You remember Jack Wilshere, yeah? Mmmmaybe? Remembering is just about all you can do these days with the glass-boned former golden son of Arsenal, who's been alarmingly easy to lose track of since he left the Gunners at the end of his contract back in 2018. He flamed out at West Ham United, lasting a little over two-thirds the length of his contract there. If the fact Wilshere joined lowly AFC Bournemouth in the Championship this past January strikes you as a grim encapsulation of his slide from glory, you'll hate what happened next: The Cherries released him in May. He plays for no one now.
What's Jack been up to since then? Well, ah, see, the thing is...
That's Athletic UK's David Ornstein, with an incredibly devastating bullet-list summary of a recent interview with Wilshere. It just gets worse and worse as you go down it. "Challenge explaining to kids" made me gasp aloud. You expect to get past "Should've stayed at #AFC" and find, like,
- Not sleeping at night
- Cries in the car every day
- Unloved
This list makes me feel terrible for Wilshere, and in awe of Ornstein's ruthlessness. And then Ornstein, whom I never previously regarded as a cold-blooded damn murderer, did it again this morning:
This is like the plot summary of a fucking snuff film. "Kids teased at school" is where I involuntarily began this weird choking sob-chuckle that I'm still trying to reconcile with my understanding of myself as not a fucking sadist. A man looks into the abyss, and the abyss turns to its buddy and whispers, "Unsure whether to continue."
This is an amazing work of creative destruction. It is very nearly complete! Poor Jack Wilshere may yet possess some flickering ember of dignity, a soft orange mote of faltering self-respect, somewhere within his withered mummy husk. What bleaker, colder depths of heretofore unknown empty darkness must this list visit, if it is to complete the job? Go all the way, buddy. For tomorrow's bullet points, I recommend some stuff like the following:
- Regrets birth
- Won't anyone respect me
- Peed on by dog
- Wife taking lots of tennis lessons suddenly
- Honestly a huge piece of shit
Use your imagination! Explore the space. I look forward to clawing my eyes out.
