Misunderstood and derided, Olivier Giroud can lead Arsenal to miracle in Monaco

Olivier Giroud cannot be accused of taking Monaco too lightly. 

Shortly after his Arsenal team were paired with the Ligue 1 side in the last 16 of the Champions League, the striker was asked by French sports newspaper L’Equipe if he was grateful to draw opponents widely perceived to be among the weakest of this season’s group winners. 

"I'm not relieved, no," he replied."“I have a friend who called me and said: 'Oh, it's good, a French team, you're lucky!’ … [Personally] I think it's 50/50. Monaco are a good team, even if they don't have a lot of Champions League experience. They are a young team with very good players."

Of course, these would not be the comments most news outlets chose to dwell on after Arsenal’s eventual first-leg mauling. L’Equipe had run another interview with Giroud on the morning of the Gunners’ 3-1 defeat to Monaco at Emirates Stadium. In this one, the striker made the mistake of contrasting himself with Sergio Aguero and Diego Costa, saying he was "just behind" those two from a statistical standpoint. 

Taken out of context, the comment smacked of arrogance from a player who had scored 16 league goals last season. Both Aguero and Costa had surpassed that number already in this campaign. Although Giroud had missed three months due to injury, his strike rate of one Premier League goal for every 112 minutes played so far in 2014-15 was notably worse than those of the City player (87 mins/goal) or his Chelsea counterpart (99 mins/goal). 

Read in the greater context of the interview, however, his words started to sound less boastful than aspirational. He spoke of trying to emulate both players, of his desire to become more of a "killer" in front of goal and control his emotions like Costa. This had been a discourse on self-improvement, not an exercise in self-promotion. 

Of course, anyone who had followed Giroud’s career to date should have known he was hardly the cocky so-and-so his critics sough to portray. If anything, he is the precise opposite: a hard-grafting overachiever who might never have arrived where he is today without an impressive degree of self-awareness. 

Giroud was just 14 when he turned down a move from Grenoble to top-flight Auxerre, on the advice of an older brother who had trodden a similar path. Romain, 10 years Olivier’s senior, had joined the same team as a teenager, going on to represent France many times over at Under-15 and Under-17 levels, but never made it as a pro. 

"[Romain] felt I was not ready," said the younger Giroud in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche in 2011. "He was right. I had been shortlisted one time among the [national team] kids at Clairefontaine but I did not seize my chance: I was too nice, too cerebral. Football is a jungle … I crossed young players who were better than me but who did not have the mentality."

A committed mindset was required for the path on which Giroud instead embarked, moving from Grenoble on loan to third-tier FC Istres before finally learning how to survive in the adult game. He scored 14 goals in 33 games there, but still needed another three seasons to make the jump up to the top-flight with Montpellier, at nearly 24 years old. 

Five years, one Ligue 1 title and a lucrative move to Arsenal later, it is revealing that Giroud still feels he has something to prove. He told Talksport back in August that, "Every week is a restart. You can’t sit there and think: ‘Oh yeah, I did well last week’. Or dwell on a bad loss."

He has delivered emphatically on such words by following his Monaco debacle with three goals in as many Premier League games. He was breathtaking against West Ham on Saturday, opening the scoring before playing an integral role in each of Arsenal’s next two goals. For those of you keeping track, Giroud’s strike rate is now very much just a hair behind Aguero and Costa – each of whom have slowed down. 

We shouldn’t really need numbers to know he is not as brilliant a player as either of them, but then, he never said that he was. Arsenal do not ask him to be, either. The Gunners, frankly, require a minor miracle to make it through against Monaco on Tuesday evening, but if nothing else, the pressure has at least shifted to their opponents. 

It is up to the French side to show, as Giroud has, that they can focus on the present, not the past.