Luke Shaw has just been awarded the Premier League player of the month for August.
This caps a fantastic month for Shaw, who has played every single minute of the season so far. Manchester United have struggled as a club, but Shaw has been individually excellent: the brightest spark in both of United’s losses and still performing well enough to stand out in the two wins so far this season and earn a recall to the England squad.
Shaw’s performances would have been impressive simply by virtue of their own existence, all dynamic energy and vertical thrust, resulting and his first-ever goal at senior level. At 23 years old he is still a young player, so to perform as authoritatively as he has done in a situation as desperate and disorganised as Manchester United’s current predicament is nothing short of incredible.
But Shaw’s displays are rendered genuinely redemptive in that they follow four years of agonisingly average-at-best pablum, all of which saw the left-back fall from living life as one of the most sure-thing prospects in football to suffering in some kind of hell on earth, a seemingly eternal inferno of injury and ignominy.
Luke Shaw emerged as a teenage sensation for Southampton, he debuted in the Saints’ first season back in the Premier League as a 17-year-old, but he really took off the following season under Mauricio Pochettino. The Argentine is a superb developer of talent and the 18-year-old Shaw was overflowing with it.
A move to the big boys was on the cards. Chelsea were expected to play their hand, as they needed a left-back and he was a childhood Blues fan, but Shaw ended up going to Manchester United, where he was meant to fill the void left by Patrice Evra. It cost somewhere in the region of £30m, a record for a teenager at the time and a huge sum of money in general. Remember this was pre-Neymar.
Shaw should have been an instant hit, but he struggled with weight, fitness and expectation at United and failed to nail down a first-team spot despite his obvious talent. He resolved to do better and began his second season in fine form, only for a double leg break to derail his career entirely.
The injury was horrific, both in terms of its own nature and the fact that it happened to a young player who had so dedicated himself to improvement. Shaw has since revealed just how serious it was. “I was really close to losing my leg,” he said, adding, “if I’d flown back, I would probably have lost my leg because of the blood clots.”
Thankfully he didn’t fly back, but the next two years were a haze of Shaw slowly recovering from injury and finding confidence again, a task made harder because José Mourinho seemed personally affronted by his very existence. Shaw barely played, and Mourinho was very vocal about his flaws when he did. It looked like an exit was imminent, a move away from the spotlight.
But his stock was so absurdly low that no one wanted him, and so he stayed and now suddenly looks like the footballer he always threatened to become. Strong, sturdy, blessed with supreme speed and a relentless drive to get forward and support the attack while having the sense to get back and defend. He’s a freight train dressed in red.
Many ask how has this happened? It’s quite simple, really. Shaw himself has spoken of a renewed commitment to fitness. Saying, of his previous efforts to find fitness “in periods when everything was going really well I may have taken my foot off the pedal and got comfortable where I was at, not carrying on to the next level.”
Not so this summer, where Shaw took a United fitness coach with him on holiday to ensure that he could stay in good shape – even on his break – and hit the ground running in pre-season, which is exactly what he has done. It’s been two years since he regained fitness following his injury and now, with his mature attitude, he’s finally getting things right.
Shaw’s whole outlook has changed, and now he even feels like Mourinho’s at-times cruel haranguing of him was because of this. “[Mourinho] got frustrated with me because he knew I could do better,” Shaw said. “When I look back, maybe he was right at times.”
This recent acknowledgement of previous faults, and his ability to correct them, is why Shaw’s current form is all the better to witness. His path was long and arduous, but his return comes at the perfect time, exactly when Manchester United needed a long-term left-back to emerge from nowhere, absolving them of their transfer lethargy. Luke Shaw has walked through the inferno of injury and now, after two years in purgatory, he is finally ready to enter paradise.
The post Luke Shaw: From Manchester United misfit to a freight train dressed in Red appeared first on Squawka News.
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