You couldn't make up Sutton goalkeeper's sideline pie controversy
LONDON – Christmas time is usually known as English soccer’s “silly season," the end of the calendar routinely bringing storylines so outlandish that you couldn’t have made them up.
Yuletide has long since passed, but given the events of the past two days, the silliness most certainly has not, which is how a previously unknown fat man with a fondness for guzzling meat pies became a folk hero and the biggest news item in the nation that invented the beautiful game.
Hopefully you’ll have heard something about Wayne Shaw by now because if not, mounting an explanation from scratch about how his culinary habits made him an instant icon, cost him his job and led to a investigation into illicit gambling requires the reader to suspend belief for a while.
On Tuesday afternoon, Shaw, a 300-plus pound reserve goalkeeper for Sutton United, a tiny and unheralded team filled with part-time players in the fifth tier of the English soccer structure, found himself unemployed. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s gambling commission was mulling over whether to take action against him for his behavior less than 24 hours earlier.
When he ate a meat pie.
During Sutton’s nationally televised fifth round match against English Premier League giant Arsenal in the FA Cup, a storied competition that gives even scarcely known teams a chance to meet a famous foe, Shaw got hungry.
It is a situation that happens quite often for the 45-year-old, whose girth has steadily increased over the years and who did double duty at the club, with his main role being that of goalkeeping coach.
This time, as he sat on the bench with no chance of making it onto the field in an eventual 2-0 defeat – Sutton had already used its three permitted replacements – he unwrapped a calorie-laden treat and crammed it into his mouth with a few almighty chomps.
“I went and got it at half-time from the kitchen,” Shaw told reporters. “I had it all prepared and ready to go. It was meat and potato.”
He had gained some popularity already. English soccer is short on heavy-set keepers who look like they’ve just stepped from the pub these days, and Shaw’s size had prompted plenty of attention in the lead-up to Monday's showdown.
Scarfing the pie only added to his legend, especially after it emerged he had headed up to the bar and mingled with fans during halftime.
So what was the problem?
Well, it quickly emerged that Sun Bets, a gambling company that is a subsidiary of The Sun, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, had offered odds of 8-to-1 on Shaw being spotted eating a pie on camera during the match.
Britain’s gambling culture is far more accepting than in the U.S., and there is a vast array of wagers for bettors to try out. Novelty or gimmick bets, such as the one involving the man who has become known as the “roly-poly goalie,” are primarily used for advertising purposes.
However, while there was no suggestion Shaw had eaten the pie for his own fiscal gain, he hinted that some of his friends and acquaintances had done so.
“Obviously we are not allowed to bet,” he added. “I think a few of the mates and a few of the fans (did). It is something to make the occasion as well and you can look back and say it was part of it and we got our ticket money back.”
Those remarks, combined with the fact that Sun Bets sponsored Sutton before the biggest game in its history and Shaw had appeared in commercials celebrating the union, was enough for gambling enforcement officials to take a closer look.
“Integrity in sport is not a joke and we have opened an investigation to establish exactly what happened,” Gambling Commission enforcement and intelligence officer Richard Watson said in a statement. “As part of that we'll be looking into any irregularity in the betting market and establishing whether the operator has met its license requirement to conduct its business with integrity.”
And the fun thereby ended. Less than 18 hours after filling his belly, Shaw offered his resignation and the club accepted it.
“He's such a lovely man but he's been swept along and his judgment obviously wasn't great,” head coach Paul Doswell told Sky News. “He's going to pay the price for that, I think.”
By Tuesday evening, Shaw was the main item on the national news. #PieGate was gathering steam. Shaw had cleared out his locker at Sutton, having shed tears in a telephone chat with Doswell. Meanwhile, British legal experts were considering whether he had committed a crime, speculating that a two-year jail term is not unheard of for those found to have illegally assisted others to profit at gambling.
Shaw is certainly not likely to see jail time but the whole thing probably isn’t feeling like such a laugh any more. If the concept of “15 minutes of fame” is looking for a poster boy it has probably found one, and if you were being mischievous you’d suggest the whole thing has probably left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Let’s hope the pie tasted good.
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