Albirroja kit through the ages…

April 20th, 2006 | by: Daniel | View Comments

Since I have memory only two countries use striped t-shirts in their national football teams, Paraguay and Argentina. You could argue that Peru use one strip across theirs, but I see it more as a band. Why most countries preferred a one color shirt? Probably because it’s easier to identify, you have less trouble playing with a team that have look-a-like shirts, having strips in two colors give you more probabilities in facing a team that has one of those two colors. And for the reporters, damn they have problems sometimes trying to understand the numbers in the back. But although all these facts, I won’t change my Albirroja for any other type of t-shirts.

In the beginning, Paraguay used very tiny strips on their t-shirts, always red and white. Some historians said that it was a 20 tiny strips shirt. With that type of t-shirt we won the America Cup of 1979. Then, as the fashion comes and goes, they changed to a 5 big strip t-shirt, like the one that was used in Mexico ’86.

A funny history is that in the qualifying phase of the World Cup USA ’94, the APF had a contract with a company and the day before of going to Colombia for the first match, they changed the whole kit for kabala to the same used in the America Cup ’79, but that didn’t bring us good luck.

In the France ’98 we came back to the 5-strips shirts, that came well, we qualified and made a decent presentation in the World Cup. To Korea/Japan ’02 we went to the tiny strip type, but with a blue zone under the arms (that was the one I like more). The surprise was the alternative kit that was in a copper color; normally it is white or blue. The same surprise came again in the Athens Olympics ‘04, when the alternative kit was yellow; some people believed that they were playing with Sweden instead of Paraguay.

For Germany ’06 we will use the tiny strip type kit, and an alternative blue shirt. It looks more as a normal shirt than a football shirt, but I don’t care, my only hope is that we make again a good presentation in this World Cup.