You’ve already seen Kasabian singer Tom unveiling the new England Away shirt live on stage in Paris, but what was it like for him? We spoke to him before and after the big moment, to discover what it’s like to be representing England abroad, and just how he felt at the big moment…

How many weeks a year are you on the road?

“In total I think it’s about 120…wait I thought you said days! Weeks? Months? It’s about 6 or 7 months a year.”

What are your favourite countries to play to?

“We love Japan, don’t we? Budapest was great, Turkey was brilliant as well. Chickens running everywhere at the festivals.”

Do you feel like you’re representing England on stage?

“I don’t really think of it like that, you’re just representing yourself, and your mum and dad. And your dog.”

Do you notice a difference between the different countries?

“The culture is completely different, the French are so different to the English. They’re in a different zone really. They do their own thing over here. It’s a more cleaner environment maybe? There’s a lot of bread and cheese and ham over here, I know that.”

How are the crowds different?

“You can’t really tell because you’re playing, to be honest. English crowds are certainly rowdier, but then in Japan they maybe do more, and in France they maybe listen more.”

What was your first gig outside England?

“It was in Japan. That was a good place to tour, but it was crazy. It was a culture shock. It was amazing, we felt like The Beatles. We got out of a van, and there was hundreds of fans going mental. We’d never seen anything like that.”

Do you get nervous before going on stage?

“There’s no pressure any more. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, you just play, and people come and see us. It’s just going to places where people want to hear us play.”

Strangest?

I left Ian (Matthews, Kasabian’s drummer) in America, in Baltimore. The murder capital of America, where The Wire is filmed. I should’ve left him there for good. We got to Philadephia before we realised.

How did you get to France for the gig?

“We got here with the Eurostar today, sandwiches on the train and everything. Beef and horseradish.”

How are you feeling about the gig?

“I can’t wait. It’ll be great. My head’s pounding a bit, but we know we’re going to put on a great show.”

How do you feel about unveiling the England shirt in this way?

“It’s cool. I’m representing England, the wonderful country that we live in, and all the good things about being from there. Being here with the band is amazing, and doing this just tops it all off. It’s the best shirt around as well. Nice cuffs.”

Afterwards:

How was it?

“Wonderful. Everything felt right, everything was in its right place. It was a great show.”

Do you feel proud to have done it?

“Mega. When you get the get the crowd screaming like that, you’re doing something right. To do that is amazing. It just felt nice. I had to throw it in the crowd at the end though, it just felt right. And now someone’s got it, and they’re loving it!”

Last week we mentioned a few statistics pulled together by The Guardian in their always entertaining section, The Knowledge. Not to get too carried away with our admiration for the paper, but we thought another of their regular football blogs deserved a mention – Six Of The Best. Bringing together six classic moments on a given theme, this week’s collection is all about counter-attacking goals, and there’s some absolute pearlers in there. For anyone looking for a bigger fix of pure goalscoring action, the comments section below normally has a glut of other suggestions from readers for you to feast upon. Enjoy.

Going back to the stats, for it is such an integral part of football, there was a remarkable world record broken this week. With news that will make Rory Delap and Dave Challinor weep at their own feeble attempts, the world record for the longest throw in ever was broken this week – by a PE teacher from Yorkshire. Former gymnast Danny Brooks threw a ball a remarkable 49.78 metres – the same distance as five double decker buses – using a special forward-role-enhanced technique. You can check out his impressive effort here, although I’m not sure how it’d work in a real match!

One player you might want on the end of those throw-ins is Kevin Davies, the Bolton striker who often arrives with words such as ‘battling’, ‘combative’ and ‘tough to play against’ in front of his name. Is Davies part of a dying breed of old-fashioned strikers who are being removed from football because of changes to the rules? Or is he merely being caught fouling in an effort to beat more skillful players? There’s an interesting blog here on the BBC site, which examines both sides of this debate along with an interview with Davies. For anyone who relishes the mud ‘n’ graft side of the game will find it a great read.

Of course, those fans who crave that old-fashioned side of the game will have been looking into the financial situation at big clubs such as Manchester United and Liverpool with concern. A lot has already been said about what these situations mean for the teams, but what are the fans doing about it? We Don’t Know Football report on an interesting campaign from United fans looking to protest against their club – by wearing a classic kit loaded with reference to an earlier era. Will it work? Only time will tell.

Looking further afield, you’ll find plenty of passionate fans over in the Basque country, where Athletic Bilbao play. They’re not just a football team though – they’re part of a fierce political ideology and a strain of nationalism that would put even the most stringent Scot to shame. The full story of Athletic Bilbao is examined in this brilliantly thought-provoking tale over at Goal.com, a story that makes any regional rivalry here in the UK pale in comparison.

Finally, I’m afraid to say that the picture at the top of the page is another Umbro self-reference. It’s a picture of the special 3D shapes that have been used as part of the creation of the new England kit – you can see more elsewhere on the blog or over at Umbro.com. Seen on their own like that though, those figures look pretty terrifying!

Returning with our latest instalment in the Tailored In Manchester series – in which Umbro invites the city’s finest up-and-coming artists for a chat about all things football, fashion and music – we recently caught up with the noisy but melodic Young British Artists. The snappily-titled quartet mainly live and work around Manchester’s Northern Quarter, where Umbro’s Dale Street studio is situated. They’ve only been around for about a year, but they’ve already managed to grab support slots with the likes of The xx, HEALTH and The Drums. Heading into 2010, they’ve recently been in the studio recording, and the first fruits of these sessions will be available to hear both on Umbro’s homepage and at Young British Artist’s own website. The video below offers a great introduction to the band, and you can see more photos from the day over on our Flickr page.

Happy 2010 to everyone, there’s plenty to look forward to this year…

it’ll just have to wait until we recover from this hangover – our heads feel the guy in this picture at the moment!

Wow, we thought it’d be a quiet time here at Umbro, but with the Caption Competition, the Christmas Giveaway and the final of A Decade Of Kits, it’s been one of our busiest weeks ever!

First things first, thanks for all your contributions to the Caption Competition – we got around 60 in total, which was terrific. We were very impressed with some of the ideas you lot came up with, and we were also very impressed at just how bad some of your puns were! We picked out our two favourites, from Daniel Langhorn and Tim Sinclair, who have both won a pair of Umbro Speciali boots signed by Michael Owen. Their efforts were…

‘Their ‘tackles’ were coming up decidedly short following a cold snap….’

and…

“Some people are on the pitch … they think it’s all over … it is SNOW!”

Make of those what you will!

Second of all, thanks to all your entries into yesterday’s Christmas Give Away. We picked out three favourites for the final round of entries – Dale Henderson’s tale of Bradford’s play off glory, Laura Gibbon’s 2-themed story about her call-up to the England squad, and James Perkins’ unusual take on the number 2. They’ve each picked their prizes from the bulging Umbro goodie bag, and I’m afraid to say that the rest of the prizes are being put back into our high security storage facility.

Finally, we’d just like to say Merry Christmas to everyone, and we hope that there’s some football played in this weather!

Proof that we’re all still hard at work here at Umbro Towers…

As we reported a couple of weeks ago in our competition to design a kit, some young Manchester City fans have real talent when it comes to design. The video above suggests that they’re pretty special in other areas as well. The clip features 7 year-old Ethan Hodge, whose prize for winning our competition was the chance to be City’s mascot for the game against Chelsea.

Before the game, Ethan had the chance to try his luck against Shay Given, and cooly slotted his shot into the corner of the net. That’s not what we’re excited about though – it’s his celebrations afterwards. Reckon any of City’s first team could manage this?

As we mentioned earlier, Loaded’s Jeff Maysh is joining the blog team here at Umbro to give the inside track on all the world of football shirts. Jeff’s a big collector of shirts, and knows his football – despite being a Spurs fan. Here’s his blog for us, where he looks at the detail that goes into one of David Beckham’s England shirts.

‘Only Posh Spice gets to see what’s inside Beckham’s Umbro shirt, (although most of Earth’s female population would gnaw off an arm for the chance). But there are others who dream of getting their hands on Beckham’s ‘used and dirties’: They are football memorabilia collectors.

And this week, some mega-rare England shirts were seen floating around cyberspace, and have raised the blood-pressure of such collectors of ‘match-worn’ garments. These shots are of some of David Beckham’s shirts from the Brazil match in Qatar on November 14th and various other Internationals. Becks pulled out of the Brazil tie, so his kit went unused, but for the first time you can see the detail that goes into Goldenballs’ real match shirts.

The match details are lovingly embroidered to the chest, (like the example above from a player’s Slovakia shirt) along with the year of the match. The shirt has been tailored specifically for David’s fit, and we can reveal here that Mr Beckham is a ’40 regular’. David’s Umbro logo is a little bit ‘different’ too, so it stands out on the on telly when he’s hitting those ‘Hollywood’ balls. Oh, and the button inside even reads: ‘Player’s Bespoke.’ Nice touch.

Shirt collectors know that kit worn by Beckham fetches the most money: A pair of the former Manchester United star’s boots once sold at London auction house Christies for £13,800. But the most expensive football shirt ever to go under the hammer, was Pele’s 1970 World Cup Final shirt. It sold in 2002 at Sotheby’s for a staggering £157,750. So if Beckham wants to improve the worth of his custom made Umbro shirts, he knows what he has to do: Lift the World Cup in 2012.’

If you’ve got any exciting shirt finds you’d like to tell Jeff about, contact him via Twitter at: twitter.com/JeffMaysh

Here’s an England shirt as you’ll never have seen it before…designed by Julian Barrett and Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh. It was passed on to us by Jeff Maysh over at Loaded magazine, who’s going to be writing some blogs for us, starting later today. The Boosh designed the shirt for a Loaded charity competition, in which top designers such as Goi Goi and One True Saxon customised the latest England home shirt – you can see the other designs here, but unfortunately the bidding to win them closed a while ago.

Here’s Jeff to explain more:

‘This must be the wildest England shirt design ever seen. Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, of bizarre comedy troupe The Mighty Boosh, picked up their crayons to create their very own England shirt for men’s magazine Loaded. And this is what they came up with. The shirt was deemed ‘impossible’ to create for the magazine’s charity shirt project, but for the first time here, you can see their magnificent creation. Reckon you’d wear it?’

Jeff is a football shirt fanatic, and will be writing for us on all aspects of football shirt culture. If you’ve seen any interesting shirt info that you’d like to tell him about, you can contact him at twitter.com/JeffMaysh

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After demolishing the competition yesterday (although there’s still time for the England shirt to stage an unlikely comeback) it’s now time for two heavyweights to come up against each other. Morecambe has been the unlikely leader in our Decade Of Kits competition, attracting droves of Shrimps fans or simply football fans sympathetic to their cause. Today however, they’re forced to choose between two Morecambe shirts, so the only question is – home or away?