Six years ago I was here picking up the League One award and I was over the moon with that. It has been a bit of a journey I have been on since then
Goal struggles and relegation have not stopped Shankland reaching top
LAWRENCE Shankland was afforded the recognition of his peers on Sunday for making the hardest part of football look ridiculously easy.
Some 28 goals in the colours of Hearts this season have encompassed the straightforward and the sublime. They have been claimed in Europe as well as the three domestic competitions.
Even if he doesn’t score in his side’s three remaining matches to better the total he managed last term, he will travel to Germany this summer as the most prolific marksman in Steve Clarke’s squad.
Yet the dizzy heights the forward is presently scaling didn’t always feel to be inevitable. A dependable enough goalscorer in League Two with Queen’s Park, he did enough to catch the eye of Aberdeen.
A loan spell at third-tier Dunfermline in 2013-14 after signing at Pittodrie brought seven goals and earned him an opportunity with his parent club the following season. But a failure to find the net in 17 Premiership appearances for the Dons cast doubt for the first time on his ability to cut it at a top division side.
Farmed back out to St Mirren and Morton over the next two seasons, Shankland knew he had to work on his inner resolve if his prodigious talent with a ball at his feet wasn’t to be undermined by psychological weakness.
‘I had to work on the mental side of the game and improve things that I maybe should have when I was younger,’ said the PFA Scotland Player of the Year.
‘I worked on my mentality, on having a bit of belief in myself, understanding how football is going to go and how things might not go perfectly and smoothly.
‘Once you get an understanding of that and an understanding of the thoughts in your head, it leads to you having a platform in your head, in your mindset, that means you can go and perform. It has probably been the biggest thing — the maturity which comes with that.’
He struggles to pinpoint the precise point and location where he felt everything clicking into place but Somerset Park in the summer of 2017 would seem like a decent guess.
He’d managed 14 goals in 63 games across those loan spells for St Mirren and Morton then rattled in 26 in 29 games for Ayr United to ease them to the League One title. This was followed by 24 in 31 games in the Championship.
At the age of 23, he found something that had been missing up to that point.
‘It just kind of started to come together,’ he said. ‘Confidence grows as you’re more successful and things are going well for you.
‘I just didn’t understand what the process of my mindset was, the thoughts I had through football. I am not ashamed to say it is something I have really worked on. It has paid off.’
Who knows where he’d have ended up if it hadn’t been for the soul-searching and the opportunity the Honest Men gave him at that juncture in his career? The lower leagues are brimming with players who have talent but not quite the mentality needed to cut it at the top level. Shankland believes he would still have been able to live with himself had he not had that epiphanic moment. ‘I’d have gone out and worked,’ he stated. ‘It is not the end of the world. Not everybody is a football player or goes on to do well in their career. ‘I would have done what everybody else does, what my da does every day, and gone out and grafted. ‘That is how I see football as well and I think it is the best approach for me. My dad is a pipe lagger. I don’t know if I would have done that right enough, but I would have gone out and grafted.’ Although Ayr was the turning point, the five subsequent seasons have not been without their challenges. Shankland helped fire Dundee United back to the Premiership in 2020, then scored nine goals to help keep them there but eschewed the chance to prolong his stay on Tayside when the chance to move to Belgian side Beerschot came along.
The fact he scored eight goals there could not take away from the fact that it was a thoroughly miserable season. Beerschot finished bottom of the pile. Professionally and personally, it was a tough experience.
‘The football didn’t go perfectly, neither did the moving or settlingin period,’ he recalled. ‘I eventually got in the team, got pretty settled and then we got relegated, so I had to reassess everything.
‘That becomes a big learning curve in itself. Just moving away and living by myself was quite difficult. I moved out there, but my family had to stay behind and I only saw them in spells. That was difficult. But you grow as a person in these situations.
‘It was great to get the chance to play over there and I don’t regret it at all.’
Robbie Neilson recognised the move for what it was; a gamble in a foreign land that didn’t pay off.
Back at Hearts by then, Shankland’s manager at Tannadice moved heaven and earth to get him back to Scotland. The forward was never going to need much persuading.
In becoming the first Hearts player to score more than 20 goals in a season since John Robertson in 1991-92, Shankland not only repaid that faith in his debut year but silenced the last of the doubters.
The torrent of goals has continued this term. His heroics have not only been the toast of Hearts supporters but have been celebrated at his old school, Bannerman High in Baillieston, where his picture now hangs on a wall.
‘I went in to see it not so long ago,’ said Shankland. ‘They invited me in. Things like that make you proud of the journey that you have been on and the impression you can leave on people who go to your old school.’
There would be enough to commend Shankland for if this had all come easy to him. But he’s had to suffer and persevere to get to this point. The real deal did not just happen overnight.
‘Five or six years ago, I was here picking up the League One award and I was over the moon with that,’ he recalled.
‘It has been a bit of a journey I have been on since then. To pick up the Premiership award was something I could only dream of.
‘There have been ups and downs. But I think everybody’s journey is different. I wouldn’t change any of it. It has been my journey.’