The Arsenal and France international centre forward may not have scored for the Gunners in the last three matches, but he is still the club’s top scorer this season with 16 goals and his tally of 10 in the Premier League has come at a strike rate of better than a goal every other game.
The big man also showed great strength and determination in the box to provide the assist for Laurent Koscielny to score the crucial match winning goal that kept Arsenal flying high on top of the Premier League, so he has been invaluable for the Gunners so far this season.
But is another of his assets that Giroud was talking about in an interview on the Arsenal website, his experience of winning the French Ligue 1 title with Montpellier the season before he signed for Arsenal.
The striker said, “To be a champion, I know [what it takes] because I was a champion with Montpellier. You need a bit of luck and sometimes you cannot play a fantastic game [but you need to win] and even more so because Manchester City are doing well.
“If I can advise the young players I will do it. We have a couple of experienced players like Mathieu Flamini, Petr Cech and people like that. We have a good mixture of experienced players and young players and the older ones bring confidence to the youngest and lead them.
“That is what I try to do sometimes – always encourage and in a nice way show them the best solution. It is very important in a group to say things to carry on with what we have. We are really pleased with the [Newcastle] win and it shows we have that mental strength and character.”
I have seen Giroud’s words reported by a lot of football websites and a lot of them have talked about the Frenchman being one of the few Arsenal players with this winning experience but that is simply not the case. While the likes of Walcott, Ramsey and Koscielny might not have won major honours, there are plenty of Gunners that have.
We have World Cup, Euro championship and Copa America winners in Mesut Ozil, Per Mertesacker, Alexis Sanchez and Santi Cazorla and no fewer than nine of the Arsenal first team have won league titles, so as usual the media have jumped at the chance to run us down without getting their facts straight.
Having said that, Montpellier had never won it before and they were not fancied so will Giroud’s experience prove more valuable than the rest?