Since Leicester Tigers parted ways with Canterbury in 2015, it’s safe to say that things haven’t always been rosy – after all, who could forget the absolutely horrendous primarily white home shirt from Kooga’s first season? But since then, things have generally played safe, and their first outing with Kukri last year continued that trend.
And from the a distance at least, 2018/19’s home design appears to continue that trend, with solid equal hoops of green, red and white.
Okay so it’s not totally traditional – many fans clamour for a return to the traditional, lighter shade of green, and the white and red hoops could be thinner, as seen on the 2016 design… but it’s undoubtedly an retro-vibed looked.
That is, until you look a little closer… and see that for some reason Kukri has decided to sublimate a tacky tiger-stripe pattern into the body of the shirt, front and back.
This isn’t the first time that the Tigers have delved into the murky waters of animal print, of course – they have Canterbury to thank for that. And while this is undoubtedly a more subtle take than that shambles.
But that’s almost why we’re more annoyed about it – this would be a really lovely shirt with just the hoops, and it definitely doesn’t need anything extra to complicate matters.
One thing you can’t accuse the away shirt of being, however, is traditional. A white jersey with fading purple hoops will rather force one’s mind into the contemporary – but that’s absolutely not a bad thing in our mind.
The combination of the two colours works really well together, and if it wasn’t for the unwelcome return of a tiger stripes at the top of the chest, the front of the shirt would be almost flawless.
We try not to let sponsor placement have too much of a bearing on our ratings of jerseys, but the sponsor around the top of the shoulder is really quite intrusive. The large red panel looks fine on the home design, but there seems to be no need for it here – it clashes with the purple in a really unattractive way.
It’s a shame really – both of these designs have elements that we really love, and certainly from a distance they work well. But up close, there’s just a bit too much going on in the animal print department to really make these shirts winners.
Rugby Shirt Watch 