Jack Wilshere faced enough combative midfielders in 15 years as a professional. Only one of them, by his own account, could make him dread the next tackle before the ball had even arrived.
Asked by David Ornstein to name the opponent he hated playing against most, Wilshere did not reach for a Premier League name. He went straight to Scott Brown, the man who captained Celtic for more than a decade and also skippered Scotland.
“Scott Brown. I played against him once for Celtic. I played against him in pre-season once. He was horrible. I played against him for Scotland. He was horrible.”
What separated Brown from the rest, in Wilshere’s telling, was not the force of the challenges but the lack of restraint behind them.
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“There was a few that you knew would hit you hard, but he didn’t care. Like even if it wasn’t on to hit you hard, he’d hit you hard.”
Three meetings that stayed with him
Their senior meetings were short but memorable. The first came on 26 August 2009 at the Emirates, when Arsenal beat Celtic 3-1 in a Champions League play-off second leg to go through 5-1 on aggregate. A 17-year-old Wilshere came on as a 71st-minute substitute; Brown started and was booked late on, the two tangling after a foul on Willo Flood that drew Denilson in to pull Brown away.
They met twice more at senior international level, in England’s 3-2 win over Scotland at Wembley on 14 August 2013, and in a 3-1 England win the following year.
From Celtic captain to the boardroom
Brown made 616 appearances for Celtic across 14 years, winning ten Scottish league titles among 23 major honours, most of them as captain. He earned 55 caps for Scotland between 2005 and 2017.
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He left his most recent football job, as head coach of Scottish Championship side Ayr United, by mutual consent earlier in 2026. In August he was announced as director of sport at The Sporting Club, a UK sporting-events business.
Wilshere, 34, has moved onto the opposite side of the touchline himself. In April he won the EFL Trophy with Luton Town, his first senior honour as a manager, after an interim spell at Norwich City led to a permanent appointment at Kenilworth Road.
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