Lawrence Shankland: The Throwback Ace of Hearts
Lawrence Shankland: The Throwback Ace of Hearts
A Jam Tart in form and in demand
Happy New Year and welcome to the first High Protein Beef Paste of 2024.
This week's main article takes us north of the border into Scotland, where Lawrence Shankland’s name is on the lips of pundits and gossipers alike. It's worked out very nicely time-wise but I've had this piece in the works for a while.
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Lawrence Shankland: The Throwback Ace of Hearts
Steven Naismith must have felt as if the whole world was watching. Having ironed out a few issues, he took his Heart of Midlothian team into their penultimate Scottish Premiership match of 2023 in fine form. They followed a poor run by winning all three of their league matches in November and their first of December before defeats by a resurgent Rangers and struggling Aberdeen.
A win at Celtic Park gave Naismith just the boost he needed heading into the festive period and Hearts saw off St Mirren two days before Christmas. Two days after Christmas the Jam Tarts went to Easter Road for an Edinburgh derby against Hibernian. Their stoppage time winner was scored, with searing inevitability, by Lawrence Shankland.
The Hearts captain had hit the post with a penalty earlier in the match but the last gasp goal was the 28-year-old’s fifth in the four consecutive league matches in which he’d scored (now five not out at the time of writing). The derby was the eighth Premiership match he’d scored in out of the last eleven. Despite an early-season drought of seven matches, Shankland ended the day two goals clear of James Tavernier and Matt O’Riley in the scoring charts.
No wonder he was in demand and on a hundred January shopping lists. As December rolled on, speculation about Shankland’s future grew ever more intense. Former Hearts, Rangers and Southampton player Neil McCann, now a pundit, recommended his old club handcuff their skipper in a locked room and get a new contract signed quicksmart.
The way Shankland’s been able to unpick match after match in the autumn and winter one might wonder whether even that would be enough should the right offer come along to take him away from Tynecastle with just a year and a half remaining on his contract.
Up to and including their late win at Easter Road, Hearts had scored twenty league goals in 2023/24. Shankland was responsible for more than half of them and that’s exactly what he was there to do. He’s a striker’s striker – a magnificent throwback ageing just nicely in a league that’s not for the faint-hearted.
Shankland plays with strength and power without being a physical colossus. He has pace but not the electrifying kind and a good deal of it is in his brain. He’s a nuisance, a hustler, as capable of making runs off the shoulder of the last defender as he is instinctive in the penalty area.
He’s got two good feet and loads of aerial ability, not to mention an almost magnetic knack for finding the top corner. His movement is the kind of constant threat that keeps defenders honest and nervous in equal measure. Stick the captain’s armband on him and ask him to lead the line for ninety minutes twice a week, and you’ve got a legitimate leader in both word and deed – a proper, old-fashioned but modern, bustling, natural striker.
The fact that you already know his shirt number based on all that says it all. In Premiership terms, Shankland is in his best scoring form not only over the winter months but for the last season and a half.
In that period he’s scored league goals at a rate of 0.66 per 90 minutes, a return he’s only bettered in the Championship. He hasn’t had more shots on target per 90 since he was a teenager. In 2022/23 and 2023/24 Shankland is shooting more, scoring more, and scoring from more of his shots, than ever before.
Statistically he’s more important in terms of his team’s goal difference with and without him on the pitch than at any other time in a career that hasn’t quite followed the path that might have been expected of him when he burst into the senior team and made an instant impact at Queen’s Park in 2012/13.
Shankland was born in Glasgow and it was at Queen’s Park that he played his youth football before he graduated into the first team. The Spiders sold a few youngsters in the summer of 2013, among them both Shankland and future Scotland captain, Premier League champion and Champions League winner Andy Robertson.
The destination for Shankland was Aberdeen, where he spent four years without ever quite cracking the first team. He was loaned away from Pittodrie on several occasions and eventually left permanently to sign for Ayr United in 2017.
Shankland rediscovered his scoring touch. His record outside the Premiership with both Ayr United and Dundee United was terrific and played a big part in the former winning League One and the latter the Championship with Shankland as their foremost marksman.
In the summer of 2021 he made the unusual move to Antwerp to play for Saudi-owned Beerschot, part of a multi-club stable that includes Sheffield United. One season and five Shankland league goals later they were relegated from Belgium’s top flight and they remain in the second tier after just two seasons at the top.
With his Belgian sojourn ended by the drop, Shankland returned to Scotland and the Premiership. This time he headed for the capital, joining Robbie Neilson’s Hearts having previously played under him at Dundee United. His first goal? Why, it was against Hibs at Easter Road, of course!
There’s been interest from England in the past. There presumably is now, too, and there will be again in the future. There’s not a team in Scotland who wouldn’t want him and there will have been European eyes peering over Naismith’s shoulder on derby day too.
Whatever else Shankland does in the remainder of his career, wherever he goes or doesn’t go from this point forward, he will surely look back on this season and last with huge affection.
Midlothian has been the making of the man. Shankland has grown in stature. He walks taller, wears the armband with evident pride and busts a gut in every match to prove himself worthy of it. He might not be long for Edinburgh but maroon looks good on him and he probably won’t look quite right in anything else.
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“He had done his youth coaching at Liverpool, found his success in Scotland. Hurdles had been cleared. Thoughts inevitably wandered towards Jurgen Klopp’s succession plans.
“Now he’s virtually untouchable in top-level management. He went from the Premier League to the Saudi Pro League to no man’s league.”
Daniel Storey on Steven Gerrard, a truly abysmal football manager.
Salty beef extracts
What I loved and loathed about football in 2023, from Lionesses to Saudi power (i)
European Super League - back from the dead? (The Football Fan)
David Squires on … 23 people who defined football in 2023 (The Guardian)
Dessert
The Nike Air More Uptempo Pink Foam. I am nearly 40 years old.
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