The 18-year-old is in England's senior and Under-21 squads, yet he is a delicate thing, to be handled, stroked and made much of
The English don't generally like delicate, fancy things. They make us nervous. We don't so much gild the lily as crumple the lily in our fist, stuff it in the back pocket of our jeans and replace it with a functional precast concrete structure that we can grow a hedge in front of.
This aversion to the gratuitously splendid comes out in the most everyday objects. In Spain, for example, a "ham sandwich" is a deliciously sensuous experience, the fruit of generations of high-end artisan indulgence. In England a ham sandwich is a cold, pink punch in the face, an angry thing marbled with gristly neglect. It is this roundhead quality that makes me feel nervous about Jack Wilshere, teenage midfield scamp and current bearer of the title of most promising young footballer in England. Watching Wilshere set up Arsenal's first goal against Partizan Belgrade last month with a brilliant backheel, two thoughts sprang to mind. First: Wilshere is really good. And second: how are we going to ruin him?
The question of how exactly English football is going ruin Wilshere may have been answered this week. Wilshere is in Fabio Capello's England squad for Tuesday's game against Montenegro. He is also the only senior player also included in the Under-21 squad, and the only senior player who could end up playing twice for England in four days before playing again for Arsenal next weekend. Arsène Wenger has already expressed his misgivings and it is easy to sympathise. Squeezing in an extra 90 minutes for our most prized, coltish 18-year-old is so obviously a bad idea that it is hard to resist the sense that it must, on some level, be rooted in the basic English urge to test and pummel, to boot-camp and basic-train.
"It is vital that he plays as much football as he can," Stuart Pearce said this week. But you only need to look at the faun‑like, impish Wilshere to appreciate how perverse this is. Wilshere is a delicate thing, to be dandled and stroked and made much of, perhaps even quartered in a very small secure dark room, some kind of sealed basement annexe. We don't produce this type of player very often. When we do we generally succeed in ruining them. Why?
Perhaps my own deeply simplistic, but also infallible, method of classifying English players may help. Particularly because, in Wilshere and Kevin Davies, this England squad offers polar opposites in the range of English archetypes. Davies deserves his call-up. He is a good player. More importantly, he offers hope to heavy-set thirtysomething men everywhere, men who may yet harbour dreams of still being allowed to join the fire brigade, or of receiving an urgent request from Simon Cowell to become the fifth member in an ad hoc emergency X Factor boyband, perhaps as the Older One who never really sings or dances but instead stands around looking sad in the background.
Davies is also a perfect example of the classic English good-bad player. The good-bad player plays "bad" football very well. He has a narrow focus, based around limiting what might possibly happen on a football pitch through a combination of strength and tactical intelligence. Closely related is the bad-good player: he appears to play "good" football – expansive, expressive football – but in practice only occasionally succeeds and is, in effect, ineffective.
Then there is the bad-bad player: the hatchet man with no discernible hatchet, the striker with surprisingly bad feet for such a small man. And finally there is the good-good player, who succeeds in playing "good" football with consistent success. This type, the type Wilshere might yet be, is rarer in England, where there is an innate distrust of the good-good player; particularly, as in Wilshere's case, where extreme technical excellence is unsupported by basic physical heft. These players, we feel, must be stretched and scoured. They must be, in some basic sense, exposed. Perhaps – and here we shrug helplessly – they will even be ruined.
There are various ways in which we could have gone about ruining Wilshere. The most common approach is to make the aspirant good-good player feel terribly guilty about his indolent gifts. This seems to have done the trick with Joe Cole, a player who, some years back adopted a furiously hair-shirt style of play, puffing about the pitch, knees high, chest out, in a manner that can only be described as apologetic. Alternatively, we might choose to ruin Wilshere by making him go a little bit mad. This seemed to work with poor old Glenn Hoddle, chastised over his lack of biceps and routinely cast as "an outsider", a socks-down maverick in the play of some great cultural conspiracy. Presumably we're happy now.
Maybe things will be different with Wilshere. He has Wenger on his side. He has a seductively tumbling, pigeon-toed gait and a dinky, prompting, short-passing range. And still he seems so delicate, so crushable in his unabashed good-goodness. Competitive international debuts will come and go and Wilshere is good enough to thrive. But what happens next may be as much a test of us as it is of him.
Barney Ronay - The Guardian
The English don't generally like delicate, fancy things. They make us nervous. We don't so much gild the lily as crumple the lily in our fist, stuff it in the back pocket of our jeans and replace it with a functional precast concrete structure that we can grow a hedge in front of.
This aversion to the gratuitously splendid comes out in the most everyday objects. In Spain, for example, a "ham sandwich" is a deliciously sensuous experience, the fruit of generations of high-end artisan indulgence. In England a ham sandwich is a cold, pink punch in the face, an angry thing marbled with gristly neglect. It is this roundhead quality that makes me feel nervous about Jack Wilshere, teenage midfield scamp and current bearer of the title of most promising young footballer in England. Watching Wilshere set up Arsenal's first goal against Partizan Belgrade last month with a brilliant backheel, two thoughts sprang to mind. First: Wilshere is really good. And second: how are we going to ruin him?
The question of how exactly English football is going ruin Wilshere may have been answered this week. Wilshere is in Fabio Capello's England squad for Tuesday's game against Montenegro. He is also the only senior player also included in the Under-21 squad, and the only senior player who could end up playing twice for England in four days before playing again for Arsenal next weekend. Arsène Wenger has already expressed his misgivings and it is easy to sympathise. Squeezing in an extra 90 minutes for our most prized, coltish 18-year-old is so obviously a bad idea that it is hard to resist the sense that it must, on some level, be rooted in the basic English urge to test and pummel, to boot-camp and basic-train.
"It is vital that he plays as much football as he can," Stuart Pearce said this week. But you only need to look at the faun‑like, impish Wilshere to appreciate how perverse this is. Wilshere is a delicate thing, to be dandled and stroked and made much of, perhaps even quartered in a very small secure dark room, some kind of sealed basement annexe. We don't produce this type of player very often. When we do we generally succeed in ruining them. Why?
Perhaps my own deeply simplistic, but also infallible, method of classifying English players may help. Particularly because, in Wilshere and Kevin Davies, this England squad offers polar opposites in the range of English archetypes. Davies deserves his call-up. He is a good player. More importantly, he offers hope to heavy-set thirtysomething men everywhere, men who may yet harbour dreams of still being allowed to join the fire brigade, or of receiving an urgent request from Simon Cowell to become the fifth member in an ad hoc emergency X Factor boyband, perhaps as the Older One who never really sings or dances but instead stands around looking sad in the background.
Davies is also a perfect example of the classic English good-bad player. The good-bad player plays "bad" football very well. He has a narrow focus, based around limiting what might possibly happen on a football pitch through a combination of strength and tactical intelligence. Closely related is the bad-good player: he appears to play "good" football – expansive, expressive football – but in practice only occasionally succeeds and is, in effect, ineffective.
Then there is the bad-bad player: the hatchet man with no discernible hatchet, the striker with surprisingly bad feet for such a small man. And finally there is the good-good player, who succeeds in playing "good" football with consistent success. This type, the type Wilshere might yet be, is rarer in England, where there is an innate distrust of the good-good player; particularly, as in Wilshere's case, where extreme technical excellence is unsupported by basic physical heft. These players, we feel, must be stretched and scoured. They must be, in some basic sense, exposed. Perhaps – and here we shrug helplessly – they will even be ruined.
There are various ways in which we could have gone about ruining Wilshere. The most common approach is to make the aspirant good-good player feel terribly guilty about his indolent gifts. This seems to have done the trick with Joe Cole, a player who, some years back adopted a furiously hair-shirt style of play, puffing about the pitch, knees high, chest out, in a manner that can only be described as apologetic. Alternatively, we might choose to ruin Wilshere by making him go a little bit mad. This seemed to work with poor old Glenn Hoddle, chastised over his lack of biceps and routinely cast as "an outsider", a socks-down maverick in the play of some great cultural conspiracy. Presumably we're happy now.
Maybe things will be different with Wilshere. He has Wenger on his side. He has a seductively tumbling, pigeon-toed gait and a dinky, prompting, short-passing range. And still he seems so delicate, so crushable in his unabashed good-goodness. Competitive international debuts will come and go and Wilshere is good enough to thrive. But what happens next may be as much a test of us as it is of him.
Barney Ronay - The Guardian
