Can Wilshere fulfil potential?

Jack Wilshere’s surprise loan move to Bournemouth in search of regular football highlights the fact that his career is at the crossroads. Could the midfielder still fulfil his vast potential? Adam Bate looks at why there are still so many hoping he can do just that…

“As a manager you do not want a guy to be a star before he has delivered and maybe here that is more difficult than anywhere else.” – Arsene Wenger discussing Jack Wilshere in 2009

It’s more than five-and-a-half years since a teenage Jack Wilshere took on Barcelona and won. Showing expert control in tight situations and a swiftness of thought, his display in Arsenal’s 2-1 Champions League win over Barcelona at the Emirates Stadium in 2011 even saw him described as “indistinguishable” from midfield icons Xavi and Andres Iniesta.

Wilshere looked like a player who’d been plucked from La Masia and asked to swap shirts to make it a fair fight. It was one game, but context is everything. Two year earlier, Sam Allardyce had watched England’s 2-0 defeat in Spain and delivered the matter-of-fact verdict that the country could never produce players of the technical ability of their opponents.

Wilshere was the one who challenged that notion. Fast forward to 2016 and he can’t even make Allardyce’s England squad. Jamie Vardy is there, a striker who was in the seventh tier with Halifax that night in 2011. Adam Lallana was in League One. England’s four full-backs at Euro 2016 had yet to muster 10 top-flight games between them. All are older than Wilshere.

It’s a reminder, if one were needed, of just how special the young Wilshere was. He remains Arsenal’s youngest ever debutant in league football and first featured in the Champions League aged 16. Liam Brady still remembers the moment he first laid eyes on a nine-year-old lad from Hitchin with “exceptional” talent and “outstanding” dribbling technique.

Throughout the England age-groups, Wilshere was seen as a star. Then England Under-19 coach Noel Blake described him as “one of the best” he’d seen and Sir Trevor Brooking boasted of the UEFA officials who’d routinely ask him about this extraordinary group of English players who could keep the ball. Wilshere was the poster boy for that generation.

He was symbolic of something more, the ideal fusion of the combative qualities so admired about the English game, fused with a more technical approach that had seemed little more than an aspiration. The Mail and the Telegraph both described Wilshere as a “beacon of hope”. A headline in the Guardian simply said he was “the midfielder we have been waiting for”.

Curiously, this wasn’t merely the preserve of …

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