BEHIND THE PLAY #27

This will be a fairly regular addition to newsletters. It gets the whole newsletter today though. After that, it’ll just be something about one piece of kit tacked on to the end of the occasional newsletter.

I’m not a kit nerd. I don’t have a lot of it, I don’t consciously add to it and I don’t even see what I do have as a collection. But I know there’s some people who are really interested in kit who subscribe to this newsletter so I thought I’d add an occasional sample of what I have to this newsletter. It really only occurred to me to do this last week when the Vancouver Whitecaps (born of the ashes of what was the Vancouver 86ers and not the even older ashes of the NASL era Whitecaps as many seem to think) had an 80’s night at their game against Sporting Kansas City. I was emailed, as an Sixers alumni, and invited to attend. I was encouraged to dig out any old uniform or jacket that I had and wear it. I’ll post some of that in the future but here’s three others I came across from that dig.

 1985 CCCP National Team Training Jersey

The stuff I like and that I buy or trade for is almost always something that has a lot of personal significance for me. I don’t buy stuff online from home. Everything I've acquired and kept has a story to it and clearly this is a good example of that.

In 1985, I was on the Canadian National Youth Team, as we were called back then, and we qualified for the FIFA Youth World Cup, a U19 competition, that was held in the old USSR. We were stationed in Minsk at one of the famous/infamous Soviet Olympic training facilities in the middle of nowhere. The other teams in our group; Nigeria, Australia and the USSR, who we failed to score against in that order before being eliminated in the group stage, were also staying there. That led to trades. I don’t remember what I gave to get this but I do remember we all bought and brought Levi’s jeans because we were told they were a solid currency at that time.

There’s no number on the back but it’s an eye catcher and has a decent sewn in crest along with good hammer and sickle detail from the neck down the sleeves.

1990 Scotland World Cup Jersey

An earlier newsletter about the passing of my Uncle Bill mentioned that he had met my buddy Alex and I in Italy at the World Cup, along with his buddy, with tickets for two of Scotland’s games for us. We were about five months into a round the world backpacking trip and were extremely grateful for his hospitality and to be able to see games against Costa Rica and Sweden.

He also brought me this jersey to wear to the games. And I’m very glad now that I’ve kept it all this time.

Scotland generally put out great national team kit and this one’s no exception. Nice detailing throughout. What my six year old iPhone doesn’t show in the photo above is the subtle pinstripes. Here’s a close up that does.

But again the stuff that I’ve kept and that I like most is because of what it evokes and this is the only souvenir I have of spending that time with my uncle at what was my first World Cup in Genoa. Very grateful for it and the memory of the time there with him.

1985 Joao Havelange Acapulco tournament souvenir t-shirt

This is a weird one. Didn’t even know I had this one until I started opening storage containers looking for 86ers stuff for the game last week. Again, this goes back to my year on the National Youth Team mentioned at the top.

I was a first year UBC student in 1984-85. That didn’t work well with a team that was preparing for a U19 World Cup. In March of ‘85 we had a short camp in Toronto before heading off to play five games in Switzerland and Sweden. Again, it was March. I still remember Alex Bunbury being completely physically incapacitated by the cold in one of the games in Sweden. The choice of locations for this trip still baffles me given we were preparing for a tournament that would be played in much warmer conditions.

That trip was about three weeks long so I missed most of the last month of classes. I then got home and had to beg my profs to let me squeeze my five final exams into a few days because we had this tournament in Acapulco in April. And yes, that did balance out the cold weather games we’d just played in Europe so all good (except for the not scoring in any of our games in Minsk part).

So you might be wondering how the exam squeeze went after missing three weeks of classes. Well I was in pre-Commerce in first year. I was not in Commerce in second year.

I arrived a day or two after the rest of the team due to the exams. That trip alone could be a separate newsletter but in the end, after all the class-missing and exam-squeezing, I only got into one game and that was the last 15-20 minutes of our game against Brazil. We were down 2-0 when I went in and I swear the whole time I was on the game was played inside our eighteen yard box. I lost ten pounds (probably) and was still hyper-ventilating fifteen minutes after the final whistle blew (even more probably but you get the idea) despite being in the best shape of my life. They were just on another level entirely which was confirmed four months later when they won the Youth World Cup we both went to winning all six of their games and only conceding one goal in the process. [Side note: Interestingly, three of the most prominent players who came out of that World Cup were all keepers. Rene Higuita from Colombia, Claudio Taffarel from Brazil and Julen Lopetegui, who went on to manage the Spanish national team, Real Madrid and is currently the manager of West Ham.]

So back to the t-shirt in this newsletter that should really be called “Segues”. No idea how I got it. Can’t believe I would’ve bought it as it would be tight on even a slightly big ten year old. I definitely didn’t trade for it as I, and several of my teammates, were busy trading away a load of our Canada gear (polo shirts, training t-shirts and in my case my Casio digital watch) to get as much Brazil kit as we could stuff in our suitcases. I probably got more than anyone. We got in a lot of trouble for that and were given a bill by the CSA to replace it. One of which will definitely show up here in the future.

So bottom line, I sure don’t need this rag-kept-under-the-sink-for-cleaning-up-messes t-shirt but I have it and it made me laugh when I pulled it out of storage last week as it instantly brought back that flood of memories above.