SHIRTY LOVE TO THREE LIONS
Badge of honour mark of England pride
THEY were the first Sunday league team to turn out in match-worn England kit – with every outfield player wearing the No.7 shirt.
Sir Tom Finney, the Preston plumber who stayed true to his roots, once gave away a set of his England shirts to one of his local grassroots clubs after removing the Three Lions crest from each one because his generation considered the badge more precious than the garment itself.
Somewhere in the Lancashire heartlands where Finney was revered as one of England’s greatest players, there was once a pub team dressed in the emperor’s clothes.
“I took the badges off the shirts I kept and kitted out an entire team near my home,” said Finney (above) in 1984.
“It became the first local league team ever to wear the England shirt.”
The tale of Finney’s philanthropy is unfurled in a definitive history of international football’s oldest shirt, dating back 150 years to November 30, 1872, and the crest entrusted to each generation of England World Cup crusades.
Many of us have owned a replica shirt, or worn one as an act of vacuous patriotism, and as Harry Kane’s Boys of ‘22 get to work in Qatar, our fashion statements will be out in force next Monday for the Three Lions’ group opener against Iran.
But how much do we know about that badge we kiss?
In Three Lions On A Shirt, a 384-page treasure trove of the national team’s kits and the stars who wore it through the ages, we learn that England wore white for 199 consecutive internationals.
Then, controversially, they wore navy blue for the 3-0 win against Germany in 1935 at White Hart Lane, where the visitors gave the Nazi salute before kick-off and the 54,000 crowd was swelled by 16,000 visiting supporters – some of them waving swastikas.
The jersey Stanley Matthews wore that day is featured in the book (below), whose editor Jim Drewett reveals the switch to a red away strip may have been hastened by England’s humiliation, wearing blue, against the United States in Belo Horizonte 72 years ago.
Another seismic upset against the USA in Doha could have momentous consequences for
Gareth Southgate.
Drewett said: “After the 1966 World Cup final, Bobby Charlton swapped shirts with Uwe Seeler, and many years later he contacted Seeler to see if he could buy it back.
“Seeler told him he’d had a clear-out and chucked it away.
“How much would that iconic jersey be worth now?
“The whole memorabilia market has been turned upside down by Steve Hodge selling Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ shirt for £7million.”
We’ve all got a favourite England shirt, while a few were more forgettable than amnesia itself.
For instance, they wore yellow in Katowice almost 50 years ago, where a ruinous 2-0 defeat against Poland was the beginning of the end for Sir Alf Ramsey as manager.
And the industrial-size operation run by current England kit men Pat Frost and Neil Jones is a mind-boggling morass of numbers, letters, sleeve patches and a heat press which follows the Three Lions everywhere.
Occasionally there is a mild panic, like Harry Maguire’s close encounter with the wrong size shirt before the 2018 World Cup quarterfinal against Sweden in Russia.
Frost explained: “Five minutes before the players are due to go out,
Harry Maguire shouts over to me, ‘Hey, Frosty, this shirt’s big enough for me grandad!’ The whole dressing room stops and looks at him. And then me.
“I had to print up his name, a number on the front and back, match detail and sleeve patches.
“By now everyone else has got their anthem jackets on, Harry’s sitting there looking over and Gareth walks past and asks, ‘How are you getting on?’
“By the time I had finished, everyone had lined up in the tunnel and he ended up pulling on his shirt as he walked out.
“But then he went and scored after seven minutes, so it worked out OK.”
THREE Lions On A Shirt, compiled by Simon Shakeshaft, Daren Burney and Neville Evans, edited by Jim Drewett, published by Vision Sports Publishing, £40 hardback, from www. threelionsonashirt.co.uk