A skilful midfielder with a good range of passing and movement, but got labelled as a player who did not go forward and left Spurs to join Everton in a move that didn't work out as planned.

Introduced for his debut as an 18 year old, the slight frame did not refelct the tough East End upbringing that Samways had before moving out to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, where he had been spotted playing by Tottenham.  He could use his neat footwork to throw off opponents and also open up other teams with his incisive passing.  Once in the first team, players tried to muscle him out of games and while this worked sometimes, he did often get stuck in to show he could not be eased off the ball all the time.

He picked up the nickname of Vinny Sideways because the Spurs crowd felt his use of the ball was not forward often enough, but he was a midfielder who continued to give his all for the side and he was one of the goal-scorers in the game at Oldham Athletic in 1994, on a mud-heap of a pitch, to keep Spurs in the top flight.   His performances in the semi-final and final of the 1991 FA Cup competition were outstanding, with his effort often over-looked by what he was doing on the ball, especially after Paul Gascoigne had left the play injured.

Vinny found his options in the side limited and his patience ran out in the summer of 1994, when Everton made him their record signing at £2.2 million.  He found fame by scoring the only goal of the 1995 FA Charity Shield match at Wembley against Blackburn Rovers, but he was loaned out to Wolverhampton Wanderers and Birmingham City that season, becoming unsettled and looked to move out of the club

Everton accepted a bid of £700,000 from Las Palmas in Spain and Vinny moved to start making a name for himself in a new country.  This reputation he gained there was not one that fans in England will have been accustomed to, as he became a hard man, much targeted by referees for cards of both colours.  Sat near the bottom of Division Two in Spain, Las Palmas rose rapidly to gain promotion  after two seasons, but by 2002 they returned to the Second tier and tough financial times saw the players going without payment and Samways left for Sevilla, saying it was for purely professional reasons and went leaving a number of weeks unpaid wages still owing to him unclaimed.  At the time, Sevilla were a mid-table side and an early altercation with the assistant coach (who gave a penalty against Vinny in training), saw him dismissed from the field.  In a game against Las Palmas, Samways confronted a number of his ex-team-mates. 

In 2002-03, he was the player with the third worst disciplinary record in Spain and from his time arriving in the country in 1996, he received 69 yellow and 6 red cards before leaving for Walsall in 2003.  He ended up in the Midlands after trying to negotiate his way out of the unhappy spell at Sevilla, with a move to Cordoba, but the deal did not go through and Sevilla would not take him back.

Having had a number of trips back to Spain to sort out a number of business issues, Vinny's chances in the Walsall team were not regular and although he spent a season and a half there, he moved back to Algeciras CF to play out his career back in his adopted country.

Settled in Spain, Samways retired in 2005 aged 36 and runs a bookmakers, a bar and a disco from his base at Puerto Banus.  He has two children.