Now, I used to be slim. I had a good-ish body, even if my chest was somewhat underdeveloped and my backside, well, slightly overdeveloped by pies and sitting around. But I could carry it off because I'm reasonably tall. I could wear a Small from most shops and football shirts in that size were no problem.
I'm not slim anymore. My old football shirts can just about be shoehorned over my chest breasts but there's a whole load of highly unattractive bulging and stretching that appears around my midriff. The backside that was large is now even larger and forms a shapeless trinity with my inflated hips and legs. Where once I could squeeze into size S shorts that left little to the imagination, now I'm clinging on to M with dear life.
I'm overweight. By a stone and a half at the last check. I'm approaching thirty. These things happen. But why oh why did adidas choose now to start producing their shirts in Techfit?!
You see, a long, long time ago there was a sportswear company called Kappa. They came up with the Kombat range. Tight shirts that hugged the body and accentuated all those lovely contours. They wouldn't have looked great on me but I ran the London Marathon two years ago so back then I could have carried them off.
The thing is, they didn't supply any teams I liked. Sure, I could have gone and got a Gremio or Roma shirt but trying that hard has never been me (and it'd've felt like I was cheating on Santos and Milan!). But what if adidas had shirts like that? They made Liverpool, Marseille, Milan, France, Spain... The list goes on and on.
So here we are. Techfit shirts for Argentina, South Africa, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Russia, France, Spain... and the club sides are bound to follow. Gone are the days where you could distinguish an international player from his solely domestic counterpart by the size of his gut. Finely tuned athletes in each of Europe's top divisions will soon have their physiques more clearly on show than ever before.
But why do I care? Fat b$%tards like me can just get the Formotion equivalents. When the shirts popped up on FootballShirtCulture most commented that they intended to do exactly that. "What are those rubber strips around the shoulder?!" we all cried, "I'll save myself some money and get the Formotion ones instead."
Yep, good for us. Thrifty and sartorial in the same breath. And then we watched France beat Republic of Ireland in Dublin.
So a France shirt that had sullied the memory of winning teams from 1984 and 1998 by *gasp* breaking and redirecting the torso stripes suddenly made sense. This reimagining of a classic iconic design not only CPR'd fresh life into it but now also became an extension, animation and highlighter of the impressive bodies that it encased. So it's obvious what Lassana Diarra said to Keith Andrews: "You'll never make it to a World Cup until your abs are coloured white, white, white and red"
Anyway, enough of this. I can feel my a*&e expanding more and more as I type. I'm off to the gym.
