Gloucester Rugby’s big club rebrand created quite the furore when the curtain was pulled back on it last week – but in amongst all the debate around the club’s new crest, the brand spanking new 2018 jersey that it’s sitting on has rather been forgotten. And that’s a real shame, because after a few seasons of XBlades sticking to the classic cherry and white hoops, they’ve opted for something a bit different this year, though it’s a design that still owes a lot to the club’s past.
In a break from the traditional, what we have here is a solid red shirt broken up with thin white hoops, each accented by by a pair of dark grey pinstripes. It’s a really nice design, and one that harks back to the shirt worn by Gloucester in 2002-4, when they won the Powergen Cup and the Zurich Championship in consecutive season.
It’s a smart move to mix this radical new brand with a jersey design that’s got fond associations – as it happens, this shirt was also worn in the period just before Gloucester stopped wearing the old City of Gloucester coat of arms and replaced it with the previous club crest.
Had the internet and social media been a thing to amplify these things back in 2005, we wonder if fans would have had the same passionate reaction to the old crest as they’ve had to the new one. It’s certainly polarised people, that’s for sure.
For our part, it’s a bit predictably 2018 in its general design, and the lion bit is definitely a bit too close to the Leicester Tigers crest for comfort, but it’s quite nice looking on the whole, and the fact that it’s on a really cool jersey certainly doesn’t hurt.
Rugby Shirt Watch 