ONE OF the benefits of the internet age is that you can never be sure what might drop into your social media inbox.

Recently, for example, my YouTube feed threw up for me Wigan’s triumph in the 1996 Middlesex Sevens at Twickenham.

I re-watched all of Wigan’s games in that competition (is it really 30 years ago?) and I enjoyed it almost as much as I did back in those days when rugby union had just embraced professionalism.

Of course the rugby union teams were no match for the brilliance of a Wigan team that had Shaun Edwards, Martin Offiah, Andy Farrell, Henry Paul, Jason Robinson and Gary Connolly.

It was hugely enjoyable to see Wigan running rings around their opponents, which they did, almost literally.

But the thing that struck me about the event just as much as Wigan’s performances was that they wore their iconic cherry and white hooped shirts with very few sponsors’ names plastered over their shirts or, for that matter, their shorts.

In those days the Wigan playing strip was truly iconic. It was widely known and admired well beyond the boundaries of Wigan. I suspect that almost the whole of the sporting public, regardless of whether they were interested in rugby league, would have immediately recognised who those cherry and white hoops belonged to.

It’s what marketing experts refer to as brand recognition.

And it was why, at Twickenham 30 years ago, the rugby union fans, who apparently like to spend a lot of time in the hospitality facilities there rather than watching the action, rushed out of the bars every time Wigan entered the playing arena.

They, along with the Wigan supporters who were there, were thrilled to watch the brilliance that unfolded in front of them.

But that event also illustrates one of the problems of our sport, which is that it has lost much of its identity over the years.

At one time clubs could be identified simply by their colours – cherry and white (Wigan), red, amber and black (Bradford), black and amber (Castleford), blood and gold (Catalans), claret and gold (Huddersfield), black and white (Hull FC), red and white (Hull KR), blue and amber (Leeds Rhinos), the red vee (St Helens), red, white and blue (Wakefield), primrose and blue (Warrington), myrtle and flame (Hunslet), chocolate, blue and gold (Whitehaven), cerise and fawn (Batley), black and white hoops (Widnes) and so on.

But unfortunately clubs that spent much of their history wearing iconic playing strips were too ready to abandon them in the modern age.

It then becomes much harder for fans to attach themselves to a team’s colours if they are constantly changing and much harder for the occasional onlooker to identify which teams they are watching.

For example, in Round 23 of this year’s Super League competition Wigan played Bradford Bulls at Odsal.

Wigan played in black shirts and Bradford played in blue ones.

Anyone who tuned in to the Sky broadcast of the game who wasn’t a supporter of either side would have had to look hard at the screen to recognise which team was which.

It was hard to connect the Wigan team at Odsal with the team that had shone at Twickenham 30 years earlier.

Some people may accuse me of being unduly nostalgic, but I don’t think I am.

When you think of the great players of the past, you think of them in those cherry and white hooped shirts. Whenever I think of Sir Billy Boston, I can’t help thinking of him in that Wigan shirt in the early sixties, when he used to terrorise opposition defences.

And that should give us continuity right up to today’s players, who wear the shirt with equal pride.

I wonder whether the RFL should take a more active part in regulating the shirts that teams wear, insisting that they stick to their established colours.

The NFL runs the most lucrative football competition in the world, for example, and it exercises an iron grip on the strips and the colours that teams are allowed to wear.

What that means is that someone like the great coach Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to glory in the 1960s, would immediately recognise the Packers today if he could return from the grave.

In the NFL all colour combinations have to be approved by the league in advance and they have to incorporate each team’s traditional colours.

That is just one of several reasons why the average crowd in the NFL regular season in 2025 was 69,055. The fans really do identify with the shirt.

All too often in rugby league we don’t allow them to.

First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 524 (September 2026)