FOOTBALL teams can bamboozle the opposition by playing in stripes, boffins claim.
Scientists discovered that predators in the wild found it harder to catch prey with stripes if the animal moved fast enough.
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And they reckon the same principle applies to football kits — as long as the players wearing it can run quickly.
The university researchers in Newcastle — whose city team play in black and white stripes — found animals such as zebras can appear blurred to predators when they flee.
Candy Rowe, professor of animal behaviour, said: “If you’re stripy and move fast enough, then the blurring of the pattern can make it harder for the predator to spot you.
“So, if England’s players adopted some stripes instead of the plain white, then maybe the next World Cup would be within our grasp.”
Her team tested their theory on preying mantises in a specially-constructed miniature cinema in which the critters were shown videos of shapes to imitate different bugs.
The results, published in the journal Current Biology, showed that the mantises found it hard to spot bugs with narrow stripes moving at faster speeds.
The research appears to support Sir Alex Ferguson’s switching of Manchester United’s infamous grey away kit in 1996 when his side found themselves 3-0 down at half-time to Southampton.
He believed that his players found it hard to keep track of one another and the team never wore the kit again.
But the study falls foul when applied to Prof Rowe’s side Newcastle. They haven’t won a major domestic trophy since the FA Cup in 1955. And rivals Sunderland were the last team to win the top division in a striped kit — way back in the 1935/36 season.
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