Their lack of usefulness makes them, quite frankly, rather uninteresting. Which might be why Hertha is trying to raise its profile by letting the fans pick it. True, it’s only of three varieties, but that’s more than most fans get to pick.

The choices:

Jersey 1

Jersey 2

Jersey 3

Personally, I like the first one (I like the arm stripes), although they all look like they should be goalkeeper or training jerseys. To vote yourself, send an email to gewinnspiel@herthabsc.de with the shirt you like, your name, and your address, by noon Berlin time tomorrow. You’ll get a chance to win one yourself. Which, oddly enough considering the normal nature of the third jersey, seems to be the only way to get one. They’re not putting it out in the shops.

On Monday, in the train station as we’re still going to have Deutsche Bahn on them, the new jerseys made their first official appearance.

My opinion? I rather like them, actually. I was a bit underwhelmed, although positive mostly, with this season’s, especially since the ones from the season before that were so neat. I think these are a little better. I like collars, personally, and I like the pinstriping against the wider stripes. This season’s, I felt, were a bit generic and the new ones are a little more unique.

What’s interesting is that unlike last year’s debuts, there weren’t any players milling about signing autographs, just Dieter Hoeness, the mascot, and a girl I didn’t recognize. Is it less of a big deal these days? Or is it more that this time around, they don’t need a way to drum up excitement around the team? Last year at this time the season was petering out into irrelevancy by this point- this year, there’s still a lot of possibilities.

And the players probably deserved a day off after Sunday’s game.

Well, now it’s official.

There have been several presentations. First there was the Kaiserbanhof, the train station in Potsdam, where there was a giant reproduction of the new jersey and some odd performer thing. The big guns were there for this- Lulu, Dieter Hoeness, the captain, Pante and Raffael looking awkward in suits. Train stations are a bit of a theme here, as Hertha’s sponsor are Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s train company.

Last night it was in the Hauptbanhof, the shiny main train station in Berlin. Several players showed up to the presentation and signed autographs, as well as posed for fan pictures. So Hertha fans in Berlin got to see Jaroslav Drobny, Rudi Skacel, Gojko Kacar, Patrick Ebert and Steve von Bergen present the shiny new jerseys.

Today was the presentation at the Brandenburger Tor, and again with more players signing autographs and taking photos. No pictures have shown up of that yet, and the news on the website is lagging, so I’m not sure how it’s gone yet. Hopefully well and all that. No rain. I’m not sure what the weather is like in Berlin, so who knows.

So, a shiny new jersey for the new season. As I said when I discussed it the first time, it’s something that they’ve done before, so there’s tradition on their side. It’s much brighter than the current strip, which is more of a navy, and the red collar does add something to it. It looks better on the players than it did in the dark and blurry bootleg picture that was floating around on the Internet. Still, though, I’ll probably be buying one of the old ones before they go away. I think the current ones are unique and interesting- there are few out there like that, while stripes is fairly common. But for stripes, they’re not bad. And the red is nice. I’m looking forwards to seeing what the away jersey is like.

From Football Shirts News comes this picture of what may be next season’s Hertha shirt. We’ve had stripy shirts on and off before and these aren’t bad, although I really like the shirts we have now. They’re unique. Lots of teams have stripes.

But as stripes go, these aren’t bad, and I do like the bit of red.

Still, I’ll probably be buying one of the old ones before they disappear completely. They’re on sale now, which helps.