Shirt Stories: Wes Hoolahan
United 3-0 Grimsby Town, 8 May 2021
Welcome to the third article in our ‘Shirt Stories’ series by United shirt collector and UTAS writer Owen Kiernan. In each piece he’ll be looking at some of the most important shirts from Cambridge United’s history and telling the stories of the legendary amber and black players through the threads they were wearing.
After Harrison Dunk kicked us off, we headed up to North Wales for a Martin Butler beauty. Now it’s time for a true legend of more recent times…
Shirt Stories: Wes Hoolahan, Cambridge United 3-0 Grimsby Town, 8 May 2021
It’s one of the most iconic football photos ever, at least in CB5. Wes Hoolahan, full kit, drinking a pint of Guinness on the Abbey pitch. The occasion? Cambridge United having just secured promotion to League One for the first time in over two decades.
So much has been said about that side, hastily assembled during the first of the COVID lockdowns by rookie manager Mark Bonner, playing for the most part in empty stadiums as an invisible disease took hold across the world. Goalkeepers Dimitar Mitov & Callum Burton, the defensive mainstays of Kyle Knoyle, Greg Taylor and Jack Iredale, the midfield grit of Paul Digby and shithousery of Luke Hannant. And the goals: seventy-three of them, the most of anyone in the division, almost half of which were scored by one Paul Mullin, with another fourteen of them coming from Big Joey Ironside.
But there was one player that stood head and shoulders above the rest of them, without a doubt the most technically gifted player to ever wear the amber and black. Wesley Patrick Hoolahan.
