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Jack Wilshere again the missing man as other England youth shine
Jack Wilshere was always the exception.
The past three or four years of his young playing career have been wedged between a myriad of injuries that have plagued his fitness and the hopes of the England national team.
Yet Roy Hodgson has always held Wilshere in an infallible light despite the player’s obvious inconsistency.
After so many years of being told their style of football was wrong, perhaps English football grew weary of its own identity and that is why Wilshere was so appealing right after Spain won the 2010 World Cup with zest and tiki-taka. The Arsenal starlet was the man to lead England in a similar direction — one of their own, with an undeniably Spanish accent to his football.
Yet some eight years after he broke out onto the scene at Arsenal as a sixteen-year-old, Wilshere has never made a single appearance in a major tournament and it’s hard to see this summer being any different.
Wilshere has been sidelined since he broke his fibula in preseason and surgery kept him out until February. Recurrent injuries have kept him out since, although he is tipped to make his return sometime soon. For how long, we will see. He has not appeared for England since a 3-2 Euro 2016 win over Slovenia in June, in which he bagged a brace. It is that appearance that did so much to earn Hodgson’s admiration, but as Wilshere knows all too well, success is far more than just promise in football.
England, however, have grown beyond their previous reliance on the midfielder this year with the emergence of Eric Dier, Dele Alli and Danny Drinkwater. Dier and Alli have molded into a promising duo at Tottenham Hotspur and beat Germany in a thrilling 3-2 comeback victory in an extension of their league successes.
Adam Lallana and Danny Welbeck played on the wings with Harry Kane up front.
Hodgson also has ample backup, with Drinkwater starting alongside Ross Barkley and James Milner in a slightly more counter-attacking oriented lineup with Daniel Sturridge out wide and Harry Kane and/or Jamie Vardy up front. Nevertheless, the volume of hungry, passionate midfielders vying for a spot in Hodgson’s twenty-three-man squad and on merit alone, they all deserve it ahead of Wilshere.
Hodgson will give his starlet every possible opportunity to make the team, but it’s best for England to move on and perhaps it’s also in Wilshere’s favor to give him time to recuperate from his injuries and begin to rebuild a career that has thus far been disappointingly sour.
And now it has at its fingertips a promising, well-oiled midfield duo and Alli and Dier, both of the hard-noosed English breed of footballer, unafraid of a hard tackle and hungry for blood. A vibrant performance against Germany gave England hope that they might just be the pair that Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard never were; yet for the familiarity alone, Hodgson doesn’t appear trust the two Tottenham youngsters as much as he still does Wilshere.
Photo credit: Kieran Clark, via Flickr