1992 Cricket World Cup Shirts

Cricket In Colour

How Hogger Sports changed the face of English cricket…

As the birthplace of modern-day coloured clothing – from Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the late 1970s onwards – it was inevitable that the 1992 Cricket World Cup hosted by Australia (and New Zealand) would be the first such tournament to shed the white gear.

With coloured clothing still several years away in home ODIs, England’s experience of wearing blue had primarily been restricted to limited-overs fixtures in Australia at that point.

Terry Blake was the Test & County Cricket Board (TCCB) marketing manager and says much of the organisation around the kits was done between the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) and the International Cricket Council (ICC), the latter of which was based at Lord’s at the time.

“I think [the coloured clothing] was very much in the hands of David Richards – who ended up being the Chief Executive of the ICC,” Blake explains. “In those days he was the Chief Executive of the ACB and he took on the main organisational role for the Cricket World Cup down under in ‘92.

“From memory I had very little to do with any decisions on what it was going to look like. I suspect the Chief Executive and Cricket Department had as much say as I would have done. A pale blue kit was given the nod by the TCCB. They had to organise the kits in such a way that there was some differentiation, so India was a darker blue for instance. Zimbabwe were red, New Zealand grey, Australia and South Africa more national flag colours, West Indies maroon and have often been that colour since.

“Our choice sort of fitted with a perhaps slightly conservative pale blue colour but there was trim with other, brighter, colours - so it was actually quite smart. In a way, I think some of the earlier coloured clothing was better [than now] where it is all in design and not in classic colours.”

International Sports Clothing (ISC), from New South Wales, won the contract to manufacture the shirts while Publishing & Broadcasting Limited (PBL) marketed them down under.

Then a couple of English-based companies ensured the shirts live on as the most iconic assemblage ever worn in an international cricket tournament.

Tobasgo Creative, from Oxfordshire, were involved with the design of the shirts – a generic style with four stripes around the shoulder representing the main colours of the competing nations and the main colour and team name on the front distinguishing each.

Much more will be heard of Tobasgo in next week’s blog, about the first coloured clothing in the English and Welsh county game...

Meanwhile Bill Miller, the MD of Crampton – a manufacturer of football shirts – had been investigating ways to get into the cricket market.

Miller enlisted the services of former Essex and Nottinghamshire fast bowler Ian Pont to look at opportunities to make their play.

This was around the time the 1992 Cricket World Cup (CWC) was getting underway and it became apparent that nobody had taken up the license to market the shirts in the UK (in fact anywhere outside of Australia).

Pont takes up the story:

“[Bill Miller and I] were watching the CWC on Sky and saw coloured clothing being worn. We had a long conversation and agreed we would try to find out what was happening with the replica kits for sale, as it was basically a football shirt lookalike being retailed out to the public.

“This was what Crampton was renowned for - team and replica sports clothing. We contacted PBL marketing in Australia, who were behind the rights to the kit, and they confirmed there was no company producing them outside of Australia.

“So we basically blew our budget and bought the marketing rights to all World Cup countries there and then. By the time we got the designs and patterns through, England were already in the semi-finals.

“We had to work super-fast to get the kits produced but we managed to get mail-order shirts out for sale within a few days. We also did some marketing through The Daily Mail in which we ran a competition to win a shirt [as well as advertising in other newspapers].

“The response was dramatic and crazy. Hummel agreed to distribute the shirts for us through retail and so, within a week or so, we had massive coverage and availability for fans. I was staggered no-one had thought of this before, or if they had, why they didn’t take it up. Unsurprising given the very old-fashioned attitude of the cricket authorities at that time.”

(pic: Graham Chadwick/EMPICS)

Rather than import the shirts, Crampton formed a cricket-arm of their business and produced the shirts themselves, using state-of-the-art technology for the time.

Pont continues: “[Bill Miller] had a broad budget of around £30k to invest into some new cricket material and we set about contacting ICI, who shared their ‘moisture-wicking’ fabric with us. We came up with the name Hogger Sports for this business and set about making performance fabrics LONG before any other sports brand in cricket was using them.”

Like the tournament as a whole, the shirts proved hugely popular – even though they only went on sale in the UK as the final approached.

Pont reveals: “We topped out at around 100,000 across all shirt sales. It was led by England and Pakistan shirt sales as these sides were the finalists and, of course, the population in the UK. That image of Imran Khan holding the World Cup, in his green shirt, is iconic.”

Such an eye-catching sales figure was sure to make counties sit up and take note, with commercialism about to enter a new era in English cricket.

To be continued…