I feel quite old quite often these days. Reaching Saturday night with my thighs still aching from a Wednesday morning run and spending time looking back to 1992, the last time we were in the second tier and I still had limited hair flopping over my Sladesque forehead, being two current examples. The time I feel most ancient though is when I consider just how different everything is for my teenage daughter’s generation compared to ‘when I were a lad’.
Maybe it’s a direct result of the frighteningly fast technological advances we now witness but the thing that I find so different to ‘my time’ is how immediate everything has to be. The art of deferred gratification seems lost among Generation Right Here Right Now, I remember getting a new camera for something like my 13th birthday. I took it to Griffin Park and took some photos. Rather than seeing them displayed on a screen within seconds, I had to get to 24 photos, take the film out, give it in at a chemist and wait for about week to see my blurred vision of the late Eddie Lyons taking his magic sponge back to the Braemar Road bench. Can you imagine a spotty oik at GP waiting a week to see his HD video of a Sam Saunders free-kick?
adidas and Brentford FC have spent this last week trying to reintroduce this concept of ‘waiting’ and deferred gratification with their, what I have been calling, new #striptease. A number of ‘wtf is that’ images showing tiny elements of the new bespoke, Beespoke even, BFC home shirt. I have chronicled my perfectly normal, and not the slightest bit sad, obsession with adidas Bees strips here before but wanted to speak out on this 2014/15 kit teaser campaign.
By the time you get to read this there should be a final pic for the new home top before it is revealed in all its glory, and available to order, from Monday 2nd June 2014.
Apparently there has been some moaning from Bees fans on social media about the week long campaign. No doubt the final design will also draw critics who see the stripes as being too fat (or too thin), the red being too dark (or too light) and there just being too much red (or white or black).
Personally though, I think the club (but most likely the adidas marketing department) have played an absolute blinder with this. There have been no leaks of the final design as far as I can tell. Trust me, I’ve Googled all sorts of search terms, even checking for German sportswear catalogues. Nothing.
The majority of the images have been posted at 9.10am and I will now miss this Teaser o’clock timing. It really has been a striptease with various, increasingly exciting, parts of the kit being shown. I couldn’t help but follow up on something Jim Levack tweeted by tweeting, “phwoar, show us your collar”, and gosh, what a collar it looks like being. A nice subtle black element to supplement the colour of our shorts. Seeing the adidas logo looking as though it is stitched in black was particularly titillating too. For me, this week long reveal has been so much sexier than an immediate, ‘here you go’ image being displayed on the website.
Mark Devlin, who has faced quite a bit if stick over the lack of stripes on the back of the last two kits, seems to have taken on board many comments from fans like myself who are rather precious about what our team wear. There will be stripes on the back. There is black on the shirt so we don’t look like we’ve got Stoke City’s cast off templates. In fact it is looking so good that it could be Dean Gaffney and not Natalie Sawyer modelling it and I’d be adding it to my basket. Mr. Devlin has also shown a sense of humour in responding to tweets about the kit. Until the final all over reveal, I’m hoping that comments about the possible colour (and verticality) of the stripes on the back, and the logo #trophyfriends being on the top of the back, were truly in jest.
So, the waiting is nearly over to see the strip our Championship team will be performing in at Griffin Park next season. It’s been a tantalising teaser campaign and one I hope can be replicated for the July launch of the away strip. In fact Mr Devlin and Brentford FC, can you please do something similar for whenever you’re going to show us your kits?
Luis Adriano
