Strip
On the left, the 2002 season jersey made by Nike and sponsored by Castle. On the right, the 2009 jersey made by Canterbury and sponsored by Sasol.South Africa play in green jerseys, white shorts and green socks. Their jersey is embroidered with the SA Rugby logo on the upper left corner and the flag of South Africa on the sleeve and traditionally has a gold collar. The strip is made by Canterbury of New Zealand and their current shirt sponsor is South African banking giant ABSA. The green jersey was first adopted when the British Isles toured South Africa in 1896. On their first tour to Great Britain and Ireland in 1906–07 the South Africa wore a green jersey with white collar, blue shorts, and blue socks. A replica shirt was worn in 2006 against Ireland in Dublin to mark the centenary of the tour. When Australia first toured South Africa in 1933, the visitors wore sky blue jerseys to avoid confusion, as at the time, both wore dark green strips. In 1953, when Australia toured again, the Springboks wore white jerseys for the test matches. In 1961 Australia changed their jersey to gold to avoid further colour clashes.
The Springbok nickname and logo also dates from the 1906–7 tour of Britain. The springbok was chosen to represent the team by tour captain Paul Roos in an attempt to prevent the British press from inventing their own name. The logo was not restricted to the white team alone, the first coloured national team used the springbok in 1939 and the first black team in 1950. After the fall of apartheid in 1992 a wreath of proteas was added to the logo. When the ANC was elected in 1994 the team's name was not changed to the Proteas like that of other South African sporting teams only because of the intervention of President Nelson Mandela. The movie Invictus starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon depicts this story.
In December 2008, the SARU decided to place the protea on the left side of the Boks' jersey, in line with other South African national teams, and move the springbok to the right of the jersey. The new jersey was worn for the first time during the British and Irish Lions' 2009 tour of South Africa.
Read more about this topic: South Africa 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)