at Euro 2016 as adidas didn’t provide them with change shorts, the Welsh ensured that that was not the case for the qualifiers.

The red shorts were also worn at home to Georgia, but closer inspection does show them to jar slightly with the shirts and socks due to the green waistband and adidas logo. Believe it or not, they are the shorts from the previous kit with the green adidas stripes removed and replaced by white ones.

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If you don’t believe us, then take the word of *the* authority on Wales and (most other) kits, Simon Shakeshaft:

They certainly deserve marks for creativity.

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And now that we’re on the subject of shorts, we’ll impart some more knowledge too, recently picked up in old match programmes, which can often provide real nuggets of information. From the 1985-85 meeting of Manchester City and Manchester United, we seem to find the year in which the Football League prevented sides from taking to the field in the same coloured shorts – however, according to UnitedKits.com, 1975-76 was the first time that United regularly wore black shorts with red shirts in the league, having first done it in the 1957 Charity Shield.

The writer expresses the hope that United’s poor record at Maine Road when wearing black shorts would continue.

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Unsurprisingly, given how well United deal with such situations, they remembered to bring the black shorts and ended the jinx with a 3-0 win.

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The Football League still has a rule preventing shorts-clashes, as do the two domestic Cups, while UEFA doesn’t allow them either, even though a shorts-and-socks clash was allowed in a European Cup semi-final as recently as 1991.

When the Premier League came into being though, it was decided that opposing teams could have shorts in the same colour, once the clubs’ shirts and/or socks didn’t cause confusion.

A letter published in the Arsenal programme for the Coca-Cola Cup game against Derby County clarified the situation, though the mention that “all teams must wear their first-choice strip whenever there is no colour-clash” is, sadly, quaint.

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Midweek Mashup – Manchester City, 1985

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Change kits, Clashes, Midweek Mashup

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Logically, and as you can see from the previous entries in this series, most instances of teams wearing unusual combinations occur in away games, but this week’s edition is a rare example of a home team being forced into a switch.

As we looked at last month, Tottenham Hotspur introduced an all-white home kit in 1985. With the away kit being all sky-blue, there were no navy shorts available at all, and so where shorts-clashes occurred, they matched the home shirts with the away shorts, like this:

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On August 31 of that season, Spurs travelled to Maine Road to face Manchester City. The hosts had had an all-blue kit until 1985 before reverting back to their traditional look and so Spurs lined out in the opposite. The game began with City in sky-white-sky and Spurs in white-sky-white, but after just a few minutes play was stopped.

Referee George Courtney (I once met him when he was the referee’s assessor at a Cork City-Cwmbran Town European Cup game in 1993, incidentally, but my nine-year-old self wasn’t aware of this and so couldn’t quiz him) felt that, in the sunny conditions, the kits weren’t distinct enoug and asked for a change.

Obviously, Spurs’ away – if they had brought it – would have clashed with City’s home, so the only option was for Billy McNeill’s team to don their away shirts and shorts, but with the home socks,

Umbro-Manchester-City-1985-1986-away-kit-home-socks-Spurs

The alteration didn’t affect them too badly, as they won 2-1, and the programme for the next home game, against Manchester United on September 14, outlined previous examples of City wearing an away kit at home (though without explaining how it used to be a rule that both teams used to change when a kit-clash occurred in the FA Cup).

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Incidentally, that wasn’t the most recent occasion that City were forced to change at home to Tottenham – but that’s a story for another time.