A Different View: Big match days with crepe hats and rosettes
When you go to support your team these days, wearing the colours almost always means donning a replica jersey; back in a different time, wearing the colours invariably meant having them stream like maroon rain down your face.
Because that was the golden era of crepe hats and rosettes bearing the name of your club or county. The only people wearing the jersey were lining out on the actual playing field.
The foundation layer for your hat was a circle of cardboard wrapped with equal measures of maroon and white crepe paper that wouldn’t be able to support a fly if he landed on top of it.
And when it rained, the dye ran down your head; not quite like something out of Scarface – but certainly sent you home with hair of a slightly iridescent hue.
The rosette was the other way to show your true colours – a big circular badge that said Galway loud and proud with a circumference of maroon crepe paper that collectively took over a quarter of your torso.
And all the way down to Croker the wide boys who’d made these paper-thin goods could be heard shouting ‘hats or rosettes – get your hats or rosettes’ in the same sing-song key as they sell you newspaper on street corners for the rest of the week, as in ‘Herald or Press’.
I’m not sure if there’s anyone left making these hats or rosettes although you can still see evidence of crepe design in national schools, normally used to create massive paper chains that light up the weeks before Christmas.
But these days fans go all out to show their support – and at some considerable cost.
No English football team would dream of producing less than four variations on their kit each season, even if versions three and four might only see the light of day once.
No English football team would dream of producing less than four variations on their kit each season, even if versions three and four might only see the light of day once.
Even League of Ireland clubs are cottoning on to the income potential; Bohemians seem more interested in producing new kits than, perhaps, new players that might wear it on the way to a league title.
Galway United produced a lovely new third kit recently, and this one was meaningful because it was a tribute to the great Ollie Horgan – just as the club’s first and second kit this year are a tribute to Eamon Chick Deacy, the finest player to ever pull on the original of that shirt.
Growing up, we didn’t have replica jerseys, but you could just get a red or blue top and pretend it was the real thing – even if there was no crest or branding.
Anyway even the actual jersey then was a simple affair because this was the age before jersey sponsorship or names on the shirt. So you could stitch on a number if you liked – and a club badge if you were really dedicated.
I remember asking Santa for a red and white Liverpool jersey one Christmas, only to find a red and white jersey under the tree alright – but red with white sleeves instead of all red with while collar and cuffs.
This was more commonly known as an Arsenal jersey, the team that had beaten them in that 1971 FA Cup when Charlie George famously bagged the winner. It wouldn’t have been much more upsetting if Santa had left me a dress.
These days, not alone can you buy the jerseys; there are also training tops, leisure tops, coats, tee-shirts, pyjamas, duvet covers, posters, iPhone covers, mouse mats, beer glasses, mugs, umbrellas, car mats, door mats, ear buds, baby clothes, chairs, torches and yoga mats.
So you can proclaim your love for ‘your’ team in every aspect of your daily life – and all without going within an ass’s roar of the ground itself.
Back in the seventies, Leeds United were the first team to come up with a thing where they had their shirt number also on the elastic ties that held up their socks.
But nobody needed their name of the back on the shirt because, first of all, you didn’t own the shirt; a team lined out from one to eleven and you only possessed the jersey for the duration of your time on the pitch.
The other reason we didn’t need to see their names was that we knew them – and, as with anything that happens in your formative years, you could name those teams of the seventies to this day.
Liverpool had Keegan and Toshack; Tommy Smith, Alec Lindsay, Emlyn Hughes and Ian Callaghan, the great Stevie Heighway’, Ray Clemence between the sticks.
Leeds United fans will never forget the team of Hunter, Bremner, Madeley, Clarke, Giles, or the Manchester clubs – United with Best, Law, Charlton, or City with Summerbee, Bell and Franny Lee.
They’re the players from the team when you first fell in love with the club, and through thick and thin you’d no more change your loyalty than you’d change your parents.
And you knew so many things about them too because – before asinine interviews or sycophantic meet-ups between a current and former player on Sky, you had Shoot! magazine to give you an insight into the lives of your favourite players.
Every week, Shoot! had a ‘Focus On’ some player that inevitably told you they loved steak and chips or some plumped for scampi; they listened to Rod Stewart or Smokie and the biggest influence on their career was their parents.
There was also a category marked Miscellaneous Likes and Dislikes.
We didn’t know what the word meant (or how to pronounce it) and maybe the players didn’t either, but it sounded so exotic. Likes were ‘good manners’ and dislikes were ‘rude people’ and ‘smoking’.
If they were fans on the terraces on rainy days, they’d undoubtedly have said crepe hats.