What Does the Future Hold for Olivier Giroud at Arsenal?
During European football's close season, we fans have got our morning routines pretty much nailed down.
We wake up, rub our eyes, contemplate the various challenges of the day and then immediately pick up our phones to trawl Twitter, sports news websites and, of course, the Bleacher Report Team Stream™ App (plug not contractually obliged) to see which players our respective clubs have been linked with overnight.
Transfers, you see, are where the glamour is.
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There is always someone, somewhere who is better than the players your club has already got, and he's usually got a buyout clause and has an agent who is talking up hopes of a potential move. With not too many actual matches to talk about, we crave the chance to pore over any potential deals, smart ones or otherwise.
As supporters of one of the biggest clubs in the world and—as the Daily Telegraph’s Tom Edwards recently pointed out—voracious consumers of online content about their club, Arsenal fans will usually have a name or two to take in when they browse the latest rumours on potential incomings to the Emirates Stadium.
Barely a week goes by without an apparent Arsenal target trending on Twitter, being “the subject of a bid” or “keen on a move to the Gunners.” They are almost always a glamorous name, are usually an attacking player and are accompanied by an exorbitant fee.
Google the name of almost any fairly big-name player alongside that of Arsenal and you are likely to find a fairly convincing link. From the past week alone, here’s Jackson Martinez in the Daily Mirror, Zlatan Ibrahimovic in the Guardian and Arturo Vidal in Metro.
All of the stories are designed to get fans talking, and given that they are usually centred on attacking players, dream formations are constructed in supporters’ heads as an all-conquering red-and-white machine is assembled and primed to take on the very best both at home and abroad.
It all means the players currently at the club can become a little overlooked, and the chief victim where Arsenal are concerned is usually, and unfairly, Olivier Giroud.
But as French journalist Julien Laurens pointed out in his impassioned defence of his fellow countryman for ESPN FC, Giroud really is a better player than he often gets credit for, adding:
"The thing about Giroud is that he plays for the team first and foremost. He is a team player, uncharacteristic of a striker's role, which by definition is very selfish. That's why Arsene Wenger is so keen on him. He takes part in the play. He links up the play. He plays mostly with his back to goal, flicking balls, playing a one-two, using his strength to hold the ball up front for his team to move higher on the pitch. Diego Costa or Sergio Aguero play with the goal in front of them.
"
In addition, Laurens points to numbers that include 19 goals in 36 games in all competitions in an injury-disrupted season just gone, as well as steadily increasing and impressive stats during his three campaigns at the club since his move from Montpellier in June 2012. Fifty-eight goals in 135 Arsenal appearances isn’t too shabby, either. Not exceptional, just very good.
And those five words could well prove to be the Frenchman’s eventual epitaph at Arsenal.
As we discussed when outlining the need for Gunners boss Arsene Wenger to bring in a top-class goalkeeper this summer, this really should be a time when Arsenal follow up their back-to-back FA Cup wins with a serious assault on the Premier League and Champions League, but Giroud doesn’t have to be a casualty of that.
Put simply, he is better at his job than David Ospina and Wojciech Szczesny are at theirs, and there should still be a role for the French forward in next season’s attempts to conquer at home and abroad. Unlike in goal, centre-forward isn’t an area where Arsenal need major surgery.
What Giroud, his manager and the Arsenal fans have had to get used to, though, is the idea that that role is forever under scrutiny, largely because one of these oft-linked glamorous names has reared its head, is trending on social media and has a great YouTube highlights video.
These players are simply someone else, that toy you haven’t got that always looks more exciting than your old reliable one.
We’re not saying that Arsenal should pass up the opportunity to sign a genuinely world-class forward should the chance present itself this summer, and Wenger has shown recently that he can pull off the big deals thanks to the eye-catching purchases of Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez—just that doing so isn’t a priority right now.
Against this backdrop, Giroud has become your classic “could do better” forward. He’s strong but not the strongest, works hard but not the hardest and is a very good finisher but not the best.
There was a time last season, though, when he was a match for any pure centre-forward around in world football.
He scored 10 goals in a 10-game spell between February and April, only failing to find the net once in a game he started. Unfortunately for him, though, it was a pretty big game.
Giroud’s critics will forever be able to point to his nightmare hour in the Champions League second-round clash with Monaco as evidence that the 28-year-old shouldn’t be the Gunners’ first-choice forward.
On a night when Arsenal sank into “Arsenal-ness” like never before, he was a magnet for glaring opportunities.
He ballooned efforts over the bar, fired wide or straight at goalkeeper Danijel Subasic when it appeared the goal was at his mercy. When he was replaced by Theo Walcott on the 60-minute mark, it was as much out of pity as anything else. He was lucky not to crash his car on the way home.
This was the original shocker, but it is harsh to judge the Frenchman on one game alone.
Often criticised for not performing in the Gunners’ bigger fixtures, he managed to score home and away against Liverpool in 2014/15, as well as against both Manchester clubs and in the FA Cup final.
The fact that he was reduced to playing just the final 13 minutes of that 4-0 win over Aston Villa at Wembley because of Walcott’s late-season upturn in form would have angered Giroud somewhat, but it is far too early to suggest he has lost the confidence of Wenger or that he won’t find himself in his compatriot’s team from the beginning of the next Arsenal assault on honours in 2015/16.
Whether people will be happy to see him there is a different matter entirely, though, and that’s largely because of the words of another Frenchman.
When Thierry Henry speaks, Arsenal fans tend to listen, and his criticism of Giroud, fused together with those aforementioned transfer links, has created a situation that has heaped pressure on the man who took over the No. 12 shirt Henry sported when he made an emotional return to the Emirates in 2012.
As a reminder, Henry said on Sky Sports, via the Daily Telegraph:
"I think Giroud is doing extremely well. But can you win the league with him? I wouldn't think so. He does a job, and he does it ever so well, but you can't win the league.
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As criticisms go, it isn’t the most stinging, but the very nature of it will already have planted seeds of doubt into many minds—including Giroud’s own, as he revealed to the Daily Mirror—but he and Arsenal mustn’t allow his presence to always become the deciding factor in any perceived failure.
Despite their often-impressive football in 2014/15, Arsenal will start the new season as third, possibly fourth favourites to win the Premier League. It is still far more likely they won’t win it than they will.
Presuming they don’t, at what point does it become the accepted belief that they failed simply because they have Giroud up front? The Frenchman acting as the scapegoat despite doing his job “ever so well” as Henry put it?
Giroud has been bracketed as a kind of second-tier forward at a time when Arsenal fans believe their club should be continuously signing players from the first tier—a not-unrealistic viewpoint, given that Wenger brought in Ozil and Sanchez in the last two summers.
If he were to make that level of signing again, then the likelihood is that Giroud’s days could well be numbered. But right now? With no imminent arrival and the need to focus much more on the last line of defence than anything that is going on further forward? Wenger and Arsenal should be happy with what they’ve got, and that’s before acknowledging the sheer level of difficulty in signing such players.
It might not be the most glamorous decision to stick with what you know, but Giroud has earned that right.
Wenger should give him at least another season as the team’s figurehead, and his already rapid improvement rate could keep on getting higher.
High enough so it’ll be more trophies, not transfers, that Gunners fans are reading about during their morning routines.
Stats via WhoScored unless otherwise indicated
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