Jack Wilshere On His Career & Iconic Football Shirts

Were you quite superstitious with boots when you were playing? Like scoring in certain pairs or doing well in certain pairs?

Not really with boots, but I was with shin pads. I had the same pair of shin pads my whole career. The whole way through. I couldn’t change them. I’d always think, “I need to change these,” or I’d have a bad game and think, “Right, now’s the time to change them.” But by the next game I couldn’t do it.

I was signed with Nike when I was really young and they gave me some shin pads. I must have been 17 when they gave them to me. They never left me. They let me down at times with injuries, but they still stayed.

What’s the main difference you’ve seen between when you started and the teenagers coming through now?

The whole world has changed. The whole football world has changed. The way players communicate through social media and how accessible they are to fans now is completely different. There’s no getting away from it. You mentioned pressure earlier. There’s probably more now because players go in after a game, pick up their phone, and there are opinions from all different types of people, good and bad. Human nature is to hold onto the bad ones.

The physical demands have changed as well. When I came through, it wasn’t as simple as putting your boots on and playing football, but there wasn’t the sports science, the data, or the knowledge around performance and what it takes. The game has definitely got faster, and I think that will continue. I was looking at data from 10 years ago around physical output and there are about 10 times more sprints in a game now. With that, you have to handle the ball even better because the game is faster. Technically, you have to be better.

I need to ask about the Norwich goal. When it was happening, did you realise how beautiful a goal you were scoring and how often it would be replayed? When did you realise it was something special?

People ask me about that all the time, and I’m not joking: probably twice a week Arsène would set up loads of mannequins in front of the box. You’d go in groups of three and have one touch each. You had to combine through the mannequins and find a way through. That’s how we wanted to play.

At the time, no, I didn’t realise it. I remember walking off at half-time and Nathan Redmond, who was on the bench for Norwich at the time, came up to me and said, “That could be one of the best goals I’ve ever seen.”

It probably wasn’t until that point that I thought, “Okay, it was a good goal.” And it was with my right foot, which I don’t normally use.