Having a conversation with a hired stooge yesterday and the subject of replica shirts came up. Specifically Tottenham shirts.
Once we had both acknowledged we preferred the old retro style tops as polyester, whilst the queen of fabrics, is not really our friend. Also, there is an inevitable visit to a ‘happy place’ in our memory palaces by recalling Ricky Villa or whoever by slipping on a vintage strip. Halcyon days on a coat-hanger.
But back from the world of dreams and the modern day shirt dilemma is an intriguing one. The Official Tottenham Hotspur Football Club Authorised Legit new home shirt with Autonomy on garment comes weighs in at £45.00.
The comparative quality of Spurs’ Puma shirts has been questioned by numerous punters across virtually all forums for the past few season. If anything has, the sizing strategy appears improved this season both onand off the pitch. So Bale and Corluka look less like their shirts were nicked and they were forced to wear ones out of the lost property box.
So what else is out there? Well I am sure there are fakes galore busily being manufactured by infants in the far east as we speak. Unless things have radically altered in the past weeks, this dingy route to showing your club’s colours entails running the gauntlet of ordering from people who generally speaking don’t have any language including their supposed mother tongue and offer two sizes, ‘M’ and ‘XL’.At least you’ll be genuinely unique in your ‘Modryc’ shirt.
The quality of these shirts isn’t actually terrible, if anything it only goes to ask the question how crap is the whole replica shirt scandal that you can charge over £20.00 for any shirt, no matter how ‘official’ it is when it’s essentially made out of recycled Evian bottles.
Spurs fans have been whining in unison for some time that they wanted a more retro feel and look to their shirt. Quite possibly by sheer blind luck the wise and goodly folk who make such complex decisions decided to do their best to match the mood.
The new shirt is Admiralesque and destined to be a best seller. But where Spurs fans have constantly moaned again, largely as one, is over the sponsor – or more so, their logo.
Some folk, trapped in a time warp still chant like friendly monks ‘Holsten, Holsten, Holsten, Holsten’ under their breath in a low, friendly, wishful hum.
The trouble is, Holsten Pils, once the daddy of lagers is now the orphaned, long tern unemployed, bastard step-son of beers. I’m struggling to recall the last time I saw it behind a bar and in Asda, it’s relegated to the shelf of inexpensive beer shaped stuff they aren’t quite sure what to do with like Castlemaine XXXX.
But we found a lunatic company who can make those humming monk’s dream come true. This mob are offering a shirt (complete with shorts, mark you) that looks a hell of a lot like this season’s but whilst they have omitted the Puma logo, they have included what looks like a cock on a ball and … a Holsten logo!
So if we could find a shirt that left field, it raised the question, ‘Can we really order off the menu, I mean completely?’ So what about a shirt without a logo? A shirt without a sponsor logo. But it has to be kosher. Like, made by Puma with all the tags and all that. In short, a shirt the purists would swap body organs for.
We got it. There’s a Danish mob offering precisely that garment. Now we know talk is cheap, but making dreams come true ain’t. Dependent upon fluctuations in the exchange rate this little beaut will come in at a few shillings over £60 delivered.
Curiously enough, after watching the lads run around a bit in the Official new shirts and then looking at the Danish ones, the sponsor-less ones looked a bit …blank.
Oh well, we tried.
