There was a moment in September when Maurizio Sarri, having eulogized Eden Hazard and spoken of the way he has challenged him to score 40 goals this season, the Chelsea manager was asked about the danger of being dependent on one player. Pedro and Willian, he replied, could score 10.
Which is fair. Pedro has six league goals this season and Willian two. There is no reason at all why one, or both, couldn’t get up to double figures in all competitions (which was, Sarri had stressed, what he was talking about; he was not anticipating Hazard scoring 40 in the league). But what he didn’t say seemed just as revealing. How many, you wonder, does he think Olivier Giroud and Álvaro Morata will muster this season?
Giroud, at least, is making a virtue of his lack of goals. France, after all, have never won a World Cup when a center-forward has scored a goal for them. In the summer, Giroud could claim to be the heir of Stéphane Guivarc’h – the non-goalscoring striker, the selfless team man whose movement and willingness to batter defenders and hold the ball up created space and opportunities for the sleeker players behind him. He was Serginho in 1982 with a better touch, or Flemming Povlsen in 1992 without the fairytale. The goalless striker who allowed his team to play.
But it is one thing to do that in a tournament of six or seven games and another to carry that idea of a forward into a league season. Perhaps Giroud’s game is not one readily encapsulated by statistics. Stats do not measure movement out to the flank to draw defenders away and open up the diagonal for Hazard, they do not measure the persistent pressuring of a central defender, the clattering and battering that slowly wears them down.
They measure goals and passes and assists and, on that measure, Giroud’s performance against Liverpool in September is perhaps most generously described as minimalist. In the 64 minutes he spent on the pitch, Giroud touched the ball 18 times. A third of those touches were in his own half, only two in the Liverpool box. One of those was a header that went out of play halfway between the corners of the six- and 18-yard boxes. He attempted 14 passes, six of which found their intended recipient. He dribbled once and was offside once. He won four aerial duels. He didn’t make a tackle or an interception or block a shot or effect a clearance. Boiled down like that, it doesn’t sound like much. But Sarri seems happy enough. And at least with Giroud there is a sense that his goallessness doesn’t matter because he is fulfilling some greater purpose. With Morata, who came on for him, there is the enduringly awkward sensation that he is a player who mislaid his confidence some time ago and has no idea how to get it back, even if he has at least scored this season.
So long as Hazard is in this sort of form, perhaps it doesn’t much matter. Perhaps the best thing a Chelsea center-forward can do at the moment is to get out of the way. Goals from wide areas, after all, are an increasingly important part of the modern game. As Alex Ferguson pointed out a decade ago, offering an explanation for his use of Wayne Rooney in wide areas that didn’t involve him acknowledging that Cristiano Ronaldo never tracks his full-back, it can be more dangerous for a forward to attack from out to in, rather than starting centrally and pulling wide in the search for space.
Attacking on the diagonal is a way of creating acceleration room when space is tight, and often means a forward targeting a full-back on their weaker side. Giroud’s movement facilitates that and draws defenders away but there comes a point at which a center-forward has to do more. All Chelsea forwards have to live in the shadow of two great predecessors. Both Didier Drogba and Diego Costa, in different ways, were adept at creating space for others, at hassling and harrying opponents, at winning aerials. Both of them did everything Giroud does effectively at least as well as he does, but both also scored goals.
And, however you dress it up, whatever tactical schemes you may have, however charmingly quirky it may be for a center-forward to play well and not score over a brief period, there does come a time when you need your striker to break a game open, steal a winner or salvage a point by putting the ball in the net. Effective minimalism is what Daniel Sturridge did against Liverpool: five minutes plus injury time played, one touch, one shot, one goal.
The Guardian Sport
