Dour Rangers should have put a sock in it

• Last Updated: February 28. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 28. 2009 5:30AM GMT

They look like gondoliers or Oompa-Loompas. Give them straw hats and they could form a barbershop quartet.

Queens Park Rangers of English football’s Championship wield what are surely the most embarrassing home kit in any sport.

The blue and white hooped shirts would be tolerable were they not accompanied by ghastly socks of parallel construction.

These befit an Austin Powers vixen more than a professional football team.

Are they toe socks? They should be. This is hosiery no champion could wear.

For some reason it makes me think of lemonade.

I have not seen the bottom half of a kit so unmanly since the National Hockey League’s California Golden Seals, under the eccentric ownership of Charley Finley, wore white skates rather than black in the early 1970s. Mercifully, the Seals collapsed soon after and their gear was donated to Ice Capades – an ice-dancing show.

Does any lad from London’s West End dream of someday pulling on the QPR socks? I doubt it.

Perhaps he hopes that by the time he is old enough to make the team, they will have adopted more sensible colours: pink polka dots, for example.

Poor, poor Rangers. They look like victims of a cruel student prank. They look like jugglers, or mimes, or lollipops.

They look like escapees not so much from prison as from a prison musical. When they fall and flail, they look like clownfish. Eye-catching yet obnoxious, their uniform is the sartorial equivalent of Cristiano Ronaldo.

* Rob McKenzie