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Repeated jumper changes are hurting league’s traditions

10th June, 2014
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Jarrod Mullen has been popped, Lance Armstrong-style. (AAP Image/Action Photographics, Robb Cox)
Expert
10th June, 2014
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I intended to write about Origin today but something that happened on the weekend got right up my nose – and it is still stinking.

How on earth could the Newcastle Knights play the Wests Tigers dressed in a predominantly orange strip?

I’ll admit I missed the first few minutes of the game but I tuned into Fox Sports and, in an instant, had no idea which team had the ball, and which team was defending.

I had to wait for the commentators to tell me that the really tall and rangy ball carrier was Willie Mason – perhaps he was Aaron Woods, sans headband? Were the Knights in possession or was it the Tigers?

Confusion reigned in my head, and I swear that was without a solitary beer! Goodish game, but it really bugged me until the very end.

I was uncomfortable watching the Knights playing in orange. The club’s traditional, premiership-winning colours are indelible in my head, but what I was watching wasn’t Newcastle. Couldn’t be.

It was the Tigers playing some team in white who were, in fact, the genuine Wests Tigers.

With subsequent research, I learnt that the Knights were playing in this unfamiliar strip and colours because of a sponsorship deal with the NSW Mining Council. Fluro orange being the colour worn by working-class miners.

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I reasoned that playing in some orange might be fair enough one day – clubs have to pull a sponsor dollar from somewhere, and the Newcastle district has a powerful mining backbone – but which genius decided that this orange strip would be worn against the famously orange and black Tigers?

It was Dumbsville to the power of ten. Hello Knights’ marketers? Is anyone at home there, or even close to being awake?

I spoke to a number of league fans, TV watchers who expressed similar frustration over this absurdity. The promotion was a total bummer, a waste of money for the good-intentioned folk of the Mining Council, but I won’t stop there.

Our NRL clubs are selling their images and souls far too cheaply and way too often.

I am all for a splash of pink here and there if monies are raised for the wonderful breast cancer cause, but why should it be on club’s traditional jerseys or playing strips? Surely, pink shorts and socks would suffice.

Over the past five or so years, I have frowned deeply at the TV screen as well as newspaper photos depicting NRL stars in alien jumpers. Have you have ever wondered who was playing in a particular game because of ‘promotional’ jumper changes?

There have been times when I did not recognise the Brisbane Broncos, the New Zealand Warriors, the Canterbury Bulldogs and even the Manly Sea Eagles. In one game, the Eagles were sent out in an army-style, camouflage strip. It was a shocker and from the fans I spoke to, it did not work.

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In the main, the joint-venture St George Illawarra club has maintained the traditions and reverence that accompanies their world-famous red V on a white jumper, but there have been times when the club has strayed to the whims of the marketeers.

Call me a traditionalist, a dinosaur – whatever. I am all for progress, but I don’t like this tampering with jumpers one bit. Clubs have to get a dollar somewhere but I say leave the jumpers alone.

Youngsters keep asking their parents to buy them the jumpers their heroes wear in the glorious heat of battle down at the local ground. For many, it becomes a serious and attainable goal to rise through the ranks and wear that very jumper one day in the National Rugby League.

How many kids have received mixed messages from jumper changes this year, and in the past few seasons? Do Penrith juniors dream of the day when they can become pink Panthers? Do up-and-coming Knights aspire to don the coal-miner orange strip, or the famous red and blue garb worn so proudly and brilliantly by The Chief, The Johns boys and Robbie O in the past?

Rugby league needs to hold onto its traditions fiercely. I understand that clubs need different home-and-away strips but that is where this marketing madness should end.

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