Last year, all we had to worry about was the fact we didn't want a rat catcher as our home shirt sponsor. With the arrival of the new money, the old order went straight out of the window. Notts had planned to commemorate the passing of Jimmy Sirrel with a commemorative kit. The sponsors were Vandanel, also the shirt manufacturers and now in the second year of their deal. Everything was on course for a pre-season release when the clubs owners changed. Their ideas were very different and existing plans were quietly scrapped including the proposed tribute. Instead, the club was looking to the future. Nevermind a run of 2000 shirts for Nottinghamshire. How about 200,000 for Europe and Asia.... well the figures are mine but you get the picture. They were certainly big enough to interest Nike who came in with the lure of running a shop full of their own stock. Medoc returned as sponsors. The new kit was bound to be a winner, even if it was a little delayed.... In the pre-season, the club used off-the-shelf black and white striped Avec shirts. These were, in themselves, very nice although there was no club logo (it being redesigned). Under the new regime, there was no chance of them being released for resale and because they were no different from normal shelf stock, if they ever do appear, they'll be indistiquishable from any other over the counter buy.
Such was the lateness of the deal with Nike, when the players ran out against Bradford on the first day of the season, the kit they wore was not yet available as a replica. Each player had only one shirt - the one they wore, made up by Nike.
The Shirts of the Championship Winning Season
With three owners and four different managers in the season, it was all very difficult to keep track of. Only one thing never changed. The black and white shirt.
With average gates going up from the season before, there was bound to be more interest in getting hold of match worn kit than previously but with so many excuses to throw it into the crowd, it was not surprising that nothing remained at the end of the season to appear in the club shop. This means it's all out there and some of it will doubtless surface, in time, on Ebay and for private sale. So how will you know whether its genuine or not ?
What a silly question.
You'll come here of course.
the new kit
After the game, there was a decision made to redesign the badge - removing a gold trim around the edges and replacing it with black. The players shirts were reissued and when the replicas were released, they also had black on them. If you get hold of a shirt with the gold around it therefore, its a 'Bradford shirt' and definitely player issue.
The 'Bradford badge' was on the player issue shirts at the start of the season only - it was replaced almost immediately.
After this hiccup, the standard shirts lasted for much of the rest of the season. The higher profile players,particularly, gave shirts away sometimes though - Hughes and Schmeichel got through twelve each ! When this happened, they were replaced from shop stock (i.e.replicas). These kits are indistinquishable from others made up in the shop. The third and final kit change came at the end of the season when all of the previous shirts had disappeared to players friends and family or in the crowd after the big matches at the climax. If you acquired a shirt that way, it's probably one of the players' two main ones for the season.Because stock was running low in the shop at this point, a whole range of new kit was issued for the last game of the season - at Torquay. Remember that, unlike last year, there was no different sponsor on the black and white kit if they went away. It was still Medoc. The Coca Cola epaulettes had run out also so the club attached the old plastic ones that had been used in the first year of the sponsorship deal rather than the felt ones commonly issued. Another distinctive feature was that, because of the shortages, most of the kits were huge - XXL sizes and above. This means that if you have a little lad like Clapham (normally an M) and his shirt is a much bigger size and has plastic rather than felt epaulettes, its probably a Torquay shirt - worn for one single game. Unless, of course, you bought it from a fat bloke.....
This regular badge was on all genuine team shirts after the first game including aways and all replicas
It had been a while since Notts had 'stars' whose shirts were in demand - mostly from a new group of fans who came with the Munto era. Goalkeeper Kaspar Schmeichel and striker Lee Hughes brought higher league quality to Meadow Lane and threw their shirts around with wild abandon to supporters. Long after the end of the era, this shirt - as worn by Kaspar in his last ever game at Torquay, was auctioned off by him on Ebay.
