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[rolaholic]

Uh oh...

Reds and American thots dont seem to mix

Nothing was the same for Memphis after messing with Kacoochie

 

[northoaklandfc]

Giroud certainly possesses some world class skills. Phenomenal touch. Phenomenal movement. Great poaching instincts. If he were more clinical he'd be held in higher regard with the likes of other top CF over the past few years. He's not much or a scoring threat from outside the box is he? I can't really recall many attempts from range.

In terms of his finishing, this is where I wish the sport weren't so behind in statistical evaluation. It would be invaluable to know objectively just how many legitimate scoring chances Giroud fails to convert on relative to the mean at his position. I have a feeling his poor finishing has become some what of a cliche.

 

[QU!K]

Aguero's injury proness brings him down to Giroud's level

 

[DeadsetAce]

Uh oh...

Reds and American thots dont seem to mix

Nothing was the same for Memphis after messing with Kacoochie

good good....

 

[SadBoi]

Pogba going for Bieber's Seconds.

Thought he better than that.

I'd do the same TBH.

 

[Verde Shuttles]

Aguero's injury proness brings him down to Giroud's level

look at the production and trophies

 

[PRIME]

Pogba won

 

[Beans]

Aguero's injury proness brings him down to Giroud's level

lmfaooooooooooooooooooooooooo this why i love arsenal fans

 

[northoaklandfc]

Aguero's injury proness brings him down to Giroud's level

look at the production and trophies

Tell that man. Production is king.

That's why I don't care so much for the perceived easy chances Giroud is charged with missing.

The Goals per 90 speak for themselves. He's a damn good target forward.

 

[Armada]

Aguero's injury proness brings him down to Giroud's level

 

[QU!K]

http://www.squawka.com/news/stats-news-giroud-second-top-scorer-over-past-three-seasons/492676

 

[rook]

I used to be really hard on Giroud but the guy is pretty damn consistent.

 

[Armada]

So in the past 3 seasons with the injury problems Aguero has history of having he has still scored more goals than Giroud in that time despite missing months in multiple seasons (not counting the goals he has scored since that article was written in Oct. 2015)

Sure they are on the same level...

 

[newgodflow]

Uh oh...

Reds and American thots dont seem to mix

Nothing was the same for Memphis after messing with Kacoochie

What happened to Memphis?

 

[northoaklandfc]

More suitable class comparison is, health is no issue, prime RVP vs. Kun.

 

[rolaholic]

So in the past 3 seasons with the injury problems Aguero has history of having he has still scored more goals than Giroud in that time despite missing months in multiple seasons (not counting the goals he has scored since that article was written in Oct. 2015)

Sure they are on the same level...

Uh oh...

Reds and American thots dont seem to mix

Nothing was the same for Memphis after messing with Kacoochie

What happened to Memphis?

His form went to hell and hasn't been back since being spotted with her

 

[d3si]

Depay getting KDB treatment?

 

[rolaholic]

Depay getting KDB treatment?

He's getting the b team treatment .

He's gonna get his shot soon though with the league cup and Europa league fixtures coming up in September,hope he can make the most of it. Tony's been out of form to start the season so I don't think he's gonna get a better crack at making the first team this year(2016), barring injury, than over the next few weeks.

 

[d3si]

Spoiler: Trapped in the Premier League’s Golden Cage

Trapped in the Premier League’s Golden Cage
On Soccer
By RORY SMITH AUG. 30, 2016

Mario Balotelli has fallen out of favor at Liverpool, but his salary makes him unattractive to other teams. Credit Julian Finney/Getty Images

Before Liverpool’s first preseason match in July, the team’s manager, Jürgen Klopp, called Mario Balotelli into his office. The conversation Klopp needed to have with Balotelli, his enigmatic Italian forward, was an awkward one, and he wanted to have it face to face.

Balotelli, Klopp explained, would not be involved in Liverpool’s forthcoming friendly games. Nor would he be invited on the subsequent tour of the United States. The atmosphere was cordial, but Klopp’s message was clear: Balotelli would need to find alternate employment. The curtain had closed on his troubled time at Anfield.

A couple of weeks later, José Mourinho had a similar conversation with Bastian Schweinsteiger. A year earlier, Mourinho’s predecessor as Manchester United manager, Louis van Gaal, had enticed Schweinsteiger, the former Germany captain, to leave Bayern Munich with a salary in the region of $245,000 a week. Van Gaal, who had coached Schweinsteiger in Munich, saw him not only as the cool, experienced head he required in midfield, but as the manager’s ambassador on the field and his acolyte in the dressing room.

Mourinho saw things differently. When the 32-year-old Schweinsteiger returned from an extended break after Germany’s run to the semifinals of Euro 2016, he was informed that he, too, was no longer needed. Schweinsteiger was instructed to move the contents of his locker to the reserve team’s changing room, and he has since spent more time on the golf course than the training field.

As European soccer’s annual summer transfer window enters its final hours, both Balotelli and Schweinsteiger remain desperate for an escape. Balotelli’s agent, Mino Raiola, has dropped hints that the French club Nice could offer his client a chance to rehabilitate his reputation. Schweinsteiger, meanwhile, has suggested his future lies further afield, most likely in Major League Soccer or China.

That both have been locked in their curious purgatories for so long, though, is instructive. The Premier League’s ever increasing financial might means that for the first time, the division’s transfer spending is set to break the billion-pound mark this summer. Last year’s high-water mark of 870 million British pounds (about $1.14 billion) in a single window has been surpassed, and Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, said last week that he was convinced that an “amazing” amount of money remained to be spent.

“There are many, many clubs in England who have a big amount of money available and have not spent yet,” he said. “Everybody is waiting. It looks like it will be frenetic. Everybody has sat on their pounds. We know they will all splash out now.”

Manchester United told Bastian Schweinsteiger, left, that he and his salary of $245,000 a week were no longer wanted. Credit Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

Wenger is no different. He has committed to spending £52 million (about $68 million) on the Germany and Valencia defender Shkodran Mustafi and the Spaniard Lucas Pérez, a Deportivo de La Coruña forward. His language, though, belied the fact that he has been something of a reluctant participant in the Premier League’s biannual festival of acquisition.

Klopp is the same, having criticized England’s “obsession” with transfers this month. Both men, however, are exceptions. For the most part, the colossal sums spent by English clubs on new players are seen as something to be celebrated, evidence of the Premier League’s potency. Every year on deadline day, the television channel Sky Sports News keeps a tally of the 20 clubs’ gross outlay in the corner of the screen. The sight of the black-on-gold totalizator creeping ever higher is treated with the sort of delight more commonly associated with charity telethons. Soccer treats buying as a virtue.

And yet Schweinsteiger and Balotelli — like Joe Hart, the Manchester City goalkeeper who was unceremoniously demoted by Pep Guardiola and is on the verge of a loan move to Torino, which finished in 12th place in Italy’s Serie A last season — offer a sober reminder that there is a flip side to this unrivaled financial firepower.

“There are a handful of teams in the Premier League who are under a lot of pressure to buy players,” said José María Cruz, the chief executive of the Spanish team Sevilla. “They pay a lot of money, and so they need an immediate return on that investment: They need the players to perform straightaway.

“If they do not, they are already looking for a replacement after three or six months. But trying to offload the players who are no longer wanted is very complicated because the salaries are so high. They are not realistic for most clubs in Europe.”

Sevilla, for example, has the fifth-highest player payroll in Spain. Thanks to a run of three successive Europa League victories and qualification for the Champions League, Cruz can approve better salaries than most of his peers. The Premier League market, though, is still too expensive.

That is certainly the case with Schweinsteiger and Hart, both of whom earn more than $200,000 each week. Balotelli makes substantially less, but his £90,000-a-week wages (about $118,000) still rule out a host of teams, particularly for a player so weighed down with baggage.

More troubling, even the likes of Emmanuel Rivière, an unremarkable French striker no longer in the plans at relegated Newcastle, are so richly compensated by their current teams that it is difficult to shed them. At £40,000 a week — just over $52,000 — Rivière earns almost twice as much at Newcastle as any of the clubs who might be tempted to sign him could afford to pay. As Wenger says, there are now effectively “two markets, one for the English clubs and one for the rest of Europe.”

To Cruz, there are two possible solutions for clubs and players trapped in dead-money relationships. One is China, where the country’s cash-soaked Super League clubs are prepared to meet — and even improve, in some cases — the pay on offer in England. The other is an increase in subsidized loan arrangements. The only way to take players coming out of the Premier League, Cruz said, “is to share their wages.”

That is, understandably, unappealing to Premier League owners. Even in an age of financial excess, paying players to play for potential rivals is a bridge too far. It may, however, be better than the alternative, which is paying them millions not to play at all. But even those solutions may not be addressing the underlying problem.

“They are paying crazy wages for mediocre players,” Christian Heidel, the longtime sporting director at German club Mainz, who is now with Schalke, said before he changed teams last year.

“They will struggle to get rid of those players in the future. They buy more players every year, and the squads will become too big. They will end up spending more on redundancies than they do on transfers.”

The consequences, in Wenger’s view, could be severe, and he said there was a risk that “the English clubs can suffocate themselves in the long term.”

He foresees a future in which cases like that of Balotelli, Schweinsteiger and Hart are no longer outliers but a regular feature of the English game, expensive regrets draining money from their parent teams.

“That will mean that the financial advantage the English clubs have will drop,” Wenger has said. “They pay for 10 or 12 players who have gone somewhere else because the clubs they go to cannot pay their wages.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/s...io-balotelli.html?smid=tw-nytsports&smtyp=cur

 

[mastamind89]

I def don't think he's world class lol but I've always stuck up for giroud, he's definitely a beast. If he put away all his chances he'd have like 40+ a season . Hes always like 1/4 per game, and always puts away the hardest chance for no reason. If he had better finishing along with his passing/build up play then he'd truly be WCG . We just went from bergkamp > Henry > RvP > giroud so he had big shoes to fill

The other day I was thinking back at how great RvP was for us. Would have loved to see Ozil feeding him and him and Alexis playing together. But **** him tho.

Yes, Giroud should be finishing a lot better than he has, but I'll take him over all but 5 strikers in the league (ftr, they're Kun, Kane, Sturridge, Costa, Zlatan) right now.

People gave us a lot of **** this summer, but we actually had a pretty good window all things considered. Got another striker to take the pressure off of Olivier, got a prime-Arteta replacement, and got two competent centre-backs to compliment Koscielny. We're currently looking like this as far as depth:

                                              Cech/Ospina

     Bellerin/Debuchy - Mustafi/Per/Holding - Koscielny/Gabriel - Monreal/Gibbs
                           
                         Xhaka/Ramsey/Jack - Santi/Coq/Elneny

                      Theo/Iwobi/Jeff - Ozil/Cazorla - Alexis/Ox

                                             Giroud/Perez

That's a damn good squad, and one that can compete with any team in the league.

Gotta take out Jack, we can prob add another youth player. We still have Zelalem with the U23 squad....unless he gets loaned out. Can't forget about Sanogo Just gotta hope injuries aren't a major issue for us this season.

Another issue is both Theo and Ox, their ability to stay consistent. Iwobi is still learning both those two can really make a difference for us.

I look forward to seeing Perez play, there's a possibility that he could be great for us.

 

[DeadsetAce]

Another issue is both Theo and Ox, their ability to stay consistent.

Theo irks me at this point. just like Jozy on the USMNT. it's getting to that point for me.

 

[newgodflow]

Theo irks me at this point. just like Jozy on the USMNT. it's getting to that point for me.

What about Serge Gnabry? Looked really good in the Olympics and did well when he broke into the first team a few seasons back before getting injured..

 

[rolaholic]

^

Dude is off to Germany apparently

More suitable class comparison is, health is no issue, prime RVP vs. Kun.

This is one hell of a comparison man,it's pretty damn even tbh . They've both been consistent goal scorers and have been the leading force behind title-winning teams. I'd have to give the slight edge to RVP for still producing near the same level for his NT but it's almost a dead heat imo

 

[DeadsetAce]

Theo irks me at this point. just like Jozy on the USMNT. it's getting to that point for me.

What about Serge Gnabry? Looked really good in the Olympics and did well when he broke into the first team a few seasons back before getting injured..

Serge is still "young"...21. or at least younger than the other two at 26/27 or so. i'm just sick of waiting for Theo and Jozy

 

[rolaholic]

At this point Walcott is what he is ,talented but crazy inconsistent. Nothing more nothing less. He'll have the odd flashes of brilliance followed by missed sitters at the same rate.

Dude was being billed as the "future of England" legit almost a decade ago