Admiral 50; This is definitely not a 'review'

You shouldn't take a review seriously by someone who's written a chapter of it, so this isn't quite a review. Also, you should still buy it.

In one sense, it is most definitely a coffee table book. Admiral 50—the hardback version—is, at over 300 pages, a weighty tome in the most literal of senses. You can only marvel at what the cumulative cost of mailing all of these out must have been. It’s also a tactile experience, with the cover featuring the company’s distinctive logo embossed upon it.

Now, at this early stage in proceedings, I have to declare a definite interest here. If you turn to page 124 of this book you’ll find my own words spread out over ten pages, interspersed with photographs of old Tottenham shirts and matches which should probably be wipe-clean and photographs of Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa looking all sexy and South American. I am not an uninterested party, so this is not a ‘review’.

It’s fair to ask; now that I have a copy of my own, should I even be writing about it here? Well, yes. So long as you don’t consider this to be a ‘review’. And there are 320-odd pages other than mine to examine here, so let’s leap on in and see what we find. (To clarify, this is the first time that I’ve actually seen this book, with the actual launch in August in London being one of the few days of the entire summer that I couldn’t make.)

But Admiral 50 is, in all honesty, more than a coffee table book, even if you’d struggle to read it on the tube to work of a weekday morning. There’s some outstanding writing going on here, if you can overlook my blatherings about Dem Double Denim Spurs. Since Leeds United were the genesis moment for the widespread sale of replica kits in 1974, they’re the first to come under the spotlight, courtesy of the excellent Rob Bagchi.

There are other familiar names, too. Harry Pearson and Daniel Gray of When Saturday Comes are present and correct, eulogising over England’s 1982 World Cup shirts and Admiral’s involvement in the Premier League era respectively. Ian Plenderleith writes about the NASL and Jacob Steinberg on West Ham, while Mark & Paul Watson cover Bristol City at the start of the 1990s. And honestly, who better could you have writing about either the Wales tramlines kit or Walthamstow FC’s Henry Morris-inspired change kit than the outstanding Andi Thomas?

Much of it has been written by Adam Bushby and Rob MacDonald, and the extent to which this has been a labour of love for them has been evident in the tone of the emails they were sending me on this subject almost a year ago; they write with a lovely turn of phrase and not-remotely-disguised glee over their subject matter.

The photographs are lush, there are pieces about “the aesthetic merit of design” and “the advent of the replica shirt market” (the latter of which is written by Professor Jean Williams of De Montfort University, whose 2003 book A Game For Rough Girls: A History of Women's Football in England is required reading), and there’s even a shirt directory, featuring thumbnails for every kit they’ve designed.

There are interviews with Eddie Gray, Gerry Francis, Viv Anderson, Lou Macari, Mark Hateley, Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, Peter Shilton, Sue Smith, Tommy Hutchinson, the latter of whom might reasonably have felt somewhat befuddled at having found himself answering questions about Coventry City’s famous late 1970s brown change kit, which made the players look “like bars of chocolate”.

But then again, Hutchinson is always good value in interviews. Reflecting on becoming the first player to score at both ends in an FA Cup final in 1981, he’d previously told the BBC’s Match of the 80s that, “When you’ve scored the only goal in the FA Cup final, you tend to want to win the game on your own”. Now there’s a man who knows a thing or two about the value of economy, with words.

Of course, anything like this is absolute catnip for me. At 52 years old, I was right there as this market was exploding. My interest in the game wasn’t sufficiently great to justify me having the Admiral Spurs shirt when they were current, but the Le Coq Sportif 1980-1982 kit—which won two FA Cups, one for its home version and one for its yellow change version—was my first kit, and remains my favourite of all-time.

But I did end up getting the yellow and blue change shirt from a sports shop for a couple of quid in about 1983. At that time, this was just fairly common. Old replica football shirts seemed at the time to be treated like yesterday’s newspapers; of no intrinsic value any more. Every Saturday I’d find myself wading through this wire basket in a sports shop on the corner of London Road in Enfield, finding something weird or other.

One upshot of this was that I did also own the Wales tramlines shirt, even though I am in no way whatsoever Welsh. A football shirt with the manufacturers’ badge on the collars is never to be sniffed at. What happened to most of these shirts is a mystery long lost to time, and their disappearance over time is something that I still probably mourn more than I should.

There are other details of that time which stick out in my mind. Briefly there was a market stall on Hatfield market that sold an astonishing array of goalkeeping stuff, with shirts and gloves by then largely unheard-of brands such as Reusch and Uhlsport. At the time on this buttoned up, stiff upper lipped island, goalkeepers still tended to wear plain green. These new brands, with different colours, black sleeves and pinstripes, offered a little vision of what goalkeepers shirts would eventually become.

And then there were the cardboard box kits. At that particular time they were also sold in Hatfield, in the big Woolco in the town centre (for those under the age of 50, Woolco was essentially big Woolworths; they all became Gateway supermarkets by 1986). Umbro would sell these boxed kits of shirts, shorts and socks; Newcastle United, Celtic, Liverpool, Everton and more. 

I once went there with my sister and, for reasons which I still cannot explain to this day, chose a Liverpool away kit (the all-yellow one with red pinstripes). I think it was just because I liked the colours. I certainly didn’t like Liverpool much at the time because they won all the time, which might have been nice for them but wasn’t for anyone else. There’s a part of me that’s still a bit like that, to this day.

I can’t reasonably expect you lot to take a review of a book by someone who wrote a chapter of it seriously. Obviously, I can’t. But it is a beautiful looking thing (this is the 21st century version of me “liking the colours”, I guess), and with a softback version now available for £30, if you do happen to be the sort of person that this would appeal to—and let’s face it, after getting on for 19 years having been doing this sort of thing, I think I can reasonably be entrusted to know my audience—it feels like it should be a fairly essential purchase with which you won’t be disappointed. Certainly no more disappointed than Tommy Hutchinson was by the end of the 1981 FA Cup final.