“WE ALL FOLLOW A YELLOW AND BLUE TEAM”
(Click on the amber text in this article to see more photographs)
The commercial imperatives of the modern game lead to teams having three distinct outfield kits a season, and if they think they can get away with it they might chance a fourth. Take Hull City fans have become used to seeing third kits in action, the 2014-2023 deal with Umbro insisted on third kits, many of which were highly sought after, such as the 2017/18 ‘Navy Peony’ kit.
The three seasons with Kappa Türkiye all included a third kit, indeed the 2024/25 campaign had a fourth kit in the guise of a 120th Anniversary kit, and the new deal with Oxen involves a third kit, which now that the primary and change kits are released will no doubt be unveiled soon.
Not that they’re a new thing per se… Hull City wore an AC Milan-alike third kit several times in the 1971/72 season, it’s just that before football became big business in the post-Taylor Report/Sky Sports era, third kits tended to be used only when they were truly needed.
Such an instance occurred in 1980/81, when City travelled to South Yorkshire for a Division Three clash with Sheffield United.
A few weeks after the game at Bramall Lane, which the hosts comfortably won 3-1, City’s programme noted the encounter in the ‘For the record’ section. As well as the line-ups, match officials, attendance and gate receipts, the respective kits of each side were listed.
It states that the Tigers were dressed in Yellow shirts, Blue shorts, Yellow stockings.
Despite yellow and blue being the civic colours of Hull, there’s something quite jarring about the idea of Hull City wearing them.
Perhaps that’s because yellow is quite close to the club’s amber on the colour spectrum, close enough for us to need a change kit when visiting teams with yellow home shirts, so the Tigers wearing yellow as a change colour seems counter-intuitive.
Not all kit clashes are caused by shirts however, and City’s black primary shorts are the reason we tend to change-up when visiting Bramall Lane. Amber alternate shorts allow us to wear our primary shirts at Sheffield United without a mash-up, a look we went with in 2019/20, but sometimes we go with a full away kit, as in 2017/18.
Curiously, a shorts clash was not considered to be an issue in 2014 when the two sides met in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley.
Back in 1980, mash-ups solved the shorts clash issue twice. In January 1980 the Blades and Tigers shared a point after a 1-1 draw in Division Three. City’s outfielders wore white away shorts with the home shirts and amber socks, though goalkeeper Eddie Blackburn went with the trackie pants option.
City were back at Bramall Lane in August 1980 for an Anglo-Scottish Cup group stage game. They again wore white away shorts with the home shirts, but this time they had black socks distinct from the regular home socks. The usual socks had amber stripes on the fold-over bands, but this set had white stripes. Sheffield United won 2-1 in City’s penultimate Anglo-Scottish Cup tie; the last came three days later when City drew 1-1 with Chesterfield, who would go on to win the competition in its final season, overcoming Rangers, Bury and Notts County to claim the silverware.
City’s next trip to Sheffield to face United, late in December 1980, would see them pack yellow and blue garments in their kit crate, and who knows why? Were the city’s colours a factor in the decision, or was it simply an easy kit to source? Yellow was a popular change shirt choice in this era, after all. In the top division in 1980/81, Arsenal, Birmingham, Chelsea, Everton, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and Tottenham had yellow away shirts, West Brom had yellow and green stripes, and Coventry had a yellow third shirt.
Of the teams wearing adidas, Brighton, Bournemouth, Oxford, Preston, Scunthorpe and Wimbledon all had yellow shirts with blue polo collars over a V-neck and three blue stripes down the sleeves. This style of shirt being readily available seems to be the most plausible explanation.
The Tigers did not fare well at Bramall Lane in December 1980. Bob Hatton tore us a new one as the Blades won 3-1. To be fair to City it should be pointed out that the Sheffield United trip came in between two of the three attempts to see off Blyth Spartans in the FA Cup. It’s hard to stay sharp when playing four games in ten days.
Not much to enjoy about a highlights video in a football sense then, as Keith Edwards’ consolation goal for City has been edited out (it was, after all, part of a SUFC History season review video), but it gives us a glimpse, albeit a fuzzy and lo-fi one, of the ‘emergency’ yellow and blue third kit.
Then we got a better look. After we first noted the yellow and blue third kit in 2020, City fan Steve Jennison got in touch to say he remembered the Tigers wearing the same yellow and blue combination away at Exeter City later that season, and we did indeed play there on 31 January, 1981. That prompted us to trawl the web for photographs, and the Grecian Archive’s scans of Exeter match programmes yielded exactly what we were hoping for. One image shows Steve Richards marking Tony Kellow and, crucially, provides a much clearer view of the shirt.
An AI-colourised version of the Exeter image appears below.
It confirms our suspicion that the yellow shirts carried neither a club crest nor a monogram, reinforcing the theory that they were off-the-shelf adidas garments rather than bespoke Hull City shirts. The shirts have the polo collar over a V-neck and shoulder stripes of the adidas ‘Rio’ template, the same style worn by Brighton, Bournemouth, Oxford, Preston, Scunthorpe and Wimbledon in 1980/81.
City won the game 3-1 thanks to goals from Mutrie, Marwood and McClaren, salvaging some dignity for the third kit after the Bramall Lane lashing.
We’ve not been able to source any further images of the kit in action, but a photograph of City players relaxing in Gibraltar in 1983 offers further intrigue. Back then, old match shirts were recycled as training gear (as this July 1982 shot of players training in Europa shirts used in matches between 1975 and 1979 illustrates), and after training in a yellow shirt with blue trim at the Victoria Stadium in Gibraltar during a pre-season tour in 1983, John Davies keeps it on for some poolside fun (we’ll totally understand if your eyes go to a barely clothed Don Robinson first).
It seems reasonable to regard the Gibraltar photograph as showing one of the third-kit shirts that first appeared at Bramall Lane and were later used at Exeter. Third kits are a matter of fact now, but there was a time when their use was so infrequent their existence could be forgotten for over forty years.
Some of the images in this article first appeared in the Facebook group Hull City AFC Boothferry Park Photos/Memories.
The match clip is an excerpt from the SUFC History video ‘Sheffield United 1980-1981’