Morning all. This Interlull seems especially ‘Lully’, not to be confused with the InterLOL which is when people chortle at Roberto Mancini for spending actual money on Felipe Melo. Go home Roberto, you’re drunk etc and so on.
If we’re hoping that England goals for Theo Walcott might re-light his fire, it doesn’t seem to have happened last night for our only goalscorer this season, Olivier Giroud. The striker misfired against Serbia last night, missing some chances, before being reportedly booed off when his number came up around the hour mark.
All the confidence he’ll have gained for winning the Arsenal Goal of the Month award for his strike against Crystal Palace will have evaporated. He doesn’t seem too down though, saying afterwards:
It’s not the first and surely not the last time it happens. I have the mental strength to bounce back. Now I am going to focus on working. I will bounce back, tonight I missed some efficiency.
I guess this is the thing about Giroud – he has pretty much everything you want in a striker apart from blinding pace. He gets in good positions, he’s good in the air, he creates, his movement is clever, and he does get himself a ton of chances. It’s just that his finishing is, frankly, inconsistent. For all the spectacular ones and difficult ones he scores, there’s another that he makes a bollix of.
We saw Arsene Wenger select Theo Walcott up front against Newcastle in our last game. Perhaps it was purely tactical, that he felt on that day against that opposition the England man would be the right choice, but maybe it also speaks to some concerns he has about Giroud in general. I think he likes him a lot, but you can be sure that if we can spot his shortcomings, the manager is all too aware of them also.
On yesterday’s Arsecast Extra I advocated once more the idea of using Alexis in the centre-forward position. Not just for one game here or there, but for a run of matches so he could grow into the role. He’s got pretty much all the attributes to do it, if Sergio Aguero or Luis Suarez can do it, why not him? He hasn’t quite found his range this season, but he’s our most dynamic finisher, and if we make him the same amount of chances as we do for others then I think it could provide the improvement we’re looking for up front.
It would allow you to play Oxlade-Chamberlain or Walcott wide on a regular basis, even Mesut Ozil – who plays from the left very often for Germany – would be an option. And it wouldn’t be a case that the German is told to hug the touchline, when he has played there before he’s been given licence to roam and drift into dangerous areas. Nor do I think that’s a position that particularly diminishes his talent or effectiveness.
The question is though, is this something the manager sees as a genuine option. There were doubts when Robin van Persie was thrust into the sole striking position but it was clearly a plan by the manager to give him a go there and, you have to imagine, work went into that on the training ground. We don’t know yet if he has the same intention for Alexis or if he feels he’s most effective coming from the left hand side.
It would probably require some work because we know how much the Chilean likes to be involved. You don’t want your centre-forward chasing somebody back to our penalty area every time, for example, but I really do think this is worth considering. It might also mean our football becomes a little less predictable. We know what happens when Giroud is up there, he’s the focal point. And when it’s Walcott he stands in the middle of the central defenders and touches the ball a couple of times in 90 minutes.
Alexis has the ability to score goals the others can’t, his movement and energy would fluster defences, perhaps opening up space for midfield runners, and in the absence of finding anyone in the transfer market to improve us, this seems like a pretty decent ‘internal solution’. I guess we’ll see, but I’d be well up for giving it a go for a period and seeing what it does to us. Given our current scoring issues, it can’t hurt – and for all the criticism of Giroud, I don’t think anyone would argue against him as a really good option from the bench when needed.
Let’s do it!
Meanwhile, should we be worried that Laurent Koscielny missed last night’s game ‘because of an injury to his psoas‘. I had no idea what a psoas was so I looked it up and basically it’s your entire torso. Well, a good chunk of your core anyway. Get that man into some yoga classes, quick.
Fingers crossed it’s nothing too serious, but with Mertesacker no longer suffering from the dreaded lurgy and Gabriel impressing in every game he appears in, at least we’re not scratching our heads wondering how we’ll cope with an absence. More on that as the week progresses.
Right, the final few internationals tonight, then we can start looking forward to the weekend and the return of the Premier League. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to yesterday’s podcast, it’s up there with the top 400 I’ve ever produced on this site, so you’ll be missing out and your life will be incomplete without it. You can listen here or via the player below:
If anything happens, you’ll hear about it on Arseblog News. More from me here tomorrow.
