There are many Arsenal fans that are not impressed with Olivier Giroud, despite being one of the highest goalscorers in the League, but do they even take into account the rest of the qualities he brings to the team.
His team-mates, at least, rate him highly, and appreciate the work he does in defence as well as attack. His fellow Frenchman Laurent Koscielny made his opinion clear. “When he plays simple, he’s the best,” the big defender said. “He’s tall, he’s big and when you try to find him, he keeps the ball. No defender can pass him.
“He’s so massive and that’s one of the best qualities for a striker. When he can play like this, with one or two touches and staying in the box – which is where we want him – we can score in the air.
“I think Olivier has a work rate for the team which is very high. He’s not just a forward, he’s always there [when we have] free-kicks or corners against us.
“He’s the first guy who tries to head the ball. It’s important that he can give assists too.
“You can see now that he smells the situations well – when he needs to shoot quickly, or control the ball, like he did against Liverpool with his second goal.
“I think he’s in good form this season and I hope he will stay in that form until the end of the season.”
He certainly is knocking them in on a regular basis, but even if he ends up with 30 goals this season, will the Arsenal fans ever fully appreciate his talent?
What Henri+ Wright
have over Giroud
is that they played in
Premiership winning sides.
When we win this season’s
Premiership Giroud will
be much more appreciated.
Good news for Arsenal
as City are through
to the Capital One final.
Yet another draining game.
Debruyne may be out with a knee injury.
They do have 3 days to get a replacement tho.
You underestimate the role winning silverware could have on a squad. When you’re in a cup final 90 minutess away from silverware all previous fatigue goes out the window. A big part of Chelsea’s title charge in the latter stages of last season stemmed from the squad being galvanized by the league cup win over Spurs, a team they got hammered by months previously.
It served to help them mentally and allowed them the strength to finish the job. City won the league cup previously and won the league the same year. It isn’t a continuous trend but people underestimate just how much the feeling of winning and getting use to the feeling of winning helps forge the mentality of a squad and that’s something we lack in large quantities.
We’ve won the FA Cup and that’s a start but we’ve crumbled too much previously in pressure situations against the big boys for the FA Cup to completely erode the previous mental frailness we have.
It is foor similar reasons that we’ve failed to score let alone beat Chelsea in 3 years. Giroud has yet to score vs Chelsea, Ozil has no goal or assist in 8 games. This is to a great degree mental.
Until we learn to toughen up and fight we’ll continue to repeat the trend. Beautiful to the eye but weak under adversity.
partly agree, but chelsea looked no better after the cup final than they did before, I think they had just set a lead before christmas that was unattainable and the real turning point was getting the draw against us, I think if we had beat them at home it would have made it an interesting finish. Adding players like Costa who had won the league against real and barca with atletico, fabregas also won the league and several other trophies, as well as matic who won the portuguese league meant that across the pitch they had winners who were used to that pressure mentally and the joys of success, we can see we’re closer now with players like cech, sanchez and ozil but we need more.