If it’s really worth saying, try a T-shirt

In Newcastle at weekends you can hardly move these days for young blokes wearing T-shirts emblazoned with their nicknames —’Cidergut”, ‘Sumo”, ‘Nobby” — and an announcement of whose stag night they’re on.

It’s as if they need a constant reminder of who they are and the mayhem they are bent on. Without the shirt, you suspect they would totally lose focus, start calling each other Orlando, sipping mint tea and discussing French Symbolist poetry.

A visceral need to celebrate and affirm through the ancient medium of screen-printing afflicts footballers, too. Spurs striker Jermain Defoe’s decision to send a congratulatory message — ‘Happy Birthday baby” — to his girlfriend during the game with Middlesbrough was the latest example.

The goal celebration that ended with the England international stripping his shirt off has been described as premeditated. So it was, but the hasty look of the scribbles on Defoe’s vest suggested that it wasn’t that premeditated. In fact, as anniversary slogan T-shirts go, it was the equivalent of a box of Ferrero Rocher and a copy of Bella from the filling station mini-mart.

It was Evangelical Christians in South America during the early 1990s who really popularised the football message T-shirt. At the behest of the organisation Athletes For Christ devout Brazilian goal-scorers began broadcasting the good news by pulling off their shirts to reveal snippets of useful advice from the Bible (Love thy neighbour; don’t eat cormorants; that kind of thing).

The first real insight we got of the possibilities in Britain was in 1995 at the end of the Auto Windscreens Shield final when Birmingham City’s Paul Tait unveiled a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘City Shit On The Villa”. As far as I am aware, this was not taken from the Bible (though admittedly I haven’t read all of St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians).

A couple of years later Robbie Fowler was fined £900 for celebrating his second goal against Brann Bergen in a Cup Winners’ Cup tie by revealing a ‘Support The 500 Sacked Dockers” T-shirt. And then along came Ian Wright with a run of self-trumpeting vests commemorating his approach to, equalling and then beating Cliff Bastin’s Arsenal goal-scoring record — a sequence that it appears to me lasted for well over a decade.

At the time, Wright’s vests seemed deeply annoying. His subsequent TV performances, however, have proved that in fact the slogan-daubed T-shirt is by far the best way for him to communicate to the public.

During Euro 2004 I would have been delighted if at half- or full-time Wright had simply pulled apart his jacket to reveal a magic-markered ‘I’m gutted, Al”, ‘Whadid I Tellya?” or a simple ‘Woargh!” rather than actually attempting to say anything.

Since Wright we have had an endless flow of messages delivered via 100% cotton. Some have been written with a Biro, others bear the dead hand of the Nike marketing department. We have had pictures of newborn babies or, in the case of Greece’s Angelos Charisteas, a young nephew, declarations of love and affirmations of undying loyalty (‘Once a blue always a blue,” Wayne Rooney’s T-shirt said, though the Manchester United forward was speaking spiritually rather than physically, obviously).

And since the T-shirts tend to be revealed only after goals or victory it is scary to think how many have passed unread by the masses and into the clothes-recycling bin outside the local Co-op.

While some T-shirt slogans such as Thierry Henry’s ‘For the new born Kyd” have a clear purpose — celebrating the arrival of Sharleen Spiteri’s daughter Misty Kyd while simultaneously informing the world that the Arsenal striker is a good mate of the Texas singer, a life-enhancing piece of news that might otherwise have remained private — the reasoning behind others is arcane.

Rumour has it that the Arsenal players were wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan ’50 Not Out” under their kit at Old Trafford in October. As it turned out, they didn’t get to show them off but, if they had, for whose benefit would it have been?

Defoe has been fined by his club after receiving a yellow card for his T-shirt-revealing antics, but it is unlikely to stop others following in his footsteps.

Personally, I would like to see players branch out and express more of their hopes and fears on their T-shirts. ‘Help! I’ve Got a Coke Habit”, ‘Keep Dreaming I’m A Woman” or simply a childlike drawing of a shark eating a man’s genitals would surely engage the sympathy of the paying public.

And while never taking our eyes off the positive, let’s not lose sight of the negative either. The cricketer Graeme ‘Foxy” Fowler was once castigated for faxing his wife the news that he was leaving her. It’s surely time for a Premiership player to convey the same message by the popular vest method.

At some point in the next few seasons I’d like to see a goal scorer lifting his shirt to reveal a muscle top embossed with sequins that spell out the words ‘Lawyer up, bitch. I’m shagging someone off Corrie”. —