Colours, Crest and Traditions
| The Wednesday's home shirt of 1871. It is assumed that these were the original colours used by the team. |
Since its founding the club has played their home games in blue and white shirts, traditionally in vertical stripes. However, this has not always been the case and there have been variations upon the theme. A monochrome photograph from 1874–75 shows the Wednesday team in plain dark shirts, while the 1871 "Rules of the Sheffield Football Association" listed the Wednesday club colours as blue and white hoops. A quartered blue and white design was used in 1887 and a blue shirt with white sleeves between 1965 and 1973. This design would have received greater notoriety had Wednesday not worn their away kit for all of their games in the 1966 FA Cup run, when all of their ties were drawn away. Given the option in the final of wearing their first strip, they chose the away strip for luck; but Everton managed to claw back a 2–0 deficit after 54 minutes and eventually won the game 3–2.
There is a superstition among many older Wednesday fans that the team tends to have a poor season when they abandon the traditional evenly spaced blue and white stripe designs in favour of some broad stripe or narrow stripe design. However, in an age of marketing-driven decisions, the team only reverts to the familiar style every so often.
Wednesday have often favoured black shorts or, more recently, blue. There have been times where Wednesday have opted to play in white shorts, sometimes to minimise colour clashes with the opposing team. The socks were invariably blue and white hoops but these too have gone through changes including blue with a white roll over top, all blue and all white.
The away strip has changed regularly over the years although an all yellow strip has been used for many of the recent seasons in the club's history. Traditionally white was the second choice for many teams, including Wednesday. Other colours used for away kits in previous years include black, silver, green and orange. Wednesday have always avoided red as an alternative colour but for years had the players' numbers in red on the first-choice shirt backs, which was not easy to discern against blue and white stripes.
The shirt sponsors Lotto finish their contract at the end of the 2008–09 season and the new shirts are supplied by Puma with whom the club had a successful partnership in the Premier League. Home colours are the traditional shirt of blue and white stripes, coupled with black shorts and the away strip is a yellow shirt with blue accents, and yellow shorts.
Read more about this topic: Sheffield Wednesday F.C.
Famous quotes containing the words crest and/or traditions:
“What shall he have that killed the deer?
His leather skin and horns to wear.
Then sing him home.
Take thou no scorn to wear the horn,
It was a crest ere thou wast born;
Thy father’s father wore it,
And thy father bore it.
The horn, the horn, the lusty horn
Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Napoleon never wished to be justified. He killed his enemy according to Corsican traditions [le droit corse] and if he sometimes regretted his mistake, he never understood that it had been a crime.”
—Guillaume-Prosper, Baron De Barante (1782–1866)