Olivier Giroud

You must have missed the time Cuellar when did a (highly selective) statistical comparison of Giroud and Sanogo.

Best to stop the 487th edition of the Giroud back and fouth because neither side will convince the other on this topic, plus I don’t want the mods to lock this thread.:joy:

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Ha, yes, I remember that.

Anyway, nice bloke, decent footballer but didn’t really suit Arsenal’s style, he kept working hard though even when it was clear he’d fallen down the pecking order.

You could see him banging in 15-20 goals per season at the right club though. He really needed a winger to give him a ball in the air, he’s very good at bringing others into play and has a knack of creating something out of nothing occasionally, but as the leading attacker, no…

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Aubameyang is one hell of a harsh comparison and of course a completely different style of CF.

Now we’re talking about an absolute monster of a forward that has such a special blend of athleticism, technical ability and timing/reading of the game that at most a handful of players in the world can match.

Quite frankly we hit the mother fucking jackpot landing Aubameyang. We don’t even have to play well for his special abilities to come into play.

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What I love about Giroud debate is people who are criticising Giroud defender for rating Giroud; believe the defenders think Giroud is some world class striker.

I don’t think there is anyone who considers him more than adequate footballer, who somehow finds a way to contribute.

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He was a good striker but not really good enough to be at a club that had serious ambitions about winning the top trophies.

He actually was playing some of his best football when we sold him but it’s no coincidence that although he went to a top six club, he was only there as cover for their main striker.

When he was bought he took over from RVP, who was the best striker in the PL, and was supposed to be cover for a top level striker here but became our starting striker for the next five seasons, and he simply wasn’t good enough in that role.

I don’t blame him at all, he always did his best, but it was a very good illustration of the clubs lack of ambition that we sold one of the best goal scorers in Europe, to replace him with a no more than competent player for a fraction of the price.

He was always going to be criticised because he was following on from truly great goal scorers we had previously like, Wright, Anelka, Bergkamp, Henry, RVP and even Adebayor.
When you compare Giroud to them, as well as his successor, Aubameyang, it’s clear he isn’t in the same bracket.

Saying that, I’m glad he won a World Cup medal and a few trophies with us, and he was fairly likeable, but he was here far too long for a first team striker with such limited ability.

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This is the thing, one of Giroud’s best features was his aerial ability and we rarely put quality high crosses in for him. I’m convinced that if you had a prime David Beckham whipping in crosses for him he’d score 20-30 goals a season. In fact in 2015 he did net 30+ goals which was an excellent run but then he had a 3 month drought and everyone hated him.

His assists were quality to

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The team has to be dominant in possession and have complementary players around for ‘Giroud up top’ to work.

Those spells where he didn’t score were also spells where we simply didn’t have the necessary control of games.

People act like goals need to mainly come from the CF but in reality anyone can be scoring the goals as long as the system’s winning. Remember when RvP came back into our team scoring all our goals while the likes of Nasri, Walcott and Chamakh no longer could? That was no coincidence and the net results were pretty much the same if not worse.

Strikers like Giroud are only in the team to improve control of the possession and combination play from further up the pitch. When that wasn’t happening there was no point of him being there.

He’s an aerial threat but that’s not really his main plus point.

Look, you can say what you want, but strikers score goals.

I have this argument with people that still rate Benzema in 2018 (and even then he does that job better, by being a foil for Ronaldo, whose supreme goalscoring means they can account for a poor striker).

You can say all you want, but this guy went like 3 months without a goal in 2016. That was the year Leicester city finished 10 points ahead of us and won the league.

Same season Ozil broke the assist record. He had the service, he was the starter, but what happened…

For France, this world cup he has literally not had ONE shot on target. As a starter there is very little excuse for that.

And then there is the Monaco games in 2015.

Look, I like the guy, and he’s a flamboyant motherfucker which had an endearing quality about him, especially when he would come out with the odd golazo.

And I am happy for him that he won the world cup as a starter.

But I am also happy that he doesn’t start as CF for my team, or any team I have a stake in.

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What you’re saying there though isn’t really contradicting anything I’m saying. I never said he should be starting. I’m just stating my opinion on where and why a manager should use him. Great managers use their squad wisely.

People want to believe there isn’t any place for a Giroud in top tier football but it just smacks of denial for me. You can simplify this game all you want - at the end of the day it’s those details people are not bothered to look into that make the difference out on the pitch.

I 100% agree that Wenger was simply wrong to make Giroud his undisputed number one striker for an entire campaign. Forwards like that can’t contribute for the whole year in a team that just isn’t anywhere near dominant enough like ours.

Maybe if we had an amazing system to control 95% of games we play then I could see it - but never in our case.

As for Benzema - I’ve always been firmly with AC on this one. The guy in my opinion is one of the most underrated CF’s in this era. This was for me his first bad season in what has been a fantastic career.

Again, there is simply no actual fact justification for this argument; people really need to stop putting forward this argument without even a whiff of evidence. Giroud no more improved our control of the game/increased the quality of our possession in the final third than Sanogo did.

I think it’s rather the opposite, hence my interest in this argument. Attention to detail and an analytic, unbiased look at Giroud’s play will reveal only the negative difference he makes out on the pitch.

Glad we agree on something :slight_smile:

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Speaking sense since 94` top quality post mate :+1:

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Lmao, Sanogo scored once in 20 appearances for us so I don’t think I need to see any comparison there haha

And in the time he came in for Giroud, his record in the last 20 game was pretty similar, and his effect on our play was worse…despite having like 6 more years of top level football under his belt. :slight_smile:

Easy for people to laugh right now, but all of the worthwhile posters at the time agreed there was little difference between Sanogo and Giroud–so bad was Giroud in this time–and many argued for Sanogo’s inclusion as I did.

Either way, the irony of people spouting utter myth about Giroud laughing at anything…

I invite you guys to look at these three pages (the offensive/+passing) parts and play a game of ‘which one doesn’t belong.’ If you have any interest in looking at actual objective data instead of spouting myth, you can also have a look at people like Benteke for Villa, Lambert for Southampton, or any other mediocre counterpart to Giroud, and see how much his numbers look much more like theirs (especially if you adjust for the difference in club stature) than the former two:

https://www.whoscored.com/Players/24845/History/Edin-Dzeko
https://www.whoscored.com/Players/14296/History/Karim-Benzema
https://www.whoscored.com/Players/24444/History/Olivier-Giroud

This is without going into the actual observational evidence of the negative impacts of Giroud’s play, such as a) slow thought process breaking down faster moves (this is reflected in his bad touches/PS %/dispossessed as well, tbf) b) Lack of any pace whatsoever allowing defences to play a higher line and limit the space in which our mediapuntas/wingers have in which to work + dropping too deep and further compressing said space c) lack of dribbling ability whatsoever, or ability to hold up the ball, to either retain possession effectively or beat a man to improve possession/chances of danger d) invitation to take the cop out of inherently poor plays for teammates-- that is, hoofing it/playing too directly/making poor hopeful Ox crosses.

Fact is, those who argue that Giroud’s ‘link-up play’ or general effect outside his goal-scoring is anything other than deficient haven’t a leg to stand on.

If Ox for us was an attribute player, Giroud is the epitome of a highlight reel player; even a minimal amount of investigation into his actual ability/effect on play reveals a deficient player, but because he has a penchant for some highlight reel involvements from time to time his myth lives on.

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Giroud exists . . . therefore he is

Just because Sanogo was better “at this time”, meaning a period of a few months in 2014 doesn’t mean that his output across any adequately sized time frame can ever be compared to Giroud. You said “it’s easy to laugh now”, well of course it is, because anyone with a brain can see who the better player is. Giroud has 31 goals for France and Sanogo will never even get one cap for the rest of his career.

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Let’s put this in context, the 12 months before that he smashed 30 goals and he didn’t start for all those 3 full months where he had that dry spell

Didn’t Ozil only get about 2 assists in those 3 months of 2016? Because he was on about 16-17 by Christmas and didn’t break Henry’s 20 assists

People never talk about Alexis Sanchez during that period either, blew cold with a spotty goal record most of the season until the title was gone.

Generally the Ozil x Alexis connection was nothing special despite Alexis consistently averaging the highest shots per game in the squad.

Giroud to this day is probs Ozil’s highest assist recipient, there was an mutual understanding between the two for sure

Of course. Who said Sanogo was better than Giroud? He’s not. That a shit player that can barely make it in Ligue 2 is not better than Giroud is not relevant to this argument, though, in fact, the fact there could even be a similarity in a short, not-adequately sized time frame (as you rightly point out), is reflective of how ridiculous it is to talk about Giroud as people do here.

I don’t know why we are still arguing about this.

There is no need to compare Giroud to Sanogo, the latter isn’t even a football player.
There is no need to compare Giroud to Auba, one cost us 12m and the other cost us almost 60m.

A 12m player that scored 100 goals for our team, is NO SHIT.

If we want to play the blame game, the only person that should get the blame was Wenger. First, he insisted to start Giroud for too long, even when he was on his annual 10-game+ scoring drought; and second, he never implement a proper tactic to comply with Giroud’s style. Best example was, when Giroud was in the game we played the low ball, and when Giroud was subbed out, we started crossing the ball high.

Again, anybody who scored 100 goals for us (not a PK machine) is no shit, when we did had some true shit like Sanogo, Welbeck, Iwobi… etc.

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There is no good tactic to comply with a bad footballer’s style. Another major myth in this debate, this. Anyways, he actually did try, we were far more–and overly, of course–cross-heavy in the Giroud era.