Simon Shaw: There are days I’ve forgotten completely, that concerns me
Former Wasps, England and Lions lock Simon Shaw reflects on a career packed full of hard knocks
David Walsh, Chief Sports Writer
Sunday January 10 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
There is a moment in the interview when Simon Shaw demurs: “No, that wasn’t true. We were different players.” He is unimpressed by the suggestion that when he played against Martin Johnson it was a meeting of similar men, two monstrously big and unforgiving second-row forwards.
“I would hope people would remember me as a more skilful player, more of a ball-playing forward whereas he was the hard-as-nails, tough, confrontational, won’t-take-a-step-backwards guy,” Shaw says. “I’m sure he may have had lots of other skills, but you didn’t often see them. He was a supreme leader. You think of him, standing tall, looking down at the referee.”
Shaw is 47 now. He played elite-level rugby for 23 years and was part of the Toulon squad that won the 2013 European Cup in his final season. He was 40 when he packed it in. He moved to the south of France after 14 years at Wasps where he’d won ten trophies, including two European Cups and four Premierships. What would he have achieved if he hadn’t been so easy-going?
They remember him at Wasps for different reasons. To break the monotony of long team meetings he sketched cartoons on a pad. Afterwards his team-mates would gasp that a man so tall and with the wingspan of an albatross could be so deft and creative with a pencil. Gargantuan size gave people the wrong impression.
He was 16 when he first showed up at Cranleigh rugby club in Surrey, looking to learn the game. Six foot nine then and weighing a whacking 19½st, he had some natural advantages. At Cranleigh, Wayne Davies was one of his first coaches. “He was this gentle giant, naturally very big but really skilful,” says Davies. “He had brilliant hands but to get the best out of him, you had to gee him up.”
Toulon, Shaw thought, would be good place to end his career. Two seasons, then home to England. For him and Jane and their four children the Cote d’Azur is now home. He’d spent much of his childhood in Madrid and grew up speaking Spanish, as his kids now speak French. Skiing is probably the family sport.
You can’t imagine the gentle giant being much good against Johnson. “On the really big days we knew Simon had Johnno’s number,” former Wasps team-mate Lawrence Dallaglio says. “Go back and check. You’ll find that by his standards, Johnno had very quiet games against Wasps.”
Those who remember Shaw’s career swear his performance for the Lions against South Africa in the second Test of the 2009 series was his greatest. Not in his mind. “I would pick the 2005 Premiership final against Leicester, Martin Johnson’s last game. That was one of my best games.
“From the get-go in my career, I found it hard to get fired up before matches. In the biggest games, I would try to focus on one member of the other team’s pack. ‘He’s the best they’ve got, the guy they rely on, the heartbeat, the talisman, and I’m going to ruin his day.’ When I started at Bristol, Ben Clarke was that player at Bath. Then for Wasps against Leicester, Martin Johnson was the target. My mindset was, ‘I’m going to make his life hell.’
“Because I’m laid back, I needed to find something more than just doing my job. I knew I had to push in the scrum, jump in the lineout but those things are a little bit boring, to be honest. I needed something to excite me. With Ben Clarke or Martin Johnson, I was like a dog with a bone. Not that I proved it to anyone apart from myself but that day in 2005 I was as good if not better than Martin Johnson.”
Seventy-one caps for England, he was involved in three World Cups and three Lions tours. And yet it could have been better. He lost out to Jeremy Davidson during the victorious 1997 Lions tour to South Africa, then didn’t even make England’s original 30-man squad for the 2003 World Cup. Flown out as a replacement for Danny Grewcock, he didn’t get to play and doesn’t count the medal.
There was, he says, a lot of soul-searching at the time. He would wonder what more he needed to do but with 47 winters on his back, there is more to celebrate than regret. “I’m very, very satisfied. I actually sometimes think, ‘How the hell did I achieve what I did?’
“I’ve never been one to blow my own trumpet, was never one who backed myself. I was always a player who feared failure and who went out thinking, ‘Shit, you know, I don’t want to embarrass my family or the people that spend money to come and watch us.’
“In meetings I was quiet. Never banged on the coach’s door and said, ‘Why aren’t I in the team?’ That wasn’t me.”
Since retirement he’s worked for a hotel group in a role that eventually involved too much travelling. He was involved in a pub at Twickenham that evolved into a restaurant, which he continues to part-own, and he’s involved in a number of start-up tech companies.
On the sporting side, he’s one of the founding members of For the Love of the Game, a group campaigning for “a dementia-free future for all athletes.”
He’s had his injuries, his knocks on the head. There was the game for Bristol against Northern Transvaal at the Memorial Ground in November 1995 when his ankle got stuck and he rotated twice without his ankle moving. The St John’s Ambulance guys looked at it and were too afraid to move him. Such was the swelling, it no longer looked like a foot. At the hospital they thought they might have to amputate and afterwards the surgeon said he would be left with a lifetime limp and should forget about ever playing rugby again.
People looked at his size and thought him a freak, not understanding that what was freakish about him was his ability to recover. Six months after that double dislocation of the ankle he was back playing and from every future injury, he would return sooner than medics thought possible. There were plenty of bangs to the head too, two fractured eye sockets, though he never lost consciousness on the pitch. Almost eight years after retirement, how is his health?
“I would say ‘fine’ but I know if I got my dear wife into this conversation, she would say something very different. I have my moments. Forgetfulness has always been part of me. And I fob it off as that. There have been occasions where I have forgotten a day and that has concerned me quite a bit. Generally, it’s when I’m really tired.
“Not so long ago we holidayed in Sardinia. Travelled from Toulon on a ferry. I didn’t get much sleep. First night at the hotel, sleep wasn’t great. We’ve been to this place a few times and we like to hire a speed boat and go to beaches that can’t be accessed by road. After a few days I suggested we spend a day at the beach near the hotel because we hadn’t done that.
“The whole family stopped. ‘What are you talking about? We spent our first day on the beach near the hotel.’ I was adamant we hadn’t. That day had vanished. I don’t know if that has anything to do with brain traumas I’ve suffered. I tell myself this is the way for most people on the planet, you have some days where ideas are popping out of your head and your speech is fluid and the next day, after a dodgy sleep, you forget things.”
Sport, he reckons, doesn’t offer enough to those who get knocks to the head. “A player suffers an injury to his quadricep, leaves the pitch and is immediately given an ice-pack to lessen the inflammation. If you think about the brain being the same as a quadricep muscle, it needs the same immediate attention.
“There are experts who believe oxygen can be the ice-pack for the brain. It makes perfect sense to me. There are many research papers on this subject that are worth reading. We need to provide much more by way of treatments and therapies to those who suffer head knocks.”
If his own situation worsened, would he consider joining the players who have initiated a class action lawsuit against World Rugby, the RFU and the WRFU?
“I greatly sympathise with all those guys and you have to be sensitive to their needs. With regards to my situation, I was more complicit than anyone in my staying on the pitch. I played because I wanted to be in the shop window. Nothing was gonna stop me. I wasn’t wholly responsible, but 99 per cent I’d say.”
Topic: Simon Shaw in the Times (Read 1165 times)
Always a Wasp