Good, Bad and Ugly kits from the past – Crystal Palace
Good – home shirt 1980-83
Palace had worn two shirts with diagonal sashes prior to this shirt but this was the est one of the three.
Worn by the ‘Team of the 80’s’ as the press hyped them and led by Terry Venables as manager, this shirt was as classy as the football on the pitch.
Manufactured by Adidas, the shirt was white and had a red and blue sash running from the left shoulder to the right hip.
Bad – home shirt 1998/99
After 11 years of vertical red and blue stripes as the design on the Crystal Palace home shirts, someone at Adidas came out with this bad design.
The shirt was predominantly red apart from a thin blue panel on the outside of the body of the shirt. The three Adidas stripes that usually run on the top of the sleeve ran along the inside of the sleeve.
This shirt was only worn for one season, which was considered one of the worst in recent times for Palace.
Terry Venables returned to Selhurst Park but left soon after being appointed as manager and the club went into administration in March of that season.
Ugly – away shirt 1988/89
This shirt gets the ignominious award for the Ugly Crystal Palace shirt.
A two-tone yellow shirt with vertical stripes looks awful and the ‘Fly Virgin’ label is the only thing about the shirt that stops it from looking like a Sunday League shirt.
I searched on YouTube for any footage of Palace wearing the shirt and found a grainy video from a West Bromwich Albion end of season VHS. The shirt wasn’t to prove lucky as they lost the game 5-3!
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