Arsenal: Jack Wilshere as much “potential” as Andres Iniesta was

Rio Ferdinand  is yet again raining on Arsenal’s parade by knocking Jack Wilshere, but the is backing himself into a corner with his misfit logic.

Jack Wilshere hit on some damn good form against West Ham, despite Arsenal’s lackluster 0-0 draw. However, there was one man who was not impressed, and that one man is always going to be Rio Ferdinand.

The former Manchester United man said that all he sees Wilshere as is “potential,” essentially ignoring all the good he does and did on the pitch. According to Ferdinand, he wants more “goals and assists” from the Arsenal man. Because apparently, when you’re an English midfielder, without goals and assists, you are nothing but potential.

This logic is incredibly flimsy. There are plenty of effective players who don’t tally hard stats. Andres Iniesta is one such case. He had a few years of massive assists, but overall, he was not know for that. And yet he was one of the most influential midfielders to ever play the game.

So, as a bit of an experiment, I did some number crunching to figure out how productive Iniesta was until the age of 25 and how it compares to Wilshere. It started out as a bit of fun. I recognized that the numbers aren’t everything, especially considering the sporadic appearances that Wilshere has had over his injury-ridden career. But this is how the numbers came out.

Up until he was 25 years old, Iniesta scored or assisted 77 times across 19,481 minutes of play. That equates to a goal or assist every 253 minutes. This ratio improved when he hit the prime years that Wilshere has yet to hit.

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On the other side of things, Wilshere has tallied 49 goals and assists in 15,357 minutes. Which turns into a goal contribution every 313 minutes. A mere hour less than Iniesta’s grand tally.

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Now, again, I’m not going to sit here and extrapolate on the numbers too much, but my point is right there in the tally. Was anyone saying that Iniesta was only potential because he could only manage a goal or assist ever three matches? So why then is it a factor with Wilshere when he is contributing every three and a half matches?

Wilshere has improved. That is what I find most remarkable about him. You can’t see it in the numbers, but numbers do not tell the whole story. Not even a fraction of it. His influence on the pitch is growing greater and greater and the only thing he needs is the only thing he has ever needed – time.

He has 4,000 minutes less than Iniesta had at that time. Those 4,000 minutes could have changed everything in the stats. Every run of form Wilshere has had has been interrupted by injuries, often serious or debilitating.

The difference between Wilshere at 25 and Iniesta at 25 is an hour. That’s it. Iniesta had the perfection of Barcelona, Wilshere has the whimsies of Arsene Wenger. Iniesta missed only 12 games, and those all came when he was 25. His formative years were hugely uninterrupted. Wilshere has missed 145 games through that same time frame of development.

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Rio Ferdinand is wrong. Plain wrong. He has an unrealistic standard of what a midfielder should be based on who knows what and he assumes that since Wilshere’s numbers haven’t lived up to his hype, he must not have matured past the point of having “potential.” Watch him play. You’ll know Ferdinand is wrong.