It was less than 24 hours since the news broke that Arsenal were selling Robin van Persie to Manchester United, and one of the men bought to fill the vacuum found himself in the middle of Hackney Marshes. He patiently repeated footballing poses for a photo shoot with giant reflectors highlighting his imposing frame. Nobody batted an eyelid. A couple of dog walkers passed by hanging on to a cluster of leads. A little group of kite flyers were out. A lone runner jogged along. A cameraman for Al Jazeera, knowing there was an interview with a footballer scheduled, wandered over, asking, "What's his name?" Olivier Giroud. "Who does he play for?" Arsenal. The cameraman shrugged, none the wiser.
If he needs time to make himself better known in the world of English football, that's an idea Giroud is totally comfortable with. His career trajectory is that of a slow burner. He knocked around the lower leagues in France until his mid-20s, finally planting his flag in the top division with Montpellier when he was not far from his 24th birthday. Since then, the pace of his development has picked up considerably, and the last few months have been more like a whirlwind. May: clinch the French title and golden boot, and even feel self confident enough to appear as the cover shot of Parisian gay magazine Têtu to reflect spiralling profile. June: take part in the European Championship with the national team. July: catapult into Arsenal ready to leap into a new challenge.
The meandering route to the top has made him circumspect, wary of getting too carried away. Giroud has absolutely no intention of setting any goals about what he wants to achieve and how quickly he might achieve it. He may have them privately, but they are certainly not for public consumption.
Van Persie's departure does put a new slant on everything. The pressure on Giroud, along with Lukas Podolski, the other international Arsène Wenger recruited to score goals, automatically becomes more intense. That was evident on the opening day of the season as Podolski struggled to make an impact, and Giroud, presented with a matchwinning chance on his debut appearance on the Premier League stage, fluffed his lines.
It is a pressure that Giroud welcomes, though. He is not afraid of this opportunity. "I don't want to spit in the soup," he says, a French maxim which in other words means I don't want to knock what's good for me.
"If Robin had not gone it would have been fine, it would have allowed me to adapt more progressively and with more time," he explains. "But I don't want to be fussy. I am happy. It works for me, because when you are a footballer you want to play. Inevitably, with Robin gone it will give me more playing time. People will expect a lot, and I really feel the desire to fulfil this expectation. It is better than if I was sitting on the bench."
Van Persie passed on a few words of advice before he headed north. "We said goodbye, wished each other good luck for the future, and said that we will cross paths again," Giroud recalls. "I hope everything will go well for him. I have no worries about him. He's a great striker."
Giroud is fond of the idea that everyone has their own story, and he feels compelled to make his own the best it can possibly be. His own childhood, in a household he describes as "a family of footballers" showed him that some tales end abruptly. His big brother Romain, 10 years his senior, was on course for a big career, and was a central defender of such promise he was capped regularly as a junior. "He was picked 40 times for the French national team, at under-15 and under-17 level, with Thierry Henry, David Trezeguet, Nicolas Anelka," Olivier recalls. "He was trained at Auxerre, he was a hope, but he never had a professional career." Romain went back to studying, and became a nutritionist.
All this happened when Olivier was just starting out as a boy in the youth system at Grenoble. Having witnessed what happened to Romain, and been sent on loan to Istres in the third tier, it was quite a knockback when his club put him up for sale, saying that he did not have the qualities to play with the elite. He went to Tours. "I had to take a risk to restart in a lower league," he says. "But I never gave up."
It resonates how often his story has overlapped with Laurent Koscielny. They were in the same team at Tours that just missed out on promotion, a close-knit bunch who felt they could be part of something special. They moved on in different directions but met up again last winter with the French national team. Now Koscielny has been showing him the ropes in London. "It was funny to see him again, like fate giving you a wink," Giroud says. "Laurent is a good example. I am proud of what I did. Those experiences [in the lower divisions] helped me to develop my personality. I have certain values. I know where I come from. I am a hard worker. I'm conscious of my luck."
Giroud has a reputation in France for being a likeable, uncomplicated character. As he opens up a chocolate bar and fizzy drink from the vending machine to sustain him through the afternoon, he breaks into English for my benefit. "Are you hungry? Thirsty?" His willingness to share a snack with a journalist he has only just met emphasises how he has not yet let a famously egotistical profession get in the way of affable good manners. He even manages to keep a straight face when a grammatical slip meant that one of my questions in Franglais turned out to be a malapropism of the highest order. Attempts to ask him about his targets ended up referencing what happens to a man when he gets excited.
Communicating in another language is clearly not always a breeze, but Giroud is keen to start making connections. He regularly interrupts his French flow to try out English phrases. It is all part of his eagerness to get on the same wavelength as his team-mates as quickly as he can.
He is realistic enough to suggest that does not happen overnight. "You have to communicate, you have to click, to find automatic reactions with your team-mates," he says. "It takes time to adapt to become an Arsenal player. Before the start of the season we had 45 minutes together. That's how it is when you have the Euros and then have to rest. But there is a lot of quality in this team."
In a sense he would like Arsenal to emulate Montpellier, a team that last season came together to prove that the wealthiest do always equate to the best. His old team were surprise champions at the expense of the newly wealthy Paris St-Germain. "Compared to PSG we had a fraction of their budget. We had less money but a lot of quality. To keep going for the whole season was something extraordinary. We had a young group of guys and we told ourselves we achieved something really huge.
"It's a good example for Arsenal. We don't have the money of the Manchester clubs or Chelsea. Arsenal builds its team through training, through recruiting players who can become something. Arsenal has less money than some other clubs so we have to fight with other values. The collective, the group spirit, is good. We have an important role to play in this championship." Is it possible to win the league? "Honestly, it will be complicated. Because the competition is fierce. But who knows?"
After that slightly downbeat start of a goalless draw at home to Sunderland, Arsenal need to find more spark, more rhythm, more efficiency at Stoke on Sunday. Next month is fairly unforgiving, including trips to Liverpool and Manchester City, as well as a visit from Chelsea. Giroud is aware of the welcome that traditionally awaits Arsenal at the Britannia, and if Wenger is tempted to select his 6ft 4in target man, whose aggression on the training ground has been noted, it will be a fascinating test.
It is early days, but the expectation seems to be that Giroud is being judged either as a potential heir to Van Persie or as an expensive version of Marouane Chamakh? In truth, neither is particularly fair.
He wants to make his own impression, his own way. So, how would he describe himself to his new audience in England? The first adjectives trip off the tongue. "Ambitious. Generous …" Then he pauses for thought. "Natural … Intelligent …" That was enough, but Giroud feels obliged to come up with another word. "Stubborn!" he exclaims before again slipping into English with some very deliberate gestures. "I want to go here." He points, then drops his voice to sound even more determined. "I go here."
The overall message does not really need translation. Do not judge this particular story by its opening line last weekend.
Source: Amy Lawrence, The Guardian on 25 Aug 12
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