The Good, The Bad, The WTF

We're on international duty today. Never a club v. country row here. When you can put on a shirt of this quality, why would you say no?

Cameroon is the offender this week. This shirt goes back to the mid-'90s, when the Indomitable Lions were still indomitable.



Is this shirt, gasp, actually OK? I'm undecided. Maybe if I talk it through, I can make a decision.

It's not overbearing, which is nice. We've seen plenty of those here. I'm not sure about the rest of it though. The stars are decent, but to me they look like the tattoos that trendier-than-I punkers have been sporting for at least a decade now.

I'm going to digress for just a moment to say that I have never understood exactly how punk rock and its followers have become so fashion codified. It's a movement that professes to be so different from the mainstream, so why do they feel the need to look the same as each other? Should I blame the late Tim Yohannon, or did it start before he made his American Punk Rock Laws?

Anyway--the stars. They're alright, I guess. Maybe if they were in a useful constellation that meant something to the people of Cameroon, I could get behind them. Instead, it's just a Sailor Jerry inspired tat on top of the shirt.

Upon closer inspection, this shirt looks suspiciously like a golf shirt, and not in the way the current US "white" jersey does. It's the collar with the stripe, and the little button hole below. Although my source insists this is the away jersey of the time, I cannot confirm.

If we look at the home shirt of the time, an interesting one in its own right, we see the manufacturer, badge and stripey thing in the collar are the same. Perhaps this is the correct one after all.

Where does that leave us? I have to come to the conclusion that this shirt is not bad, and definitely not WTF material. However it's not good either. This shirt that made me say "I have to do this" when I first saw it is, instead, rather, well, blah. That's a fate worse than WTF, I'm afraid. Now, about that home shirt. . .