Obscure Kits From British Football History #9

Chelsea (away)
1978 - 1981

You'll have gathered by now that SPAOTP are big fans of ITV4's brilliant retrospective of vintage football, The Big Match Revisited. The series showing hour-long re-runs of football action from the 1978/79 season is a joy to behold for anyone that yearns for a more innocent time before rampant commercialisation took over.

This week's show featured a First Division clash between Manchester City and Chelsea at Maine Road dated January 22nd 1979, and it's from here that we get the latest in our Obscure Kit series.

With Manchester City playing in all-Sky Blue, Chelsea (managed by Danny Blanchflower) couldn't possibly enter the field of play wearing their traditional Royal Blue shirts for fear of a colour clash. It was therefore time to wheel out the change strip, and even by the rich and varied history of all Chelsea'a change strips, this one was a bit peculiar.

When playing away from home, Chelsea have worn various colour combinations down the years - white and blue, red and white, even yellow and blue, but between 1978 and 1981, Chelsea opted for the rarely seen combo of yellow and green.

A quick check of my True Colours book by John Devlin tells me that ostensibly this was an all-yellow kit with green trim, but on certain isolated occasions (such as the aforementioned match against Man City) green shorts would be worn to create a distinctly 'Norwichesque' ensemble.

Chelsea's kit at the time was made by Umbro and featured their familiar styling du jour, namely the famous diamond logo running liberally along the sleeves, shorts and stocking tops. It was a device they used to great effect on their blue and white home kit back then, but when their yellow away kit was originally launched in 1977/78, it featured blue trim, not green.

Obviously someone in the Marketing department decided to change things around to give the team a more Brazilian feel for the following year, but it didn't do them much good - they were relegated at the end of the 78/79 season and promptly stayed in Division Two for five long seasons.

Oh well, at least they'd make up for that with interest a decade or two later. And as for that yellow and green kit, we've still got the photographic evidence to remind us of a time when Micky Droy et al looked ever so slightly Brazilian. Or like a member of Norwich City's reserve team - one or the other.

Revisit Football's golden age...

Nostalgic football fans in the UK - can we have your attention please!

Some People Are On The Pitch are proud to announce that a new series of The Big Match Revisited is returning to ITV4 on January 1st 2009. Covering the final 20 weeks of the 1978/79 season, the first programme has an absolute gem of a game in the shape of West Bromwich Albion's 5-3 victory over Manchester United.

So if you want to hear plenty of this...



...see some of this...



…and wallow in the masterly presentation of this man...



…make sure you tune into ITV4 in the new year on Thursdays or Sundays for a huge helping of football 1970's-style.

The previous series (looking back at the 1982/83 season) was broadcast at the start of this year and was hugely successful - so much so that many people wrote about it at the time from national newspapers to… well, us, frankly.

And rightly so, in our opinion. There's little enough vintage football on our screens as it is these days and ITV4 have realised this by giving fans of a certain age plenty of what they're looking for.

Throughout the course of the second series of The Big Match Revisited, you can expect to hear lots about the league title race between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, the dwindling fortunes of Chelsea, QPR and Derby and the race for promotion to Division 1 involving Crystal Palace, West Ham and Brighton.

And of course you can remind yourself of all the great players of the day that were doing the rounds. Names like Liam Brady, Steve Coppell, Mick Channon, Cyrille Regis and the recent arrivals at Spurs, Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa are all there on show for your televisual entertainment.

So go on - immerse yourself in nostalgia. Make a note in your diary for New Year's Day on ITV4 - The Big Match Revisited is back on your screens again.



With thanks to our friends Laura Wootton and Gary Andrews at ITV for providing us with the above information.