Thursday 27th June 2024

At the Q&A and quiz event at the Accomplice bar on Princes Avenue, former Tigers captain Garreth Roberts got a kit question wrong during the quiz: he didn’t remember City wearing red socks during the 1982/83!

Thursday 20th June 2024

Fellow City shirt collector Terry Kent sent some images of match-worn shirts he’d picked up, as well as a Mansfield Beers sponsored 1987/88 primary shirt (number 6) there was also this…

No sponsor on the front, and the number style suggests a 1986/87 primary shirt, as those were chain stitched on rather than heat bonded as in 1987/88, but you’d expect the number top be red. My guess is this is a reserve team shirt, and the black numbers identified such shirts as such, not first team shirts. There were certainly no replicas in long sleeved, and the circled tag number is 6, not 5, as you’d expect on replicas.

Thursday 6th June 2024
Hull City Kits had a display of 32 match shirts (from 1965 to 2024) at the Senior Tigers memorabilia day at the MKM Stadium.

Getting to meet Nick Barmby was a real privilege and he confirmed that the kitman issued XL shirts despite his requests for mediums, which confirms the 2005/06 Barmby home shirt I have is legit. Looking at a variety of other collectors Barmby shirts, he wore a range of sizes that year, Phil Beaumont on Twittex (@philbeaumont2) shared images of a framed 2005/06 home (s/s) in L and a 2005/06 away (l/s) in M!

Other things gleaned on the day..

1. When manager, Nick Barmby wanted us to have white shorts like in the mid 1970s
2. When at Liverpool, he played in a tournament that included Real Madrid. Liverpool keeper Pegguy Arphexad grew up with Zinedine Zidane in Marseille and sourced Barmby the shirt Zidane had worn.
3. Adam Lowthorpe said the first City shirt he wore as a player was the Dale Farm home (1989/90) when playing for Hull City Minors, showing match shirt recycling was going on in the early 90s.
4. Lowthorpe also said that the felt Needlers Sweets patches of 1994/95 absorbed water and became heavy. He recalls a game at Shrewsbury played in a downpour.
5. A fan claimed that the red and black striped shirts worn at Luton in March 1971 were paid for by the BBC, who feared City’s amber shirts would be indistinguishable from Luton’s white shirts on black and white TV. Those Milan-alike shirts were also used in 1971/72, at Cardiff, Oxford and Blackpool.

Sunday 2nd June 2024
I’ve never seen a picture from City’s Associate Members Cup final from 1984 so always presumed we wore our home kit. However an image on the Facebook group English Football in the 1980s seems to show the Tigers in white away shirts with black shorts and socks.

The pinstriped away shirts had red numbers, and the numbers seen on this image sure look significantly lighter in tone to the black of the shorts and socks. City won a coin toss to see who would host the final, which irritatingly moved to Wembley the following season. It’s possible then that Bournemouth were the designated home team despite the game being played in Hull.

Thursday 30th May 2024

At the second ‘Forever Tigers’ memorabilia event hosted by the Tigers Trust, I exhibited a modest number of match-worn shirts, putting an emphasis on 1964-1976, the years Ken Wagstaff played for the club.

I’d gotten wind of the likelihood of ‘Waggy’ attending, and let his daughter Fran know on Social Media that I was displaying a shirt worn by the man who made 378 appearances for the Tigers, scoring 173 times. It was quite gratifying seeing Waggy take in the shirts I was displaying.

Other former players were there too, Tom Wilson, John Hawley, Rob McDonald and Stan McEwan, and each took an interest in the shirts and shared anecdotes of kits they had worn. Sadly John Hawley doesn’t recall what he wore when playing in the Anglo-Italian Cup match away to Bari, only that whatever it was got covered in spit from hostile locals, and that he showered in the kit initially post-game.

My reason for asking was a snippet from the Friday 4th May edition of the Hull Daily Mail which suggested the Tigers wore Bari’s away kit… (Thanks to Nick Turner for sourcing this)

“Tigers lost their gear on Bari trip!

Somewhere in the world— probably in West Africa, there is around £1000-worth of Hull City kit, shirts, shorts, socks and boots, writes BRIAN TAYLOR

The basket containing City’s strip was mislaid when they were en-route to Bari on Tuesday for their Anglo- Italian game. Today the club were still making inquiries from airlines all over the world an effort to trace the gear. Secretary John Adamson thinks that the basket is probably in Accra for it was a Ghana Airways plane which took the party to Rome.

The plane was going on to Accra after stopping at Rome and it was there that the basket was lost. Searches at the other airports City called at Leeds, London, Rome and Bari failed to unearth the basket. But as yet there has no reply from Accra to City’s request for a search to be made.

The Tigers had to play Wednesday night’s game in their training boots and a set red shirts and white shorts borrowed from the Italian club. Fortunately the Tigers’ hand luggage containing their personal clothing was not lost.”

What John Hawley did remember, and this was backed up by Rob McDonald who also played for City in the 1970s before moving on, was that players didn’t train in old match kit, they had specific training gear.

We know that in the 1980s, certainly after the club narrowly survived going into receivership in 1982, the club had to ‘cut their cloth’ according to the new financial realities of City being in the bottom division, and that old match kit was recycled as training wear.

That’s evident in this picture, of gaffer Colin Appleton, who took over in 1982, putting the players through their paces in pre-season training. The players are wearing a mixture of late 70s Europa match shirts and adidas gear from our time wearing the brand with the three stripes between 1980-1982.

This thriftiness explain why 1975-1980 Europa away shirt in our collection, which we believe was worn by Waggy in his final season, is signed by Les Mutrie (with City 1980-1984) who used it as training wear.