Gary Shaw: Hometown Boy
An exciting young striker in a League and European Cup winning team, Gary Shaw was the most exciting young player in the First Division in the early 1980s.
Football and I first met in 1981. Prior to this, I had been absolutely disinterested in the game to the point of being proud of my antipathy towards it. There have been plenty of points since then when I’ve wondered how I might have turned out, had I not flicked that particular switch. And I knew nothing. I still recall the exact moment when, while looking at a League table in my dad’s copy of the Daily Telegraph, the rows of letters and numbers suddenly started to make sense.
My team was Spurs. It had to be. After all, I’d lived the first five years of my life barely a ten minute walk from White Hart Lane. My dad had been a supporter since the 1940s. I had no choice, and there have been several points at which I’ve wondered how I might have turned out had I decided to do that most peculiar thing of supporting the most gargantuan team of the era.
I know what one or two of you might be thinking, here. Liverpool, eh? Well, no. They might have become the champions of Europe for the second time in 1981, but the European Cup wasn’t the behemoth that it is these days, back then. At the time, it was all about Aston Villa, a curiously-named team from England’s second city who even eight year-old me recognised as meaning something.
Villa won the league in 1981 after a titanic race with Ipswich Town which Ipswich blew through trying to take on too much, and it was a surprise. Famously, Ron Saunders only used 14 players that season. Ipswich beat Villa in the Third Round of the FA Cup, a result which left Villa concentrating on the League only while Ipswich also had both the Cup and the UEFA Cup to deal with.
Ipswich lost seven of their last ten league matches of the season while Villa just kept plugging away. In the last season of two points for a win, they ended up winning the title by four points despite losing 2-0 at Arsenal on the last day of the season. The team from Suffolk got a consolation by winning the UEFA Cup over two legs against AZ Alkmaar, but the FA Cup went to Spurs (Ipswich were beaten by Manchester City in the semi-finals) while the League title headed to Birmingham.
And there was one player in that team who captivated me more than any other. Gary Shaw. To a point, Shaw was a perfect Ron Saunders player, a cog in a wheel, all industry and bustle. But in another, he was cast from a very different mould indeed. He only turned 20 years old eighteen days after Villa lost to Ipswich in the Cup, and he played like an explosion.
To eight year-old Ian, he looked like a superstar of the future. Blonde and good looking with incredible pace and preternatural poise in front of goal, Shaw felt like a vision of the future in a division in which the largely immobile lump was still a presence in most teams. He ended that season with 20 goals, of which 18 came in the League, just two short of Peter Withe, who’d already won the League three years earlier with Nottingham Forest and who was ten and a half years older than him.
A year later, Shaw was involved again, providing the pass for Tony Morley to cross for Withe to score the winning goal in the European Cup final against Bayern Munich in Rotterdam. A domestic and European champion by the age of 21 with a World Cup coming up that summer, Shaw seemed like an obvious fit for Ron Greenwood’s England team, but while he made the 40-player preliminary squad he eventually missed out on a place in the final 24.
England crashed out of the tournament in the second group stage that summer, failing to score in either of their games against Spain and West Germany, with the creaking Kevin Keegan and Trevor Brooking hauled onto the pitch at the Bernabeu in desperation as a team whose goalscoring record in the tournament had, to quote Sean Connery in G’Ole!, the official film of it all, had been “like a Canaveral countdown; 3…2…1… zero”, tried unsuccessfully to muster the two goals they needed to sneak into the semi-finals.
Now I’m not going to suggest here that England might have won the 1982 World Cup had Greenwood taken a gamble on the exuberance of youth, but Shaw could have hardly done a worse job than Keegan or Brooking, who were crocked for most of the tournament and were broadly ineffective when they finally did make their way onto the pitch with twenty minutes to play against Spain, with England needing two goals to stay in it. Could Shaw or, say, Garth Crooks have been an answer? We’ll never know. It is frankly astonishing that neither won a single cap for their national team.
In September 1983, Shaw was playing for Villa in a League match away to Nottingham Forest. With the score level at 2-2 and Shaw having scored Villa’s second goal, the match was a couple of minutes from its end when he felt his knee ‘click’. He was replaced by substitute Paul Rideout, but the damage was done. He only made 32 further appearances for the club over the next five years, his final one coming, somewhat ironically, against Ipswich Town in January 1988.
By that time both of these clubs were in the Second Division, and although Villa were on their way back to the top flight by the end of that season, Shaw’s time at Villa Park was coming to an end. He signed for the Danish club Kjøbenhavns Boldklub that summer. He later made a handful of appearances for Walsall, Kilmarnock and Shrewsbury Town, as well as having a spell in Austria with Austria Klagenfurt, before ending his playing career in Hong Kong in 1992.
It’s tempting to say, “what a waste”, isn’t it? But the guy won both the First Division title and the European Cup before he even got to 22 years old and, having been born in nearby Solihull, did so very much as one of their own. And it’s these players, those who burn so brightly, and who have that connection with their own supporters, who make us really fall in love with this stupid game, isn’t it?
If all players were mercenaries, perhaps we’d never be able to build that bond. Gary Shaw was more than just a player. He was the Villa fans’ representative on the pitch. He was their man. For a couple of seasons, he was a vision of a way in which that 1981 League title might not be a flash in the pan. And when you score all those goals, even if it’s only for a couple of seasons, that’s enough. His passing is a loss to all of us.
I loved Gary Shaw. He is one of the reasons that I briefly supported Villa in the late 70s/early 80s as a moment of rebellion against my dad who was at that time playing for Stoke 😉
I'm a Birmingham City fan.
I have huge respect for Shaw, a local lad who hit the heights for Villa. I always admired Shaw, though he should have played for England.
I've been hit quite hard by this one. For people of my age (I was 15 when 'they' had their glory), he represented the Midlands to some extent. Of course, I didn't want them to win anything, but Shaw was the single one of their players I couldn't force myself to dislike.
I know a small number of Villa fans and can fully empathise with their sadness today, as I feel it too.