Olivier Giroud goes through purple patches where he scores in nearly every single game, but then he seems to hit some confidence wall and suddenly he can’t hit a barn door from two yards away. Last season the turning point came immediately after the Frenchman was publicly criticized by Thierry Henry on live tv, where our legend said: “You can’t win the League with Giroud.”
Giroud voiced his displeasure with the stinging attack, but then went on to prove the fact by not hitting the net for the next ten games, which saw the Gunners drop into third in the table. Fast forward to this season, and I can now tell you where it all went wrong this season. Up to Christmas, Olivier was in his purple patch and scoring for fun, but then in January he made the fatal mistake of being interviewed by the Arsenal Magazine.
In this interview (titled “Consistency is my target”) he was approaching the total of 84 goals previously reached by Robert Pires, and Giroud was asked if he now had something to aim for. “Yeah, of course.” he said. “I want to mark the history of the club, and for a striker you always do this by measuring how many goals you score and how many assists you give. I know the part that my team-mates play of course, but the most important thing you check is the goals of the striker. So yes, hopefully I can beat my friend Robert soon!”
Then he started making his targets for this campaign. “Yes, to be honest I would like to reach 25 goals this season, and after that why not keep going? Between 25 and 30 could be nice. But in the league, yeah, hopefully I could reach 25 – that would be a nice line,”
Since that interview, how many League goals has Giroud scored? That’s right. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Rien de tout! He remains firmly six goals below Pires’ total, and doesn’t look like surpassing it any time soon. And any chance of him reaching 25 in the League is now nearly a mathematical impossibility, unless he scores two in every remaining game…
Does this show that Giroud and words don’t go together very well?