Olivier Giroud

It’s amazing what the luck of having Benzema disqualified for the national team and the not unrelated factor of Deschamps being a total clueless knob will do for your national team stats when you play for France as 9.

He still has to do his thing even if Benzema not being available worked in his favour.

He has always delivered for his country even if his contribution for Arsenal was not great.

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I think that the fact he was never even considered by any other big club, while he was here, probably means he was a good striker, but not good enough for a top European club.

He has scored lot of goals for France, who do play to his strengths, so he is clearly quality but not top quality.
But he was a decent bloke, and did he was a committed player for us.

ummm
He got bought by Chelsea

Are you negative about everything?
Christ you are a miserable twat .

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I think that the fact we didn’t want him because we had Aubemeyang, was a bigger reason for him going there to be their second choice striker, rather than Chelsea prizing him away from us.

Scoring international goals isn’t that impressive to me. Getting international goals is dependent on getting international appearances and he’s lucky that France has had the same manager that’s rated him from the time people started taking notice of him. Rooney isn’t in any way better than Lineker or Owen or Shearer because he got picked more.

I remember Owen picking Heskey to be his partner because they played well as a two and Giroud probably would have been far more useful and appreciated 20 years ago in a team like that. With France I think he’s picked often for similar reasons to suit players like Griezmann but clubs these days aren’t playing like France.

Our problem was expecting him to be a 25 goal striker which he isn’t but unless the team is going to be built around that (e.g. Benzema isn’t necessarily expected to be the one scoring for Madrid) he was never going to be what we wanted.

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He just needs to lead France to World Cup glory, win the league a few times and the CL as both a player and a manager and he’s right up there with Zidane.

Can totally see it happening

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There is one thing he will always have that’s better than Zidane and that’s his hair.

Archie Thompson also scored 31 goals for Australia, just saying :stuck_out_tongue:

The only similarity Zidane and Giroud have is their gigantic Nose.

He’s behind Podolski who is on 49.

Platini and Zidane weren’t strikers either, they were attacking midfielders who you’d expect to score less.

Giroud’s record for France is pretty good. But he’s obviously not an elite striker. He did manage 30 goals in the calendar year of 2014, which is pretty impressive.

I agree with a lot that has been written here. We know that Giroud isn’t an elite striker and we know that he should not have been our main striker for 5 years.

But I do think the qualities he does possess are under rated. People lament him for what he isn’t, rather than focus on what he is. I rate his hold up play (waits for @AbouCuellar to call this a myth)
/one touch link up play – though I think this has gone under the radar since Cazorla’s injury as he was the player able to make the best of that.

He’s also a threat in the air. Since Giroud arrived in the PL, in Europe’s top 5 leagues, only Ronaldo has scored more headers in that time frame.

The problem some people have is that he wasn’t the striker they wanted. He isn’t fast like Henry was. He isn’t as graceful as RVP – quite simply he wasn’t as good as those two, though he did reach 100 goals in fewer games than it took RVP.

But for the bracket of strikers that Giroud is part of, he is top level. Having him as a plan B was incredibly useful in many a game.

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The problem with Giroud is partly we didn’t play to his strengths. You need crossers putting in loads of crosses to make the make the best of his aerial ability but we never did that consistently. There was one game where Ozil was putting in cross after cross and eventually Giroud scored and you could just see it coming but we never did it consistently

Imagine for a minute we build around Giroud and but elite crossers like Payet, Fabregas, Di Maria, Baines alongside Ozil all whipping in high ball after high ball. In that scenario maybe Giroud would be a 30 goal a season striker.

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I dunno if you know this but Podolski isn’t French

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Aubameyang scored 10 league goals in 4 months, which was just 6 off Giroud’s best ever tally. We can’t be sentimental, we’ve upgraded big time :sunglasses:

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Not look wise though

Robbie Keane has more international goals than all of them guys…

*Big fan of OG but yea, international goals aren’t all that.

I think the fact that we have upgraded is exactly why we can be sentimental and nostalgic about Giroud.

We can remember the good stuff and forget about the 16 game long droughts and all the other shit stuff :grin:

We’re not the only ones who upgraded though :smile: He went across town to a better team and picked up another Fa Cup

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