Oliver Giroud is a true embodiment of Arsenal with his knack for being both brilliant and banal

Divisiveness is one of Olivier Giroud’s behold traits. He can provide rare moments of illumination, but also infuriate with his languidness and enduring propensity to squander proper chances. That “Giroud-ness” – define the term according to one’s perception – veils the prolonged toil the Frenchman has applied to play at Premier League level.

Henceforth there will always be January 1, 2017 for Giroud, a split-second of radiance and brilliance that will forever adorn, and even embellish, a fragmented career. Everything about that goal – not in the Carlos Alberto Torres order for lack of context and importance – was an aesthetic delight – the build-up, the final delivery and the finish, all coated in a glowing slickness so associated with “Wengerian” (derived from the Arsenal gaffer’s name) football.

Arsenal had been pressing Crystal Palace, probing and poking, but with little result – until Lucas Perez gained possession. Hector Bellerin slipped the ball to Giroud, whose back-heel found Granit Xhaka. He passed to Alex Iwobi, who with immaculate timing picked out Alexis Sanchez. The sequence of passing was nifty and fast, with purpose and incursion.

Outlandish, extraordinary, audacious

There, at the edge of the box, the Chilean – so confident on the ball, so much the master of his game – paused, mapped out his immediate environment and delivered a floating cross just behind a charging Giroud. The ball was in and out of reach for the striker – by the law of classical physics, scoring was nigh impossible.

Then, in a jiffy, Giroud contrived to do the outlandish, the extraordinary and the audacious, exhibiting imagination and spatial genius. He stretched his left foot up and behind his own shoulder and send the ball floating past his own ear and over Wayne Hennessey. Even the gods of football felt poetic – the ball clanged the underside of the crossbar, augmenting the aesthetic value of the goal.

Afterwards, Giroud said that his finish had been made up in the moment. Perhaps the pulchritude of the goal was that the French striker will not succeed in repeating the feat. Indeed, the strike was an aberration in Giroud’s strange career trajectory.

“My coach told me this: You don’t have the level to play in the second division, let alone the first division,” Giroud said once, of his playing days at Grenoble in France. “They didn’t play to my strengths and I wasn’t given the confidence. It really hurt.”

A realistic Giroud opted to take a step down and moved on loan to French third division club Istres. There, he scored fourteen goals in 33 games and in turn, returned to the second division with Tours.

At Arsenal, Giroud has never been an A-lister. He is a cumbersome top nine, who has a pathos-filled knack to combine both the brilliant and the banal. At times, Giroud is a self-fulfilling prophecy of footballing mediocrity. The Frenchman, the argument goes, is a workhorse who has not successfully replaced Robin van Persie. The Dutchman brought much attacking luminosity to the Emirates.

The mediocre workhorse

Giroud, then, is an undistinguished striker. He scored 17, 22, 19 and 24 goals respectively in his first four seasons at Arsenal, figures Van Persie mustered only in his final four seasons at the club. Van Persie scored 10, 11, 13 and nine goals respectively in his first four seasons in north London.

Notwithstanding those impressive stats, the pervasive feeling is that Giroud is not – and never will be – an elite striker. Perhaps then, Giroud is a victim of the “Peter Principle” – first posited by Dr Lauren J Peter and Raymond Hull in the 1969 book The Peter Principle, and later coined a “wicked satire” by Andrea Ovans in the Harvard Business Review, explaining the core conceit as “Everyone in an organisation keeps on getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At that point they stop being promoted.”

Is Girous a Peter? Has he reached his level of incompetence at Arsenal? His tendency to be infuriating has not helped either. The Frenchman is often heckled – off late, he was scorned for his goal celebration against Bournemouth. At Dean Court, Arsenal recovered from a three goal deficit with an injury time equaliser from Giroud. He celebrated with the bewildering enthusiasm of a five-year-old, who imagines to have scored the winning goal in a European Cup final – instead he should have dashed back to the halfway line to press for a late winner.

In the weekend, Giroud scored a late winner in the FA Cup third round tie at Preston North End. This season, Arsenal’s number twelve has scored plenty of late goals, due in part to his demotion to second choice striker behind Sanchez, who has been reinvented as a central striker. It is in this role, as impact sub, that Giroud has thrived most, proving that old-fashioned rough-and-tumble strikers have a place in the game.