Quote Originally Posted by Power_n_Glory View Post
Underestimate that first touch and finish if you want to. The touch was sublime and set himself up perfectly to take the defender out of the equation and line up a perfect shot. If that had been a Song passing the ball to RVP, people would be creaming themselves over the finish and downplaying the ball from Song. I've seen this before. I'm not taking anything away from any of the players. A beauty of a pass from Ozil but the first touch was important as well.

This whole concept of a striker holding the ball up and bringing others into play is what facilitates tippy tappy play in the first place. It's dragging players like Santi further forward, playing a higher line with the defence and leaves us vulnerable to a counter attack. What you describe is exactly why we have games where we require 500 passes to get into the opponents box. It's what we've been doing for years and we haven't been successful at it with Giroud.
Except that's not what I described. The idea is you can't solely lump the ball to Theo, you have to have a mixed attack and Bif can provide that. Corners (if we could learn how to take them), crosses (if we could learn how to provide them), these aren't for Theo. And I don't underestimate his touch and finish yesterday, but I do understand he'll do that 1 in 5 at best and the rest he'll fuck up. A truly top striker is a 1 in 2 player. The Cazorla thing has little to do with it, that's another one of Wenger's crackpot plans that is supposedly designed to keep possession in the opposition half and I guess it does achieve that with the one downside being Coquelin often has to be in two places at once.

It's all a bit confusing. You look at managers like Wenger and van Gaal with all their experience and you think surely they know what they are doing. But then you see Ramsey on the right and Fellaini playing as a central striker and you realise actually, no, they don't. Hard as it is to believe.