Football focus

The early 1970s was football’s brute era of Passchendaele pitches and Stalingrad tactics. The gnarled ruffians of Leeds United — wee hatchet man Billy Bremner, the graceful assassin Johnny Giles, Norman ‘Bites Yer Legs’ Hunter — embodied the age. Not that you’d guess this from the badge on the club’s shirt: the letters LU were styled into a grinning emoji in goofy yellow.

In 1973, the club kit (pristine white, which they had changed to a decade earlier to mimic the lordly Real Madrid) was designed by Admiral, the company that dreamed up the wallet-emptying concept of the replica shirt. Admiral went in for hectic piping and busy collars. They soon got the contract to dress up England’s team as they hoofed and tripped from one catastrophe to another. I became a student of their output when, in the mid-1970s, I attended a boarding school where a prepubescent craze caught on for sending off to Admiral for their catalogues. Fat A4 envelopes duly arrived by the sackload — also from Umbro, Adidas and even Slazenger — until the headmaster declared a ban on our crack-like addiction to sportswear porn.

The craziest Admiral kit of all belonged to Wales, featuring a dragon-red shirt down which symmetrical stripes of leek-green on a bed of daffodil-yellow curled in from the armpit towards the nipple before plunging south. The badge, conventionally placed over the heart, was shunted across to the solar plexus. It was a lunatic design lent international prominence by Wales’s qualification for the European Championships in 1976. I remember nervelessly daubing the stripes on to the all-red of a Liverpool Subbuteo squad I had no use for.

The random daftness of these Admiral kits are celebrated anew in The Football Shirts Book. This pub chat in book form enacts that rare footballing feat of creating a space for itself in an overcrowded area.