OK, A CONFESSION. I felt sorry for the Demons’ last weekend.

It’s not just the seemingly endless run of soul-crushing defeats they’ve suffered. Nor the retirement of Neita or the injury to Robbo. It’s not even the fact they can’t even call themselves Demons anymore since the poindexters at marketing central said it gave them the wrong ‘market position’.

I’d love to know what they thought was going on. Did they think calling the club the Demons was footy’s equivalent to playing a Judas Priest album backwards? Were they worried that little Demons fans were going home, closing their bedroom doors, breaking out the pentagrams, goat’s blood and Iron Maiden albums and communing with the dark lord?

Next they’ll be telling us the Dees have a future market booting footies in Beijing.

Um, they’ve tried that one already.

None of this was the trigger for my pity. It was that jumper they wore last week. They looked like an ad for that old fashioned chewy, Stimorol. It was kind of fitting really as the Dees have been routinely chewed up and spat out this year.

It was disturbing none the less. A pallid, pale strip that reflected a team that look like it had the life force sucked out of it. It wasn’t the sign of a club looking fearsome and forcing its opponents to run to the hills, more like one that looked like it was ready to fade to grey.

We know these things matter because we have walked in those ragged shoes. Remember the gawd awful bright yellow Bananas in Pyjamas jumper we wore earlier on in the decade? Never has a team that played like witches hats taken it upon themselves to look like them as well.

We’re not the only ones. Carlton wore the blue M&Ms number that looked like Carson Kressley had got to them and convinced them that the flocked wallpaper look was going to be big that year.

The Hawks stepped out one pre-season wearing a chequered jumper that made them look like a bunch of apprentice chefs. North once wore orange stripes instead of royal blue giving them the appearance of one of Terry Wallace’s’ mid-winter suntans.  And Freo, well, they are what they are. They are to Australian sport what Coogi jumpers are to the colour blind.

An awful mistake that everyone else gets to laugh at.

No, make it the old tri-colour red, white and black for me thanks. It gets the heart skipping a beat every time I see it. Let’s hope this week we can wear it proudly after we put the Bulldogs back in their kennel.