Celtic Player of the Day – 240 shut-outs for Charlie Shaw

The Celtic Star

·21 maggio 2025

Celtic Player of the Day – 240 shut-outs for Charlie Shaw

“Ten Internationals and Charlie Shaw” was the way that Celtic were described in the 1910s and the early 1920s, the implication being that the Celtic team were so good that Charlie Shaw the goalkeeper didn’t get a chance to show his talents…

This was certainly true of the great side of 1913/14 which earned words like “burglar proof” and “impenetrable” to describe Shaw, McNair and Dodds, the side that lost one goal in a whole winter!

Charlie came from Twechar and had already been noticed when he played for Port Glasgow Athletic but Charlie joined Maley’s team from Queen’s Park Rangers in 1913 and promptly won a Glasgow Charity Cup medal.

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For then on for the next 10 years, Charlie was a permanent fixture in the Celtic goal, ever reliable and never letting his side down. In due course of time he became captain, and there was something always reassuring about his presence looking like everyone’s favourite uncle, and not at at all like the ruthless and totally professional character that he was.

Charlie may not have been capped for Scotland, but he won the Scottish League in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1919 and 1922 and the Scottish Cup in 1914 and 1923. He went to America in 1925 to become player/manager of New Bedford Whalers.

He died in 1938.

David Potter

Charlie Shaw had 240 shut-outs for Celtic in 436 games and shut-out ratio of 55%.

“Shaw, McNair and Dodds understood one another so well that they developed the pass-back into a scientific move of which there have been many imitators but none to equal the originators. It was indeed a spectacle to see either McNair or Dodds passing, with unerring accuracy and cheeky coolness, the ball to Shaw two yards away, with the opposing forwards almost on top of them. That was their method of getting out of a corner, which in all probability would otherwise have been fatal.” (Weekly News 25 July 1936) Willie Maley

*Article from The Celtic Star archives celebrating the wonderful Celtic writing of the late Celtic Historian David Potter.

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