Cardiff, 2005

When Jonah Lomu, rugby’s first great superstar, joined Cardiff Blues on a short-term contract in 2005, it was destined that the sky blue and black shirt he wore, posing at the Arms Park alongside club legend Gareth Edwards, would instantly become iconic. Despite many famous wins and two European titles, few Cardiff Blues shirts can rival this modern-day classic.

Lomu would only play ten games in Cardiff colours, but the impact he had in his stint is still talked about to this day. Joining in his off-season from Northern Harbour, he made his debut in the Heineken Cup against Calvaniso to a crowd of 12,000, more than three times what the Arms Parks would have been expected to draw for a game, against Italian semi-pros no less. This was an immediate demonstration of the pull the 73-cap international still had – despite battling with a serious kidney condition and with his best days behind him, Lomu was still the sport’s biggest ticket. Commercially, the move proved a massive success, but the stories of the kindness he showed to his teammates and the impact he had on the dressing room only further cemented his legendary status in Wales, the shirt he wore forever evoking those emotions of anticipation he brought every time he had his hands on the ball.

If the presence of Lomu wasn’t enough to make this shirt memorable, its significance grew the year after when it was revealed that the following season’s jersey would, for the first time, not feature the traditional blue and black. The traditional club colours were adopted from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge back in 1877, replacing their original black shirt with skull and crossbones. With black omitted entirely in an attempt to imprint a ‘Blues’ identity, this jersey marked a significant departure from the club’s roots in Cardiff RFC.

In the following seasons navy would take the place of black on Cardiff’s shirt designs; visually the difference was subtle, but symbolically it was significant to swathes of supporters. The Blues would go on to have moments of success, particularly in 2010 when they won the Amlin Challenge Cup to become the first Welsh side ever to lift a European trophy, and when they repeated the feat in 2018. However, with a stint away from the spiritual home of the Arms Park at Cardiff City Stadium and success on the pitch diminishing, the feeling among supporters that the Blues had drifted too far from its rich history eventually required change. Ahead of the 2021/22 season, it was decided the club would drop its suffix and re-brand as Cardiff Rugby, with kit suppliers Macron also finally returning the traditional blue and black to the playing shirts.

Blue and black may have returned to the Arms Park, but with bleak days ahead for Welsh regional rugby, the 2005 jersey will only grow in significance as a reminder of times when excitement gripped the Arms Park terraces.