New away kit

Football Shirt Culture (pretty much the best site out there for collating leaked kit pictures that float around fan forums, bookmark fans) have posted scans of a leaflet that would seem to confirm our new away kit for 08/09 as being a fetching grey and red number…

EDIT 19.06.08 – The kit is now available to pre-order, with some proper pictures now up, in the online shop.

Pictures of the kit were first leaked onto the net a few months back, around the same time as pictures of the home kit started to show up. The number and quality of pictures already out there suggested that the kit was indeed genuine – particularly when the veracity of the home kit pics was confirmed – but this is the first time any official club documentation (in this case, a card sent out to season ticket holders) has featured it.

At the time of those initial leaks, I was quite pleased by the idea of a grey kit – it immediately harkens back to the classic late ’80s Candy strips, which of course were the away colours the last time we won the title. One concern I had about the shirt was that the white Carlsberg logo looked wrong, and I hoped that before the official launch it would be changed to red or green. Sadly, this hasn’t proved to be the case, and it looks rather out of place on an otherwise smart shirt :

The checkerboard detail takes some getting used to, but also goes some way towards making the kit look distinctive. Note also the collar detail – I like how the adidas stripes run into it and it then goes around the back of the neck. All in all, it’s a decent kit – a vast improvement on last year’s – and despite that poor sponsor logo colour choice, it feels very “Liverpool”, and I’m certainly still interested in buying it. Even better, though, is the away goalie kit :

It’s green! Proper, goalkeeper green! A simple green shirt with white adidas stripes and big thick cuffs! I’ve wanted us to have a GK shirt like this for years! It’s a total Bruce Grobbelaar-era effort! My only problem with it is that it should clearly be the home shirt, and the black AC Milan-style effort used as the away version. Nevertheless, this has leapt to the top of my “want” list immediately. All in all, I think the four kits so far (with a European away shirt still to be officially announced or unveiled, but supposedly it’s dark green with a navy/black collar) are the strongest set of strips we’ve had in years, even better than adidas’ first season back. Long may this sort of thing continue!

Seb Patrick