Blue is the colour: Cardiff City at Millennium play-off, 2003

In the week the traditional 3pm FA Cup final kick off disappeared, another football tradition is under threat. The Malaysian owners of Cardiff City want to turn the club red – and replace the bluebird symbol with a red dragon.

It would not be City’s biggest change. The club said goodbye to Ninian Park three years ago. But there’s something symbolic about a team’s home colours. Can you imagine Liverpool in green or Chelsea in red?

And there’s something lazy and unimaginative about opting for a red dragon symbol. As future Welsh first minister Rhodri Morgan argued in the 1990s, in a book about Cardiff called Half-and half a capital, the red dragon symbol was all too often chosen by businesses because “it was safe, bland and reassuring and therefore dead right in modern marketing terms.”

Let’s hope that common sense and tradition prevails.