Aston Villa’s third kit is a winner

The best third kit since the last third kit is finally here! Fast on the chattering heels of the much-lauded home and away strips from Luke Roper, comes a brand new third shirt that definitely doesn’t look like someone forgot to finish the sleeves.

The shirt begins after a bib collar with a subtle claret gradient that dips into the obscurity of a V into a shattered prism of nonchalance. But first, the club badge on the left breast is a lighter shade of maroon and white. It’s clearly a style choice to use a two-color outline of the crest, but it’s somewhat unnecessary as the original coloring could easily work just as well. The fact that it is advertised as “rubberized” in texture but looks less rubber than the shark from “Jaws 2” is eye-brow raising. The line fade into black (or perhaps it’s a dark navy — who knows; I’m in America so I’m not going to see one of these until Christmas) shifts into a purple before ceasing somewhere around the point where you lose view of your nether regions in your late thirties. It’s after that the shirt just sort of ends and blends right into the shorts, which is much nicer than what the Nike kits that teams like Tottenham are trying to do with that long sashy-saucy-divorcee-belt sort of look.

The back of the shirt has the McGregor statue cutout that quite frankly could have been a little bigger because from a distance it looks like a husky guy loading a Gatling gun with his kill count underneath his profile pic on 1800’s Tinder.

The shirt-to-short flow has the most traditional of transitions before we hit a neon blue color pop insert on each thigh. The black and white badge is actually a really classy touch and makes the shorts look even better than the top. The white outline works better against the darker background as a design aesthetic.

And now we’re at the socks. I mean, these look like an afterthought. Let’s be honest with one another. I was hoping for hoops because the V-chest into the hoops would be super weird and an awesome call back to when the FIFA franchise let you design your team’s kits at the same time. You can almost see the 16-bit edges even in high definition photos.

All told, this is a fantastic third option and I will be pre-ordering the top and the shorts — but not the socks so I can’t go “full kit wanker” or whatever you guys say — I hope to see Villa utilizing them more than they have in the past. Where do they fall in the pantheon of AVFC third kits?