Football and its link to Lonrho

Its very easy to upset them isn’t it ?

Football supporters.

All you do is mention this blog on another internet forum that has nothing whatsoever to do with football and they rant and rave like children trying to get out of a playpen in which there is a big spider – biggest number of hits ever yesterday, most of them frothing at the mouth.

No doubt some will return today to see what other drivel I’ve written about “The Beautiful Game” so we’ll not let them down…

What sort of moron wears a nylon football shirt to go shopping in ?

Back in the 1960’s we all had to wear shirts made of a material called bri-nylon, it was the wonder of the age, just like Gerry Andersons Supercar, it washed so very easily and it drip-dried if you couldn’t be arsed to dry it any other way, come to think of it don’t all other maeterial drip-dry when you peg them out on a line ?

Anyway, it was a miracle of the technological age, Bri-Nylon, every housewifes answer to the endless struggle with linen and cotton, now you could dip your husbands shirt in soapy water and let it wash and drip-dry itself while you went and played bingo in the afternoon, its what the space-race was all about, Bri-Nylon.

We even had bedsheets made of the stuff and the huge monolith Lonrho company in the UK who marketed the stuff via its Brentford Nylons retail outlets, all of which was owned and steered by a man called “Tiny” Rowland who was described by a Prime Minister of the time as “unpleasant” and in Prime Minister parlance that translates to “a right bastard”.

But we all soon tired of Bri-Nylon.

It was slippery to wear, slip on a Bri-Nylon shirt and it felt like you were wearing something made of slime, it was shiny and being of a plastic nature it was rather like wearing a bin liner all day, it made you sweat even on cold days and because it was really a plastic bin liner it didn’t absorb any of that sweat so that everyone smelled of bacterial odour – its no coincidence that the rise of the underarm deodorant occured at a time when Bri-Nylon was all the rage.

So we abandoned Bri-Nylon in favour of cotton again, threw all of our Bri-Nylon shirts in the bin for they were not even good enough for dusters being that they couldn’t absorb anything, our bedsheets could at least be used as tarpaulins or tents as they did repel water very well – building sites and camping grounds became very colourful places for a few short years.

But not all of us abandoned Bri-Nylon.

Football supporters embraced Bri-Nylon with a passion that is at the same time both boundless and inexplicable.

Take a stroll through any shopping mall at any time of any day of the week and you will be able to smell the football supporter before you see them walking towards you in their garish team shirts, for football clubs all over the world have adopted Bri-Nylon as their fabric of choice.

Walk into any so-called “sports” store in the UK and you’ll find thousands of football shirts of all club colours, precious few sporting goods but plenty of Bri-Nylon football shirts.

Of course they don’t call it Bri-Nylon anymore, they call it hi-tech man-made fabric with the ability to “wick” away moisture and leave the wearer feeling much more comfortable than the old Bri-Nylon shirts did, what they don’t explain is that the sweat generated by the hi-tech man-made fabric does not disappear completely, it cannot be “wicked away” into thin air, it is simply “wicked away” to another place on the shirt where it then gathers, and smells.

Its Bri-Nylon again in all but name, cheap materials run up in far east sweatshops (how appropriate) for a few pennies then retailed back in blighty to gullible fools who will pay between forty to sixty pounds for a glorified bin liner in their team colours so that they can walk around a local shopping mall advertising an internet bookmaker or local skip company whilst at the same time emitting the fragrant odour of a person who doesn’t know that they smell like an old tramp.

I’m never quite sure what to make of people who wear their football team shirts outside of a matchday attendance – what frame of mind does it take for instance to stand in front of your wardrobe of a morning while your wife informs you that you’re taking her shopping this morning, to stand there and think “hmm, what shall I wear to go shopping in, a tee-shirt, this nice blue oxford short sleeved button down collar shirt perhaps, or maybe my replica Man Utd nylon shirt , even though its not a matchday and we live 100 miles away from Manchester ?”

And what is your reaction supposed to be to someone who has clearly lost the plot while choosing their garments for shopping in, do you tap them on the shoulder and “excuse me but I think you’re attired incorrectly for shopping…oh and by the way, you whiff a bit in that shirt” in the same manner that you’d politely point out to someone that they’ve come out to the mall in their pyjama’s ?

Or do you just stare at a place somewhere above their left shoulder and pretend that you haven’t noticed their faux-pas and waft a nosegay underneath your chin ?

Tiny Rowland had a lot to answer for, for his legacy is the horde of the fashion unconscious that passes for your average football supporter in the UK these days.