Giroud’s Arsenal Career Over – If Twitter Was In Charge…

Why do opinions on players have to be so black and white? Why is not rating a player considered abusing them? Why is rating a player considered complacent and “settling for mediocrity”?

Football, like life, is not black and white and few things infuriate me more than the over-simplification of the opinions and beliefs of others. For example, I do not like people taking to social media after every draw or loss and bemoaning the lack of a striker by calling Giroud sh!t.

They are more than entitled to have their views but the way they choose to express them, and the often contradictory nature, vexes me.When I exercise my right to complain about how they are complaining I usually get a barrage of tweets claiming I think Giroud is the all-mighty.

For what it is worth, I think Giroud is an effective striker in the system we mostly play. In fact, when we are playing our game to the best of our ability he is extremely effective as evidenced by the goal-scoring form of our midfielders, his goal tally and amount of assists he has achieved.

Does that mean I think he is the best striker in the league or we cannot do better? Of course it doesn’t, well, in the real world it doesn’t but in the parochial world of social media (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) it seems it does.

Improvements can be made in every position at Arsenal but having the best player in every position, or trying to have, doesn’t always make a successful team.

Giroud is a limited player, some might even say average, and that is okay to say but calling him sh!t just because he didn’t score a goal is unfair. If Sanogo had started against Bayern and we drew 1-1 people would slate Wenger for not starting a player who scored two goals at the weekend. Said player actually starts the game and the result is still the same and it then becomes that players fault. What about the 10 people behind him? Why is it not their fault too?

I feel like a broken record when defending Giroud and it’s not because I think he is a world-class player whose value is not recognised by the supporters but because I am defending him from aspersions cast via poorly formed arguments.

There is always an excuse for why Giroud is bad and no matter how illogical it is, or how logical the counter-argument it, it will always win out. Such as the fallacy “Giroud doesn’t score against the top teams”. This kind of opinion depends entirely on your view of a top team. Liverpool do not count when we beat them but when they smash us they are a top team all of a sudden. Spurs, who pushed us to the death for Champions League places for the past few years and spent £107m in the summer on “quality players Arsenal aren’t even trying to get because they are tight”, are considered irrelevant because of their subsequent form.

Bayern do not count because “they weren’t focusing”. Napoli do no count because “they were rubbish”. If he had scored against United it wouldn’t have counted because they are so poor this season. Everton do not count because it was the FA Cup. Arsenal forcing teams into making mistakes, expectation before the game, lack of support from the midfield, the entire team having a shocker and so on are never considered to be worthy counter-arguments because that would mean Giroud has scored against top teams or there are legitimate reasons he hasn’t. Or it would mean saying only City and Chelsea are big teams but that would be tantamount to admitting it’s almost impossible to compete against oil money, right?

There are legitimate criticisms of Giroud, the club and of the manager but I despair at how they are argued. Like Wenger being used to highlight how wonderful a previous manager was or a rival manager is. What has Wenger got to do with it? Why not highlight them on their own merit? Or Suarez, Aguero or van Grey C*nt being used to highlight the deficiencies of Giroud. Do any of them play in our system? Do they play with similar players? Do they have the same job? No to all three, so why compare? Or why overlook how Suarez rarely scores against the big teams? He doesn’t score against us that often. And if we aren’t a big team then why are we so upset to be behind other teams? Surely we are in our rightful place in the pecking order?

I don’t know why we can’t just support the team and express our dissatisfactions in a logical manner, incorporating context, reason and objectiveness. Maybe we have been spoon-fed sensationalistic dross by the media morons for too long. In a world where Mesut Özil can be branded a waste of money and a thief for being paid to play football I am surprised I find myself so astonished people would slag off a player and be completely oblivious to counter-arguments or contradictory evidence.

RIP Giroud. I fear your Arsenal career is not long for this world the way things are going. I hope I am wrong.

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