NOT that many in Newport will care, but Cardiff City’s return to the traditional blue shirt is a cause for celebration for football fans.

In an era increasingly defined by the purchasing power of moneybags owners – soccer sugar daddies, as some pundit called them on the radio last week – it is good to know that if the fans keep working away for long enough at issues that dismay them, they might occasionally be listened to.

The trials and tribulations of the club down the road, writ large in the bitter exchanges between those who pay their money to keep the turnstiles clicking and owner Vincent Tan, are well documented.

As a Derby County fan, I shouldn’t really care what colour Cardiff City play in, but the red shirt just didn’t seem right. It was as if a small but significant attack on basic football tradition had been made by an incoming owner who did not understand one of the fundamental facts of the club’s history.

Whether it is down to fan power or as Mr Tan maintains, a chat with his mum, the return to blue is a welcome move.

Hopefully, the whole shirt saga at Cardiff will have been noted by other rich football club owners tempted to tamper with their club’s very DNA. It might only be a bit of fabric with a few sponsors’ names on it, but the club shirt, the club colours, really should be off limits.

If an owner really wants to change a club’s colours, he or she should limit their interference to the second, or away, strip.

Just about anything goes in that department these days indeed, football has a rich history of crimes against fashion when it comes to away kit.

I seem to recall a hideous chocolate brown Coventry City away kit back in the 1980s, though I might just be ridiculing the wrong club in this instance.

And my own club does not escape unscathed in this department. I remember a purple away shirt in the not too distant past, and longer ago, a shade of orange so extraordinarily hideous it has never been reproduced in any other context, anywhere in the world.

I know we are only in January, but this season’s prize for awful away kit will go to Leeds United, whose players were forced to parade themselves against Derby at the end of December in a sickly looking light brown shirts and shorts combo that must have sickened television viewers up and down the land.

I can only hope there wasn’t much demand for Championship football on the telly between Christmas and the New Year, because this outfit was an insult to the senses.

It was the sort of shade that inspires hospitals to warn visitors to keep away from wards. You surely get my meaning.

As is only right and proper on such occasions, the team committing the fashion faux pas was duly dispatched back up the M1 empty-handed, having been beaten 2-0.

Clearly, there are plenty of occasions on which away kits are needed, though it can be argued that the confusion that would ensue from having two teams wearing similar kit might sometimes produce a more entertaining game of football.

No need for change strips at Rodney Parade last weekend, when Newport County beat Portsmouth 1-0 for a fourth win in succession. and a move into the League Two promotion places.

Sadly, other weekend commitments mean that I am an infrequent attender of County matches, but while this contest was hardly one for a connoisseur of the so-called Beautiful Game, it was zestful entertainment nonetheless.

After a sometimes testing season and a half back in the Football League fold, there is a real sense of belonging at the club these days.

Thankfully, there is no backroom nonsense about changing the club’s colours to lemon and aubergine striped shirts, cerise shorts, and British racing green socks, though even that could not compete in the appalling fashion crimes league with the aforementioned Leeds United kit.

Of course, success on the field can bring unwanted if understandable attention on those pulling the strings off it, and Justin Edinburgh has been at the centre of speculation about his future this week.

That is flattering for him, and should be for the club as a whole too, but the timing is unfortunate, as the business end of the season approaches with County very much in the promotion mix.

Exciting times indeed, and not a dodgy shirt in sight.