In the three seasons since their inception, Zebre have had a rough old time of it – they’ve finished bottom of the Pro12 every year, they’ve never won a game in their Champions Cup history, and they’ve generally been a bit rubbish.
Times, they do seem to be changing, however. The XV Of The North-West have got this season off to a pretty good start by their standards, having won more games at time of writing in the league than they did in the whole of last season, and sitting pretty in the dizzying heights of 10th place.
Their newfound sort-of respectability has coincided with Zebre’s second season with fellow Italian kit supplier Errea. Last year, the firm produced a clean, subtle home shirt that made rather restrained and tasteful use of the team’s ‘slinky zebra’ logo, but this time around is much more abstract.
While they haven’t gone so far as to go full zebra as they did a few seasons ago, and that’s probably a sensible thing. Instead we have… well, we’re not entirely sure what exactly this is…
It’s kinda zebra-y of course, what with the black and white stripes and all that’s fairly obvious. But it’s kinda hard to see exactly what those stripes are supposed to be? It’s not the slinky zebra from last season… it almost looks like a topographic map in a weird way…
Thinking about it for a while, we think that it’s an abstract representation of a traditional zebra stripe pattern, made itself of a more modern, abstract zebra stripes – it’s like zebra Inception!
Errea have done a nice job with Zebre’s shirts over the last two seasons, and we think this is a really nice, individual design. The abstract nature of the Zebra Inception is perhaps not to everyone’s tastes, and from a distance it looks a little like someone’s been doing some serious wheelspins on it, but we think it’s a cool take on the zebra concept. Nice.
Rugby Shirt Watch 
