The Daily Observer London Desk: Reporter- Judith Benjamin
Jack Wilshere kept a scrapbook during his playing days. Its pages are filled with nuggets, mined en route from the Arsenal academy to the Arsenal dugout via Bolton, Bournemouth, West Ham and Denmark.
The 31-year-old would jot down snippets from conversations. How managers behaved, too. It’s all come in handy over the past nine months, since Wilshere took over Arsenal’s Under 18s. Alas, there was one hole in his research.
‘The coaching side, when I first came in, that was my big thing,’ Wilshere explains. ‘Trying to work out a way to play against teams, trying to develop an individual.’
But? ‘Obviously, it was a different world I was entering. The corporate world, All the emails! I was like: ‘What’s going on here?”
That late introduction to life admin forced Wilshere to rethink his routine. ‘But now I’ve worked that out,’ the 31-year-old says. ‘I’ve structured my day better.’
Jack Wilshere has relished his role as Arsenal’s Under 18 head coach throughout the season
The Gunners’ academy side will face Man City in the FA Youth Cup semi-final on Tuesday
So he can focus on his team and his coaching. They’re two steps from silverware already.
At the Emirates on Tuesday, Arsenal face Manchester City in the FA Youth Cup semi-finals. A proxy war before the battle for Premier League supremacy.
‘It’s given me back the real deep love for football. And I didn’t know I’d lost it, to be honest,’ Wilshere says of this first step into management.
‘I came back here last year – I was coaching a bit, training a bit. Then I had a decision to make.’ He was a free agent and had offers from around Europe. He chose Aarhus in Denmark before retiring, aged 30, just five months later.
‘I loved it – the country, the people – but I didn’t love it as much,’ Wilshere says. ‘I didn’t know that.’ Not until he began this new chapter.
Wilshere, who first joined Arsenal aged nine, won the Youth Cup in 2009. He then became one of 86 youngsters who, since 2000, have graduated to the first team. Now, his task is to steer the next generation down that same path.
‘There are players that are good enough,’ he says. ‘Then it is down to them when they get in front of the manager [Mikel Arteta] and down to me to give them what they need.’
Wilshere is often asked: what’s my pathway? His answer is simple: ‘Every single time we are over there, whether we are acting as Leeds or Sporting, you are in front of the manager. There’s your pathway. There’s your chance.’
It helps Wilshere, academy boss Per Mertesacker, and their players to see Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith Rowe and Eddie Nketiah climbing the higher rungs of that ladder in real time.
The retired star claimed that coaching has brought his ‘real deep love for football’ back
