Back in the early 1990s, the Bristol hooker Mark Regan had a nickname for his tight-five colleague Simon Shaw.
“I call him the ‘welded wallet’,” he explained, “because he never buys a drink. If he has any money, he doesn’t expose it to the light.”
This being the season of goodwill, we must be charitable to Shaw – one of the finest players to wear an England shirt in many a long decade, despite spending so much of his career in the shadow of Martin Johnson (who wasn’t so bad himself).
Rugby was still amateur when he pitched up at the Memorial Ground and to make matters worse on the readies fr...