Strip
England have returned to the traditional all-white shirts, white shorts with navy and white socks. The emblem on the shirts is a red rose, rather than the Plantagenet Three Lions displayed on the shirts of the England football and cricket teams. The strip is manufactured by Canterbury and O2 is the shirt sponsor. Red was the change strip, although prior to the introduction of the red strip, navy blue was used. Purple was used as the change strip as of the 2009 autumn internationals, reflecting the traditional colour of the original England track-suits from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. For the 2011 Rugby World Cup the change kit was black.
The Rugby Football Union (RFU) had created the national side's emblem prior to an English team being sent to Edinburgh to play a Scottish side. A red rose was chosen to be the side’s emblem. The white kit worn by the national team was taken from the kit used at Rugby School. Alfred Wright, an employee of the Rugby Football Union, is credited with the standardisation and new design of the rose, which up until 1920 had undergone many variations in its depiction. The Wright design is thought to have been used without minor alteration until the late 1990s. It was not until 1997 that the rose was modernised when Nike became the official strip supplier.
In 2003 England first used a skin-tight strip. This was intended to make it more difficult for the opposition to grasp the shirt when tackling. The home and away strips for 2007 were unveiled on 15 May that year. The materials used are superior, offering improved performance to the 2003 kit. However, a sweeping red mark on the base-white front which forms St George's Cross on the top left, and a changed away-strip (dark blue to red), have received criticism because it is felt that emphasis has been placed on St George's Cross at the expense of the traditional red rose. The new strip was introduced in England's home game against Wales on 4 August, while the alternative strip was first used against France on 18 August.
The current England home strip is white with a strip of red around the neck, and the away strip is black (causing much controversy due to the famous All-Black kit of New Zealand), both kits have a ground breaking new technology in the form of a gripper print. A special strip was worn during the match versus Wales in the 2010 Six Nations Championship which replicated that worn in 1910 to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of Twickenham.
Read more about this topic: England National Rugby Union Team
Famous quotes containing the word strip:
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Here we’ll strip and cool our fire
In cream below, in milk-baths higher;
And when all wells are drawn dry,
I’ll drink a tear out of thine eye.”
—Richard Lovelace (1618–1658)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)