New Saints kit - love it or hate it? (From Daily Echo)

New Southampton kit - love it or hate it?

5:00pm Saturday 30th June 2012 in Adam Leitch By Adam Leitch, Chief Sports Writer

New Saints kit - love it or hate it?

The new Saints home kit seems to be a bit like Marmite – people either love it or hate it.

Abandoning the full blooded red and white stripes once again is a bold move, and never one that was likely to please everybody.

I have a confession to make – I don’t think red and white stripes are fantastic colours for a kit but that is what the founding fathers of the club eventually settled upon and once you get them, in my opinion, you should stick with it.

The new home strip is not the worst Saints kit ever unveiled, but it’s not the best either.

Personally, going back into the Premier League, such a significant moment, I’d have preferred to see invoked all that history and tradition that comes with the red and white stripes. This kit brings more to mind Liverpool than Saints.

We shouldn’t revise history and pretend Saints have exclusively worn red and white stripes until this moment because they haven’t, and those claiming it is sacrilege to change are overreacting.

For me it’s not actually that the shirt itself is that bad in isolation. It’s alright to be fair.

It’s the principal and that is a personal thing.

If there was to be one criticism of the kit away from the altered colour scheme it would be that in main image released of Rickie Lambert wearing the home strip the whole kit being red does make it look a bit like he’s wearing his pyjamas. In fairness though, it is an entertaining thought that the great man might sleep in branded Saints clothing.

As for the away kit, well I quite like it. Though I love yellow and blue for the same reasons as the red and white, the away strip is a place to experiment and, quite frankly, they could choose bright purple and I wouldn’t particularly care.

The truth is you could make a shirt out of pure gold and sell it for £40 a pop and some people wouldn’t like it. This is the way of kit launches.

It’s not really the kit itself however that seems to be vexing people as the abandonment of a tradition in such a big season.

Like most strips though, it will probably grow on everybody – and if not you can at least wear it to bed.