Worcester Warriors Kooga 2015/16 Home & Away Shirts

Worcester Warriors earned promotion back to the Premiership in one of the most dramatic, ‘I was there’ games in rugby’s recent history. Having had a few minutes to process their spectacular Championship final victory, the Warriors now turn their attention to the small matter of top flight rugby. Top flight rugby also means that long-time supplier Kooga gets to show off their wares on the big stage… 

Kooga are a company with a bit of a patchy history with Rugby Shirt Watch – some of their recent designs we’ve really liked, and some of them… well… we’d rather forget about them to be honest. This, however, is very much in the former category.

Kooga are clearly digging hoops this year, and while that’s not always turned out so well for them, anyone who’s been reading this site knows that we have a borderline-inappropriate love of the damn things, and we’re happy to say that this new home shirt ticks pretty much all of our boxes.

Worcester have gone down the hooped route before to pretty nice effect, and stripey shirts in various modern guises have been part of the club’s visual identity for some time, but usually those stripes have used a lot of yellow or white, the club’s secondary colour.

Now, that’s fine of course, but what we’ve got here is something much, much more appealing. Instead of keeping the body a plain, solid shade of dark blue, they’ve mixed it up by throwing in contrasting hoops of a lighter shade.

Combined with very cool, very eye-catching gold piping and sleeve cuffs, the whole thing hangs together in a wonderfully successful way. And while the Warriors’ traditional white third colour has had to make way for the blue here, we think that’s a sacrifice worth making.

The away shirt is a different kettle of the fish to the home design, and it’s definitely more of a ‘modern’ rugby shirt than the primary design’s hoops. It’s still quite a looker, though, and is one of the more unique designs we’ve seen this year.

Worcester have often used a lighter shade of blue to the home for their alternate shirts, but this is a much more pale shade than we’ve seen before, and it works.

If we were to be very mischievous, however, we’d idly speculate that their choice of sky blue might be a little pointed, given that a certain insect-based rugby team have moved into their patch and set up shop at a stadium more traditionally associated with a team who also play in that colour. It’s almost certainly a coincidence, but it made us chuckle…

Back to the shirt then, and there’s plenty to like here, not least the eye-catching black and white band around the middle of the shirt. It cannily contains the sponsor without looking OTT, and has a bit of a retro vibe about it too, or at least it would if the bands weren’t made out of unabashedly modern tiny dots.

On the whole though, it’s cool – an individual design and a colour scheme that nobody else is using definitely sets this shirt apart from the rest of the crowd.

Worcester might not be tearing it up at the top of the table this year, and recent experience for newly promoted teams would suggest that wins are probably going to be hard to come by, but whether they manage to make this year a success on the field or not, there’s no doubt that the Warriors will be wearing one of the coolest home shirts in the Aviva Premiership, and an away shirt that’s none too shabby either.

SHIT/GOOD RATING: Good

Images courtesy of Lovell Rugby