Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Good, The Bad, The WTF

I hate it when this happens. You get so busy with other things that you forget what day of the week it is. That happened to me yesterday, which is why a Wednesday came and went without a weekly installment of this recurring feature. My apologies to anyone who noticed and cared. Of course, if you did not notice or care, then my apologies for wasting your time with this paragraph.

Torquay United are coming back to the Football League after a two-year absence. The Gulls finished bottom of the table in 2007, 13 points adrift of safety in League Two. They nearly bounced right back up in 2008, finishing third in the conference, but were beaten out in the playoffs by Exeter City. Last season it was Torquay's turn to go up through the playoffs, a feat accomplished after a 2-0 win over Canbridge United.

Before their woeful 2006-07 season, Torquay had been in the Football League for 80 consecutive seasons, despite never advancing higher that the third tier. That's pretty impressive. Of course, if it were up to me, I'd have kicked them out of the league in 1992-93 for wearing such an ugly shirt, and a cheap ripoff at that.


Here's what I don't understand. It's obvious that this shirt is trying to use the same Umbro template that showed up in Northern Ireland, among others, at the time. Unfortunately, Torquay must not have been able to afford paying Unbro prices, so they got a knockoff from a company that advertises team kits in the back of football magazines. This shirt is so cheap, there is not even a manufacturer's logo on it. It's almost like No Logo got published a decade earlier, if you disregard the shirt sponsor and team badge. Oh wait, the manufacturer logo is on the sleeves. Yeah, so, not so much then.


As you can barely see in this closer view, there is some kind of pattern-within-a-pattern thing going on. Doesn't make it any better.

The real crime, as far as I am concerned, is how this shirt minimizes the team badge. If you did not know better, you'd feel safe in an assumption that the badge is the manufacturer logo, probably some company that starts with an M. Coincidentally, Matchwinner made this shirt. Perhaps that was planned on their part?

As an aside, the movement ascribed to No Logo never really took off did it? Besides Radiohead, did anyone take this manifesto seriously? Corporations have their logos in more spaces than ever before. Perhaps it's time for a fresh sequel from a less earnest, more thoughtful author who self-publishes instead of using a publisher who put their logo on the front cover. Just a thought.

8 comments:

EbullientFatalist said...

Their badge looks like something from Star Trek.


I think I just inadvertently called myself out.

Teeknuts said...

If you stare at that thing for more than 10 seconds you get a headache.

EbullientFatalist said...

Glad I got to read that ManU debt post before the Glazers got to UF and made them pull it.

jjf3 said...

umlaut:
2 questions (actually, make that more): what the hell are the Star Trek triangles In Torquay's logo supposed to represent? Sails? And why doesn't the first sail reappear at below the second, when the second is complete?

2) I meant to ask this before, but if Notts is not the oldest football team, and who is instead? And why is this still debatable 130 years later? Just curious...

Gracias!

Jacob said...

1) I think that's a stylized seagull. I'm not sure, though.

2) Sheffield FC are the world's oldest club. Notts County are the oldest professional club. A subtle distinction, but one that must be noted.

jjf3 said...

Thanks!

Subtle distinctions seem to matter in English football, professionalism among them. A BBC DVD set left me with the impression that Blackburn was also a forerunner in English football (though I forget the exact distinction they supposedly had)...(I'll try to revisit at some point)

jjf3 said...

Apologies in advance, but were they the first professional FA Cup winners, or the first full-time professional team, or some other weird distinction? I just remember being happy I had picked a team that hadn't just been important the last 20 years...(and rationalizing my avoidance of the "big 4")...

Jacob said...

Best I can tell--Blackburn Rovers were the first non-London club to reach the FA Cup final. Blackburn Olympic were the first non-London team to win the Cup two years after.

Sheffield Zulus were the first professional team, I think. Such things were frowned upon at the time and the club was disbanded shortly thereafter.