It might now be four years since the first Covid restrictions were brought in but some of us still haven’t learned the lessons of lockdown.

Recently I was invited to appear as a guest on a Norwich City podcast. It meant trying to remember how to make our dining room at home appear tidy on Zoom.

One of the unexpected trends of 2020 was to have a bookshelf that looked impressive on video calls. As this was entirely a Canary commitment it seemed like a good idea to hang a few of my old Norwich shirts in the background.

After the best part of an hour of agonising over whether it was acceptable to have the egg and cress shirt before the Asics strip or whether they needed to be in strict era order I was ready to connect. Guess what? It turned out to be an audio only podcast.

It would be wrong to write this off as wasted time though. It was the perfect excuse to wallow in some yellow and green polyester inspired nostalgia. Football fans feel the same about kits as music nerds do about their vinyl collection. It’s all about bringing back memories of the old Disco favourites. Or, in this case, ‘Disco’ Dale Gordon and his trademark shuffle on the wings at Carrow Road which come flooding back at the merest glimpse of the old Foster’s Lager logo (which I was allowed to wear as an eight-year old).

They might not be the most stylish item of clothing in your wardrobe and they don’t really look good on any grown adults that aren’t professional players but that’s not why they are important. Football shirts matter because of what they mean rather than what they look like.

Which is why the new England shirt has been making national news over the past week. It’s not the colour of the flag on the collar that should be the main talking point but its price. One journalist worked out they could get a return flight to Germany for the Euros this summer for less money.

It’s interesting that the new kit was unveiled just a few days after the long-awaited Football Governance Bill was introduced in parliament. Its stated aim is to make sure that a regulator is introduced to give supporters more of a voice in the way the game is run.

Eastern Daily Press: Jude Bellingham in the new England kit against Brazil

How that is achieved will be fascinating to follow. It assumes that football fans all think the same about every major issue but that isn’t the case. We wouldn’t be able to do phone-ins after matches if everyone agreed.

The main headlines so far have been about club ownership and whether finances should filter down more generously from the Premier League. These are important but the issues that really concern fans go much deeper than that and it can only be hoped that we all get a chance to have our say on what exactly the regulator should regulate.

Top of my list would be a complete ban on any team with striped or hooped shirts not having a plain panel on the back for the name and number. Trying to commentate on QPR or Sheffield Wednesday in recent years has been a nightmare for those of us who rely on quickly being able to pick up shirt numbers. It’s such a simple thing to get right as Stoke City have shown this season.

Perhaps the price of a football shirt will be something else that this new authority could keep an eye on.

The obvious answer is that these are market forces and, regulator or no regulator, companies will only charge what they think people will pay. Fans perhaps need to stand up for themselves more and refuse to be taken for a ride by their favourite sport.

The trouble is it just matters a huge amount to a lot of people. You can’t just give up on something you love. It’s the same reason that every Beatles re-issue gets snapped up by the aforementioned vinyl collectors.

Back in 2020 when football came back after lockdown behind closed doors everyone agreed that it was soulless, awful and supporters must never be taken for granted again. Then we all forgot how to set-up our dining rooms to make them look tidy on Zoom.

 

City Women breaking through

It was fun moonlighting as a River Ender on Sunday. At least I assume that’s what they still call themselves.

It’s actually the Regency Security Stand now but when you get into middle age and are from Norfolk it takes a while to get used to change.

Watching Norwich City women draw 2-2 with QPR as a fan rather than a la-di-da media type was refreshing. Not least because I didn’t have to try to read those awful numbers on the QPR shirts.

These games are always memorable occasions even without Rachel Lawrence scoring from a distance that even Gabriel Sara might have considered ‘a bit far out’ for a shot at goal.

There was genuine disappointment at full-time that the Canaries hadn’t boosted their promotion hopes with a victory but that is a good thing.

Perhaps this is the harsh middle-aged Norfolk man coming out in me again but being underwhelmed by the result is, I think, a sign of progress.

Now that Norwich City Women have played at Carrow Road four times in the past year it’s not a novelty. They have reached the point of having really broken through.

Several young fans at the game on Sunday had players from that team and not the men on the back of their shirts. An increasing number of supporters really want them to win rather than just ‘wish them all the best’, ‘like to see them do well’ and other patronising platitudes.

If following the men’s team for so long has taught me anything it’s that you need the disappointment to make the good times even sweeter.