With this in mind I always keep a watchful eye over the Facebook homepage when I can, particularly the right hand "Highlights" column. This is the place where if one of my 600+ "friends" has posted something particularly funny, it will show up here having been commented and liked by a least a few of my other "friends". Two such links appearing here in the last few days have concerned new strips of sports teams, for reasons I will discuss shortly.
In Britain, the team sports which are followed by the most people are undoubtedly football, cricket, and rugby in its union and league codes.
Of these, only football and rugby strips are actually high profile in any way. (Cricket is either played in the traditional whites or the one-day cricket colourful pyjamas which are pretty tacky and horrible at the best of times so I'm going to largely ignore them, but the same principles basically apply.)
Of all the football and rugby team kits in the world, very few will ever feature any colours outside of red, blue, black, white, green, navy or sky blue, with the occasional splash of yellow, gold or claret. (I am very glad that Chelsea's away strip is no longer completely fluorescent yellow - euch!) Furthermore, an unwritten rule states that only Holland are allowed to play in orange.
Combinations of two or three of the above colours are largely acceptable. The rugby union side Harlequins are typically allowed to get away with more because they're, well... they're harlequins! I say combinations are largely acceptable because some combinations are so foul they defy common sense to choose for strips, which are usually a large source of revenue for a club, each of which usually has a devout fan-base who will go out to buy the latest shirt(s) every year before they attend the first game. Some clubs (insert Manchester United, Real Madrid, etc. here) are lucky enough to have supporters around the world to whom they can sell shirts.
Obviously the board of Newcastle United, who are losing money more quickly than the current government (disclaimer: that may or may not be true) aren't bothered about getting some money back through the sale of their new away strip, as they have come up with this ghastly concoction of yellow and orange stripes which makes them look a bit like bannoffee pie.
Even, though team strips dipped into the more unusual combinations of acceptable paints come and (usually pretty quickly) go, one team has done the unthinkable.,,
That team was Stade Français Here, because I can't phrase it any better than this, is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
"In 2005, [club president] Guazzini went further and chose to shock the ’’macho’’ world of rugby by introducing a pink away jersey, pink being one of the rarest colours used by sports teams."
So you will understand that, when I tell you that this rugby team were playing in shocking pink shirts, I mean it on about 3 levels! Yet apparently this seemingly crazy idea struck a chord with the apparently fashion-loving Parisian crowd, as they sold 20,000 of them for the 05-06 season (compared to about 3 for Newcastle's away strip this season - see above.)
Following this, they went on to stir up more discussion have pink lilies on their 06-07 season home shirts. However, having followed up a link on my Facebook homepage, as alluded to earlier, I have come to the conclusion that the kit designers for Stade Français's 2009-2010 season have really excelled themselves. While the home strip is pretty mundane by their crass standards, their away kit is pink (again) with a baby blue print of Blanche de Castille surrounded by stars. However, on seeing their third strip, I was astounded...
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you their alternate strip for the current season.
(I recommend sunglasses before viewing this image...)
WOOOW!
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