Tynedale Rugby Club’s 1stXV manager Chris Lynch has been very active in recent weeks arranging new shirts for next season.
This year the club are changing suppliers and this more than ever involves ensuring colours, hoop sizes and sponsor logos remain the same, and then ordering a combination of shirt sizes which will best cater for the various shapes and sizes of over 50 different players usually called up during a season - almost impossible one would have thought!

There have been significant developments in the material and design of playing shirts over recent years. It’s not too long ago that it would take two men to carry a bag of used shirts after a day in the wet clarts whilst nowadays a full bag of used shirts is featherweight whatever the pitch conditions.

As well as being lightweight the modern shirt is very 'body-hugging' which does show off the gym crafted bodies of some of the players to good effect but sadly are very unforgiving for those players who carry stomachs expensively developed on a ration of many pies and many more pints.

The concept of the ‘change strip’ has also changed in recent times and is now used more often as an ‘away strip’ – which makes a lot of sense when a change of strip due to a colour clash may only be needed once a season leaving one set of shirts lying around in a bag all year doing nothing. It does not, however, please everyone as one Wharfedale scribe wrote several seasons ago after a Tynedale match at Wharfedale when Tynedale donned their change strip - “How disappointing to see a Tynedale team run out NOT wearing their famous blue and white hoop shirts”

Delving into the Tynedale Rugby Club archives suggests the club first adopted the blue and white colours in 1887 and since then the colours have remained the same, or similar, although the design has changed.
A report on the April 2nd 1887 Northumberland Challenge Cup final v Northern says "Tynedale appeared for the first time in jerseys of blue and white". However a photograph of that team, (who won by one goal, one try and three minor points to one try and three minors !) shows that the colours were in NARROW VERTICAL stripes.
By 1895 the stripes were horizontal, though still narrow. By 1906 the wide horizontal hoops had appeared. These wide hoops remained for around 80 years but have since gradually narrowed as seen below.