SPORTS apparel company Puma must take us all for schmucks.

Their spin doctors now claim that the new Bafana Bafana jersey they unveiled at Soccer City on Tuesday was just the interim shirt and the real deal will only be officially introduced to the public later this year.

Ahem.

I’m pretty sure I was paying attention to proceedings at that press conference this week and I certainly do not remember anyone from Puma or the South African Football Association (Safa), for that matter, saying this was the interim jersey.

But I do recall them putting on the party hats and blowing whistles when they unveiled the new jersey.

So what has changed since Tuesday? Has this thing suddenly become an interim item because of the huge amount of criticism from the public?

The nation’s soccer lovers are not dumb  and they quickly figured out that Puma simply took the design of the Tottenham Hotspur jersey, changed the colours and then presented the yellow and green strip as the new Bafana attire.

Take a look at the two jerseys and you will see that they defy Puma’s claims that they spent months designing this bloody thing. More like five minutes if you ask me.

The criticism has  been immense and some fans have told newspapers, talkshows and social networks that they will not buy this new jersey.

They ask what is the point of  rushing to unveil a new jersey if it is only the interim strip?

Why bother buying this thing now if there is another design coming?

Did Safa pressure Puma into unveiling something — anything — because of the embarrassingly long period since the end of the Adidas   sponsorship on December 31?

Bafana have been playing in an expired product since December 31 and I’m told that the guys at Adidas chuckled themselves senseless each time the national team played an international fixture in their colours over the past six months.

They got free advertising of their product gratis and this must have hurt Safa. But Safa was embarrassingly forced to play on with the old Adidas jerseys because  Puma was apparently still scrambling to come up with the new colours.

Tags: #Bafana jersey, #Soccer