Forget Lineker, I like the new England strip

Good news and bad news for England football manager Roy Hodgson after a thrilling victory over world champions Germany at the weekend. On the one hand, it was a stunning result and he could bask in a certain level of satisfaction in the post-match interviews.

But rather than having to answer tricky questions about selections or substitutions, as usually happens when things go wrong on the field, Hodgson instead found himself having to justify the team’s controversial new kit.

The red and blue away strip has been described by former England striker Gary Lineker as the worst he had ever seen – a bit rich coming from a man who was still a professional in the early 90s, the heyday of bad football kits.

A quick Google search and you can see that Lineker has clearly played in – let alone seen – much worse.

The questions, enough to faze a less experienced manager, were expertly batted away by Hodgson who said “the only thing that interests me is the person wearing the shirt”, adding “I’m happy to let everyone out there have an opinion.”

Well, for what it’s worth Roy, I quite like the new kit. Recent designs have been a bit too white for my liking, so it’s nice to have something that doesn’t look the ‘after’ picture in a 1970s washing powder commercial.

When I was a child, England’s kit was always red, white and blue. I remember people at school being a bit sniffy about the 1982 World Cup shirt – the one with big colour blocks across the shoulders – which has now become a design classic and a favourite of pub-goers who choose to watch the team in ‘vintage’ strip.

Let’s hope that, after Euro 2016, Roy Hodgson isn’t conducting a post-mortem on another early exit but instead putting up a sturdy defence of the FA’s chosen colour palette.