1. McGregor 4. Bruce 5. Taylor 6. Davies 7. Meyler 8. Huddlestone 9. Hernandez 10. Snodgrass 11. Clucas 12. Maguire 16 Jakupovic 17. Diame 18. Jelavic 19. Akpom 20. Hayden 21. Dawson 24. Aluko 26. Robertson 27. Elmo 28. N'Doye 31. Lenihan
I don't think it means anything at all, the players numbers are largely picked by the players nowadays and we issue a squad number to all first team players once the season starts, even if we expect them to leave.
Why would you not have a number 2 or 3? Other clubs seem to make a big deal out of shirt numbers like they represent status in the team.
5 was available; would have made sense for Dawson to inherit Chester's shirt. Taylor could have been 2. Robertson 3. Remember under Barmby when he had hardly any players we almost played an entire team numbered 1-11. My squad number OCD loved it.
I liked Argentina's idea in the World Cup 1978. They numbered their players alphabetically. Ardiles was number 1. If the squad has been numbered and a new player comes just give them the next number available.
The problem with this random numbering is that when the team is announced they do it numerically so it takes a few seconds to figure out how many of each position we have on the pitch I'm easily confused and don't have seconds to spare ( apart from wasting time on here obviously)
I wait to see how they line up. Last season I could never get the formation right because they would sneak in Chester to play very wide sometimes.
Off topic a tad, but that got me onto a mental agility test, putting the numbers themselves in alphabetical order. It's real messy with big numbers.
