New Brighton away kit leaked?

Brighton and Hove Albion have spent the past week bigging up this coming Wednesday 26th July for the unveiling of the clubs first ever Premier League away kit – only for it to be leaked nearly a week ago with virtually nobody noticing.

The drummer of Brighton based band Royal Blood appeared on stage at the Metro Theatre, Sydney wearing a yellow Albion shirt with a pretty garish set of what appear to be green sleeves – very similar to the design of the home kits sleeves, in fact. Or in other words, a standard current Nike design.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an Albion kit cock up. You know the sort of thing – home, away and third shirt all being blue; ordering a home kit in the wrong shade of blue; plastering an oversized silhouette of a seagull on a black shirt to make it look like something batman would wear.

So this is a hark back to the good old days. Build up to the release of a brand new shirt, set a time and date for it, get everyone really excited – and then have a bloke who is on the other side of the world wear it on stage six days before the official launch.

So the big question is – is this the new Albion away kit? In all probability, yes. Royal Blood drummer Ben Thatcher (not the Manchester City who nearly decapitated Pedro Mendes) has got previous for this, having appeared on stage before in the volt away kit of the 2015-16 season before it went on sale.

Being gold and green, the shirt will no doubt have gone down a treat with the Australian crowd. And any Norwich City supporters who may have happened to be in the Sydney audience. Perhaps that is why they did it? While our fellow Premier League sides sort China and the far east, we are going after the Australian market. Tony Bloom does live there for half the year of course, and we’ve signed their national goalkeeper this summer. If this is the case, then we better apologies to their national broadcaster ABC for offending them with our reporting of Maty Ryan’s arrival.

From the pretty dark pictures, we quite like. The only gripe being that the badge looks like it has been stuck on by a child. If that was in the same green as the sleeves, it could rank as one of the better Albion away kits of recent times. It remains unconfirmed what colour the shorts and socks will be, but a guess based on nothing other than the fact that there is a yellow pencil in front of me is that they will be the same colour as the shirts.

We will find all that out tomorrow when the kit is officially launched. Six days after it was revealed. Hehehe.