Aussie international Richard Garcia routinely changed shirts at half time during his time with the Tigers, which makes verifying the games his shirts were worn in a bit tricky. We managed it with this shirt though, discovering it was worn in at least two Premier League games before we got our mitts on it.

It was the shirt on Garcia’s back for parts of the highly creditable 0-0 draw with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge and the 2-1 defeat to Spurs at our place. In the latter game it got blathered in KC Stadium mud and having not been washed since, matching the distinctive mud pattern on the back to photographs taken during that game has allowed us to verify it as a genuine match worn shirt.

Being a player specification shirt, it has full size Premier League appliqués: the numbers are 258mm (compared to 230mm on replicas), the letters are 53mm tall (as opposed to the 47mm letters for replicas) and the Premier League sleeve patches are larger than those readily available to the public.

Most of the shirts worn by Garcia in 2008/09 had the number 4 applied with the right side of the vertical bar flush to a black stripe, such as the shirt he wore in the first half against Tottenham…

In the second half though, he wore the shirt we now possess, and there is a slightly tapering gap between the right side of the 4’s vertical bar and the third full black stripe. To the right of the 4’s horizontal bar is the tell-tale mud mark…

Looking for more pictures showing a shirt with the amber gap, we found this shot of the squeaky voiced Antipodean being booked at Chelsea…

As well as having mud from the KC on it, the shirt is daubed with Garcia’s signature, he has autographed it on the 4 of his then squad number of 14. A great piece.