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Gold Coast players model the new Gold Coast Football Club playing strip during the Gold Coast Football Club Launch at the Southport Sharks Function Centre, Gold Coast. Slattery Images
The AFL’s newest club confirmed the worst kept secret in footy last night in announcing they’ll be called the Gold Coast Suns, but thankfully they didn’t stop there – the team’s colours, jumpers, logo and song were also officially unveiled.
The string of announcements will no doubt generate a mixed response from fans, especially with the fledgling club throwing up a few unique decisions.
Most people saw the Suns name coming – especially readers of The Roar – so there’s no need to go over old ground there. The jumpers, logo and song provide enough to dissect in their own right, however.
The home jumper closely resembles the current VFL version, in that it’s predominantly red with a GC logo in the middle. However, two yellow panels have been added to the sides, completing what looks like a fine football jumper. Some might say it’s too simple, and it’s easy to understand that view, but sometimes less is more.
The other two playing strips have adopted a more stylised look, with a giant wave dominating the front. The away jumper is red with a yellow and white wave, while the clash strip is white with a blue wave.
While the clash strip does well to incorporate the blue that’s become synonymous with Gold Coast-based sports teams in recent years, the away one feels a tad unnecessary given its similarities to the home jumper. The only explanation you can draw for creating it is that it features more white and is paired with white shorts, traditional for away teams.
On the whole, however, the three jumpers are not a bad first-up effort from the club. A look back at some of the early Fremantle jumpers verifies this.
The logo is also an updated version of the one used up until now. Unfortunately, it’s hard to call this one a change for the better.
It’s fair enough that the club would try to continue on the Suns theme with its logo, but having beams shooting out in all directions and adding glare to the background of the previously-simplistic GC symbol is over the top. Perhaps it would have been better to simply add the Suns name at the bottom of the logo, without going after symbolic references at the same time.
The club song, meanwhile, will take some getting used to – and that’s after already hearing it on YouTube months ago. To be fair, though, it does have two nice redeeming features.
The first is that it’s more of a traditional club song than other recent efforts. The second is the “fight fight fight” line of the song, which has a bit of “yellow and black” about it.
But still, it will definitely take some getting used to.
Finally, and although the jumpers and logo pretty much covered this, the colours are deserving of a mention. They’ve stuck with the red and yellow look, and they should be applauded for doing so.
They’ve managed to find colours that are fitting for a Gold Coast team without copying the colour scheme of the NRL’s Titans, the A-League’s United or the NBL’s Blaze. As mentioned before, it was good to see blue incorporated somehow, but they’ve found a healthy point of difference with the lifeguard-inspired – or sun and beach-inspired – look.
However, with so many unveilings in one day, there is bound to be more than a bit of conjecture.
On one hand, it’s easy to look back at the efforts of Fremantle and Port Adelaide and say Gold Coast have made some truly great decisions. But it’s also easy to say they could’ve done better.
With that in mind, Gold Coast seem to have done a reasonable enough job.