A proper striker’s goal. He had one thing on his mind when he received the ball and one thing only. Clean striker, perfect strike. Long may this continue.
On a side note, while he is a lot quicker than Giroud, I don’t think he is that quick. I mean, I expected him to be as quick as Defoe was in his heydays but I don’t think he has that kind of burst of pace. Don’t know why I had that impression. It doesn’t matter though cause he has quick feet and a pure strike on him, something none of our current strikers have.
Yea his pace has never stood out to me. He’s quick enough to beat his man but he won’t be skinning defenders. What is a stand out is his striking and finishing. He doesn’t get many chances though, he’s averaging a goal per 3 shots this season, last season too 3 shots per goal. That’s an incredible finishing ratio. If we got him averaging 4 shots a game we’d have a world class striker on our hands. Everything should be geared to creating chances for him.
Really dunno what you all are on about. One thing is quickness another is pace, he’s not got amazing straight line pace or anything, but he’s a million times more agile and quick than Giroud, lol. Just look at that GIF above, when the ball hits the back of the net that’s when Giroud would still be winding up his foot to take a shot.
He reminds me a bit of aguero the runs he makes and his quick burst of pace with power but not athletic pace more of a power run, hard to explain but he is kina like aguero with his low centre of gravity etc and his directness and good runs. He may not be as good (yet) as aguero but he has the same sort of game, hangs of the shoulder and drops off and uses a quick burst of pace with power to get around and past defenses etc.
There is also that element of intelligent movement, quick thinking, and “losing your man” that makes a ton of difference in the perception of “quickness” or “speed.”
RVP was a good example of a really smart attacker who found ways to have his man “lose him” for a split second in order to get a positional advantage - he wasn’t quick OR fast, but it didn’t matter as much. Aguero is similar - one sec you have him, the next he is 3 yards behind you and it doesn’t matter if you are as quick or quicker, it is too late.
Re: comparisons - I would say Giroud is a little underrated as a pure striker, but he isn’t the kind of striker I enjoy watching as much personally. To be fair, his hold up play and combinations can be fantastic when the team is functional.
Laca to me is just a better striker b/c he can create situations more independently of his teammates. The goal this weekend was a great example - I think he is a bit more “fox in the box” than most of our guys for a while and combines that with good pace and very good quickness, as well as solid footballing brain.
One other thing - I think strikers like RvP, Aguero, and to some degree Laca (in contrast to Giroud) benefit MORE from having fantastic passers like Ozil because they make those little runs and quick turns or intelligent “floating” and team positional play. Walcott actually does this pretty well, but I find it to be a bit more “run around until I find a spot or out to in standard darting run” as opposed to true striker “space navigation.”
Anyway, a bit of ramble - hopefully clear enough… :giroud3:
I was impressed with his link up play vs Bournemoth. Short quick passes and moving intelligently. How we’ve missed that up front. The finish was clinical as fuck as well. He saw the keeper in a bad position and cleverly placed it passed him.
If Sanchez and Ozil are gone we’re probably going to build a team with him as our vocal point. I’m very curious to see which direction we go next summer. This season is a wash.
Without Ozil, Sanchez and Cazorla, I’m not sure what direction we’re heading.
Persuading Lacazette to stay, might be an achievement.
He might prefer playing in the CL to the Europa League and he might join the others out of the exit door.
I’m about as pessimistic as you can get but the guy is one month into his contract lol let’s see what happens before we start whining about him leaving Jesus haha
Tbh I think this is just a case of his involvement on the ball looking less intelligent than that of the people you mention and so instead of saying he’s a “space navigator” he becomes “that dude that runs around a lot but ends up finding some nice spaces,” because space navigator just sounds too nice and intelligent for someone who looks that way on the ball.
Yeah it is hard to pinpoint… I guess I just don’t see Walcott doing the micro-movement in tighter spaces that I see with players like Aguero/RVP… he is much more about sprinting runs into space, which tends to require more open ground to be terribly effective… could be observation bias, I acknowledge.
Yeah, I think it is, frankly. a) They play different positions, so the type of movement is naturally different b) Walcott’s movement is intelligent in small spaces, you don’t get as many poacher’s goals as he does if it wasn’t, especially being as average a finisher as he is, and anyways it’s noticeable that a lot of his movement has little to do with open field runs, he’s very good at finding that pocket of space between the CB and LB when we have possession in the opponent’s final third, he’s good at timing inside runs in the same situations, etc. I don’t think sprinting runs into space is really a good description of what makes Walcott’s movement good, if anything his patented run from the right into the middle is less about sprinting into space and more about finding the right moment/timing.
Good points but my broader judgment stands around their skillset and intelligence here. I don’t think you and I agree on the Theo critique, but that’s ok. Hopefully you got my main points regardless of that - agree or not.
Yeah, I do, I admit I was cherry picking with the Theo thing and that it’s got nothing to do with your broader points. I just think slighting the one thing Theo does quite well, even exceptionally well, smells of guilt by association (in this case, with the other parts of his game).
I wouldn’t put Agüero’s movement above Theo’s, for instance. Maybe van Persie’s but then again van Persie was just a tremendous player, it’s possible that we overrate a harder to grasp or quantify thing like off the ball movement because the player is just so good.
As for Giroud vs. Lacazette I don’t even think it comes down to movement either, really. Lacazette is just better in pretty much everything-- better finisher, better link up/combination player, better dribbler (without being really a good dribbler), better at finding a shot for himself, processes the game faster, more agile, etc. I think Giroud’s movement is actually rather good, aside from in 13-14 or other periods in his time with us when dropped way too deep/tried to participate way too much in build-up, but he’s just simply not as good/as talented a footballer as Lacazette.
I do agree with the point about better players benefitting more from having really intelligent/top players around them, but that is really a simple point to that comes down to the old rule, the good players benefit most from being surrounded by other good players, as being ‘intelligent’ and good is really the same thing in most cases, except for extreme ones like Mertesacker’s (and even in his case he’s still pretty good despite being such an extreme case of physical attributes offsetting the fact that he’s good/intelligent). (<-- I’m digressing a bit here, but this dualism of quality and intelligence that you see often in discussions about football is something that bothers me a bit, for me the word ‘quality’ or ‘class’ has intelligence as the major component of its definition, even for the players–Messi being the paradigm example–who don’t fit our classic conceptions of intelligence, in the cerebral sense )
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