Newcastle United’s third kit reminding us of something familiar

Newcastle United boast one of the most iconic shirts in world football. Black stripes and white stripes, basic yet beautiful, a stone-cold elemental classic. That hasn’t stopped kit designers through the ages sticking their nebs in to varying degrees of abject failure, though. The blue trim. The all-black chest panel. The Micky Quinn-era irregular stripes that really did look like an actual barcode. And of course last season’s why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-when-we-were-scribbling-it-down-on-the-back-of-a-fag-packet 4 abomination. Oh Adidas, Puma, Umbro and Castore! How could you, you, you and you.

To be fair to Castore, they’ve learned from their shouldn’t-have-signed-that-off-at-the-end-of-an-eight-pint-session fiasco, and this year’s effort looks a lot tidier. More stripes, no once-seen-can’t-be-unseen hidden numbers, a step back in the right direction towards the Jackie Milburn ideal. But a kit manufacturer wouldn’t be doing their job properly if they didn’t do something to irritate and annoy the fanbase, and chafe against the aesthetic and/or moral sensibilities of the wider public at large, and to this end, Castore have unveiled a third kit that’s the spit of the Saudi Arabia national team’s clobber. And there was The Fiver thinking those leaked images had just been some buffoonish online prank.

The choice of green and white could simply be a coincidence, of course, another case of Castore failing to think things through, number two in a continuing series, number one being number four. Or, given the Premier League only approved Newcastle’s takeover by a Saudi-backed consortium after receiving “legally binding assurances” that the Saudi state had no influence, it’s a spectacular and unambiguous middle-digit trolling of