TT BLOG
Tom Elsby – @TorquayShirts
Tom looks back at the quality home shirt from the mid-nineties
HOME 1993-95
Play-off semi final heartbreak, plastic pitches and the Gulls donning Yellow and blue hoops, sound familiar? No, I’m not talking about the 2024/2025 season. Let me take you back to a simpler time. A better time. The 90’s. 1993-1995 to be precise. The last decade where in my opinion, Torquay was truly the English Riviera. Rock walk was in it’s full glory, tourist flocked into town en masse and is it just me, or why is it for some reason, when you look back to your childhood, the sun always seemed to be shining?
It was also an exciting time to be a Torquay United fan. No, not because The Gulls were challenging at the top end of the 4th tier, or that Don O’Riordan had us playing some great football or even us fans being treated to a brand spanking new Pop Side, it was because, as I’m sure we can all agree, that Matchwinner would again be our kit supplier for both the 93/94 & 94/95 season. They would produce the second, (and there last) home shirt for the club. For the first time in the clubs history, we would don hoops on our home shirt, and not just any old hoops-this is Matchwinner we’re talking about!
A busy looking shirt, very shiny polyester (if you have one, it more than likely has at least 700 hundred or so pulls!) with a sublimated triangular pattern in the material, and a white border surrounding navy blue hoops. In-between the blue and yellow is a thin white hoop which breaks up the pattern. A navy blue collar with two popper buttons and white stripe running throughout with a felt Mod-Dec sponsor in white. A beautiful home shirt, and at the time, something very different to what we’d been used to.
In the early to mid 90’s, Matchwinner was producing some absolutely mental looking shirts for clubs in the lower divisions in England and Scotland. Google Hull City’s tiger striped kit in 1992 or Kilmarnock’s 125th year tartan anniversary shirt. In fact, just google ‘90’s Matchwinner football shirts’ and if you’re a football shirt nerd like me, you won’t be disappointed. Matchwinner is my all time favourite kit supplier and as much as I love the 7 shirts they produced for us over the 4 years, I would have loved to have had some of the more crazy templates that they produced for other clubs. Shirts which were more than likely not very popular at the time, but over the years have become classics amongst fans and collectors alike.
On the pitch, the team were playing some entertaining football led by Don O’Riodran who was player/coach for the club throughout the two seasons. Despite flirting with the automatic promotion spots early on in the 1993/1994 season, too many draws meant that it was the play offs for the Gulls. A fantastic 2-0 win against Preston in the semi final first leg at Plainmoor saw us go to Deepdale as firm favourites for a trip to the twin towers. Unfortunately, a dodgy ref and a plastic pitch saw us fall short and a 4-1 loss on the night (4-3 on aggregate) meant that despite punching above our weight for the majority of the season, promotion wasn’t meant to be. Several departures the following summer meant a mid table finish for the 1994/1995 season and then that was all she wrote for our hooped home shirt.
More recently, our current kit supplier VX3 have paid homage and our home shirt for 24/25 season was based on that Matchwinner classic. Throughout the years I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many replica shirts being worn in the stands as I have seen this past season. Further proof of the popularity of the original shirt and how we all love a little bit of nostalgia.
COYY – TOM
OTHER ARTICLES
TT PARTNERS
TORQUAYTALK 