Olivier Giroud

That’s the one . He was disappointing.

But dat chaos factor tho!

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But you need to subtract the propensity for spastication. Full equation:

Overall quality = (Bantz rating + Chaos Factor) - (Propensity for Spastification + Ability to actually fucking shoot like a coordinated human being)

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Forgot to add If scores (very small odds) try to stay on feet for celebration.

Totally in the minority here but purely from a contextual ‘benefits vs drawbacks’ perspective, this no shots on target stat holds nowhere near as much weight against Giroud as people are making out it does.

There have been far more convincing arguments towards him being this supposedly useless striker (even in this World Cup) that have got nowhere near the same unaminous approval.

I don’t think fans realise how much their own ideals about football dominate how they assess individual performances in quite a diverse team sport.

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Giroud’s shittness transcends ideas about football. He’s just not good. No reason to throw this much mud at it.

You really must see him in your nightmares every night, it’s personal with you isn’t it?

lol not at all, I’m just hopeless before bait. Like I said, I actually rather like the guy, especially now that I haven’t been watching him on a regular basis for Arsenal. Just think it’s funny how deluded people get themselves over an incredibly mediocre striker who had the luck of circumstance on his side (read: Wenger and Deschamps + Benzema).

btw, @Hass , you get that it’s 0 shots on target, not 0 shots, right? He actually took a lot, from what I remember from the quick look at his stats. Basically, if you look at the stats, or if you watched him, no hay por donde cogerle, that is, there’s literally nowhere to begin a defence of him. But then there never was with Giroud, people just do it anyways.

He’s better than mediocre though, that’s just insulting. He isn’t world class by any stretch of the imagination, but he ain’t Emile Heskey either.

He is, though. At Arsenal his seasons tended to be matched by the likes of Ricky Lambert and Christian Benteke, would you call them more than mediocre? Even his best seasons he wasn’t doing anything someone like Carlos Bacca wasn’t, how do you rate him?

Giroud’s being considered anything more than that can be summed up by the mediatic effect of playing in a big club (hence why I said: “who had the luck of circumstance on his side”), and the fact that the majority of people on this forum are pretty shortsighted and don’t really know a thing about football outside the PL.

(And, well, also a group of people that see a big man who occasionally pulls off a bit of technique and can’t help but say DAT LINK UP PLAY, and who in general just have a soft spot for the classic idea of a big #9–which is a lot in England/on this forum I find–, and who will praise his link-up play because of it despite it being seriously sub par in actual fact)

So youre clearly only judging him on goals. Benteke is a lampost who sits up top and does absolutely nothing but wait for service. Girouds link up play was always quite good with his back to goal; he was able to connect with our midfield better than a lot of so called mediocre strikers would have. I would be willing to bet that his assists and passes in moves leading to goals accounted for a lot more than you noticed.

Take the Wilshere goal against Norwich as one example, his contribution to that goal was beautiful and Rickie Lambert would never have done anything like that.

No, any one who’s been around since the old forum can attest I’ve done full comparisons of his full game throughout the years. Your last sentence in this post sums it up-- the biasing effect a few outlier moments have on what is, on the global level, and indefensible picture.

Actually, it’s the other way around-- I’m very likely to defend a striker whose goal output is lacking (see: Benzema) if their actual effect on play is good. Probably in terms of personal preference I lean too far towards this side of the spectrum. The problem is Giroud has always been a donkey in terms of link-up play, and his effect on play has always been negative.

You can’t categorize my mentioning of one example as a “biasing effect” when it’s meant to highlight what he did on multiple occasions.

You also edited your post before I replied and you knew exactly what I would point to, his link up play. You can’t mention someone like Benteke and then discount Girouds link up capabilities because you know it’s what I’m going to mention in reply.

I’m not arguing here that he was a top player by the way, he clearly wasn’t and his lack of finishing at times was bewildering. We should have had someone else leading us for a very long time, but in isolation Giroud is by no means a terrible player.

When I referred to Benteke and Lambert I was also doing statistical comparisons of their other contributions aside from scoring.

Long story short-- there was no difference or Giroud even came out below in a number of categories. This is a game that has been done for a while, even when people were trying to argue Giroud was better than Dzeko :joy:, or Costa (@Calum)

Like I said, statistically there’s nowhere to pick him up from, he’s just not good. The same if you watch him game in and game out, without falling into the trap of being biased by certain extremely memorable moments (one that I too have been susceptible to, for the record).

When you say he’s “not good”, what standard are you using that qualifies for “good”? If scoring 105 goals for a top club in six seasons, the last two of which he was invariably a sub isn’t good then there aren’t that many good players around.

That not good, that mediocre at best for a starting striker at a top club.

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He was only a starting striker for four of those, and he wasn’t even a “striker” as much as a centre forward who was deployed to play with his back to goal and provide for the players around him. That was obvious from the way we played with him in the side.

When Alexis was in the team for instance, everything went through him, so Giroud was never meant to be the leader of our attack as much as a supporting player. Now that we have an actual world class striker in the side in Aubameyang, we can use him as our focal point and we certainly will.

Ohh that’s just the same old repetitive bullshit people have use defend Giroud, he was as useless with Alexis as without him, he had 2 seasons without Alexis and he was the same useless donkey.

Centre forwards are fucking strikers, their job is still to score and Giroud assist record was 3-8-3-6-3-0 in his PL seasons so if his job was to provide for other was also shit at that.

And you know something funny, Aubameyang without basing his game around LINK-UP PLAY got 4 assist in 13 games last season.

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Again, throwing around terms like “useless” and “shit” are grossly unfair when describing him as a player. Just because he isn’t world class doesn’t mean he’s shit, there aren’t just two categories we can sort players into.

If you wanna talk about someone who was truly shit, we can toss names like Chamakh and Sanogo in the ring. Giroud was a decent player, never a great one. If the argument is that a club like Arsenal shouldn’t have just had a “decent” man leading the line for that long, then I agree. Thankfully we’ve got something a lot better now.

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Shit and useless is just a way of talking. Decent is a bit strong, mediocre or a bit less would be a better term if we’re getting all semantical with it. When we say shit or useless it’s just to save ourselves these next couple sentences, as I think would be overly understood.

If that were obvious it would’ve been reflected in some tangible benefit to the team, and it certainly would show up, in the very least if not in Benzema like non-goal scoring statistics at least in something tangibly better than donkey contemporaries like Benteke and Lambert. It didn’t. Actually, the “Giroud may not be a great goalscorer but look what he provides for the team” is the least viable of all the unviable defences of Giroud. On the spectrum of viability just arguing on the basis of his goals you probably get past 1/100 on the spectrum at least.

It looks funny now but the fact that someone as shit as Sanogo could come up and the team functioned equally well, or even close to equally well, to as it did with Giroud, is actually a huge slap in the face for any argument you attempt to make.

I recognise I overrated Sanogo–and above all trusted more in Wenger’s and the U21 France teams’ talent evaluators’ criteria–when I said he could be a good back-up striker for us, but it’s 4-5 years on now and you’re still saying a shit player is good when there’s an excess of evidence to the contrary. Which is funnier?