Purple pays

Perhaps when we first bought the kit - when the purple and white gleamed, all the shirts fitted and no-one had as yet nicked any of the socks - perhaps then it had looked like a reasonable outfit. Certainly no-one could have predicted that several years later the City Life Church FC team gear would be winning a national competition for the worst football kit in the country!

In the last few weeks, the CLC footie team have featured in the Sunday People, as the winners - or should that be losers - of their 'My Kit's the Pits' competition. Illustrated by a couple of photographs to show just how bad our clobber is, the reward for looking worse than every other team in the nation was a brand spanking new set of jerseys, shorts and socks, sponsored by non-alcoholic lager brewers Kaliber.

So what went wrong? Maybe it was the fact that we never had any matching shorts, so the purple was juxtaposed simultaneously with red, white, black, brown, green, and even Norwich City colours on our various thighs. Or perhaps it was that all the socks got stolen, not least by one opposition goalkeeper who sported them whenever our two teams met as a kind of insult. Maybe it was the visual similarity, when splattered with the wet mud of a January football pitch, to an old bar of Dairy Milk that had been run over by a bus. Or perhaps our performances were so woeful, that the kit became a symbol of decrepitude by association. 

        
Spot the difference: before (left) and after (right) shots of the contrasting kits from the Sunday People. Can anyone tell the difference?

 Whatever went wrong the lads are now blessed with a new blue outfit that brings out the sparkle in their eyes. So hats off to Justin Ruffell-Ward, who suffered the colour-blind jokes for many years, having chosen the purple gear initially, only to be justified in that it was so bad it won us a new one. And now we have the luxury of an away kit. Although judging by the critical opinion thus far, the only away action it will be getting will be 'take it away!' Let's just hope that unlike the sponsor, our football doesn't remain fizzy and light, with little substance ...

Cambridge Evening News also ran the story. Click the picture below to see the clipping: