Ian Wright gives his opinion on famous Arsenal shirt
Arsenal has had some very nice jerseys over the years, year after year the club has been introducing fresh jerseys that fans have been buying.
Some have been so iconic that the club has had to bring them back, none is perhaps more iconic than the yellow bruise banana kit that the club wore between 1991 and 1993.
The jersey maker at the time was Adidas and after being through many other kit makers Arsenal has returned to the German kit maker.
One of the kits Adidas made this season was a return to the bruised banana kit and Arsenal fans have fallen in love with the new version.
It is one of the top-selling kits at the moment and it seems to be one of the club’s fans favourites, but Ian Wright says it wasn’t always like that.
The Arsenal legend played for the club when the kit was first introduced in the early 90s and he claims that it wasn’t so welcomed especially among the players and he also admitted that he didn’t enjoy wearing it.
“Such an iconic shirt, everybody goes crazy for it,” he said as quoted by Football London.
“They just brought it back out as well, Adidas, and it just flies, they just love it.
“I mean, when we started in it, we hated it. I didn’t like it because I was desperate to play in [the home] one.
“Played my first two games in [the bruised banana shirt] against Leicester and then Southampton and I had to wait to play in [the home] one against Chelsea.
“You know, you’re thinking it’s gonna be something normal then all of a sudden Adidas came out with this.
“We used to hate it because we didn’t know where to sign it, everybody used to moan about it.
“We thought that when it first came out people were gonna laugh at us in this. I look back now at the pictures of when we were playing: it’s brilliant and the pictures are fantastic.”
Though I find the whole con of ever changing kit boring and of minor interest at best – though I accept that is because I am an older fan – the whole fashion industry in and out of football annoys me with its blatant commercialism designed to extract cash from already hard pressed fans.
That being said we have “bruised bananas” in our house at times and they are yellowish brown, not yellow and green, like this ridiculous non Arsenal colour shirt. Just saying but I do prize accurate descriptions, which “bruised banana” cannot possibly be. But TBH, who cares? Not me!