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.