It was announced this week that Arsenal striker Olivier Giroud has been offered a new 4 year deal worth £80k a week and will remain at Arsenal for the near future.
It’s always risky re-signing someone who is currently injured because you don’t know just how much their injury will affect their form in the future? Giroud is definitely that sort of player, he’s unpredictable in most games and you never know what you are going to get. With a serious injury behind him will he be able to pick up and improve or will he remain at the standard he was before?
The 28 year old French international is currently recovering from a broken tibia and it likely to be sidelined until January 2015. Since joining the gunners in 2012 he has scored 41 goals in 102 appearances and 28 of those were league goals.
For a Premier League striker at a top 4 club to only be scoring 28 goals in two years is not great, that’s not a league winning striker, he scored as many as Dzeko last season who was City’s substitute striker when they won the league. Even injured Aguero and Swansea’s Bony scored more goals.
In Giroud’s defence a lot of people rate his link-up play and his aerial strengths and they are two dimensions of his talent in which he excels most in but here comes the problem….we have midfielders and defenders for those areas of the game already in place, we need a striker that is mainly focused on scoring goals, being in the right place to receive them, low miss rate, good shot to goal conversion rate and this is where Giroud lacks the most.
Our midfielders especially Ozil and Sanchez should not be slogging their guts out during a game to supply the feet of Giroud for him to miss, it’s was already becoming obvious that Ozil wasn’t comfortable with passing to Giroud and preferred to seek out Cazorla or Ramsey or anyone that wasn’t going to waste his pass within seconds by shooting wide.
Our midfield need someone strong upfront, an experienced goalscorer or a fox in the box type of striker, someone who can score 30 goals a season with ease. Giroud and Welbeck can barely manage to get to that amount collectively.
For a top ten team he would be a great acquirement but Arsenal keep talking about ambition and being stronger together forever and Giroud doesn’t fit in with any of this? There is no ambition in keeping a striker who doesn’t score goals and misses more shots than most strikers, showing ambition would have been going for someone like Edison Cavani or Jackson Martinez, instead we are keeping a sub standard striker just because his link-up play is good?
It’s ambitious of Wenger to say we are competing for trophies when we don’t have a strike force capable of that but will he fall flat on his face come May when another team with decent strikers wins the league over him?
