My Feverish Consumption of World Cup Fashion

A fever is all encompassing. It doesn’t pick and choose how, when or where it will strike, it just smothers you at a moments notice to the extent that all you can concentrate on is the fever. It becomes your master.

I am now well truly in the grip of World Cup consumption.

My mind wanders away from tasks at hand and I find myself trivialising over every little detail of the upcoming festivity.

The coverage on TV, the noise of the crowd, past achievements, past failures, shock results, the attendance of North Korea if they don’t declare war on the South first and most recently the kits of each country have been dominating my thoughts.

Many of my childhood pleasures associated with football have remained with me, perhaps because I’m still a kid according to my girlfriend, but the joy of seeing how that country is represented by their shirt has remained.

Emanating from seeing a glimpse of the shirt in Panini’s World Cup sticker album, it has always signified the beginning of a unique excitement that only a World Cup brings.

Shirts from past tournaments still stand out in my mind and can help to project a glowingly positive image of that team and their achievements in that particular tournament.

For example, an absolute classic in my mind is Cameroon’s shirt from 1990, complete with oversized badge that seemingly embodied the character of a larger than life team that progressed far beyond expectation.

Equally, Holland’s Euro 2008 shirt had an elegance and style that reflected their ability to comfortably beat the 2006 World Cup finalists France and Italy and dare I say it, West Germany’s 1990 shirt had an admirable authority to it.

On the other hand a poor kit can leave an extremely successful team far from the reaches of my memory.

Sweden and Bulgaria both performed miracles at the 1994 World Cup finishing third and fourth respectively, but the generic addidas kit they were sporting at the time had almost faded into obscurity until I saw it again recently and once more made me acknowledge the tremendous achievements of Kostadinov, Stoichkov, Larsson and co.

So here are my favourites that have grabbed me during my World Cup fever, or at least they’re my favourites until one of them knocks England out on penalties.

Posted By Dan Mobbs - Thursday May 27, 2010.
Tags: World Cup, England