Stephen Jones interviews Simon Shaw as the giant Wasps lock prepares to play his 196th game in The Sunday Times.
”The fascination was ghastly and yet compelling. After the monumental second Lions Test, they had dragged Simon Shaw into one of the television interview spaces in the bowels of the Loftus Versveld in Pretoria. As he stepped into the lights, the familiar giant figure looked stricken.
“It was massively emotional,” recalls a man not given to emotional pronouncements. Shaw had just given what I consider to be the greatest performance by a forward in any match, ever. Watch the video and tell me I am wrong. It was his third Lions tour. At last he had made the Test side and obliterated Bakkies Botha, his feared opposite number, and half the Bok pack besides. He was being interviewed because he was man of the match.
“But it was the bitterest, as well as the sweetest, moment. The Lions lost the series that day. Thousands will go to their graves unable to accept the ferocious ill-fortune of the match — the scandal that Schalk Burger was not dismissed for his brutal gouge, the chain of injury events, one of which saw both Lions props leave the field after the same movement, de-powering a scrum phase in which the Lions had been dominating.”
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