Juve-Milan, Giroud: “I have a head, I want to continue”

Only the Lady was missing from the man of heavy goals. Olivier Giroud has punished Inter, Roma, Lazio and Napoli. All the bigs. And now Juventus have also joined Allianz with a header similar to that of Sheva in 2004. In place of Seedorf this time there is Calabria, but the goal that is worth the third consecutive qualification in the Champions League – twenty years after the final won in Manchester against the black and whites – recalled the flicker of the Ukrainian. Always with the head, even there decisive.

Improve yourself

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Giroud has improved himself. With the leap of Allianz he reached 17 goals for the season with one game left to play. Last year he stopped at 14, including eleven in Serie A. Now he’s at twelve. His pin pricks are the manifesto of those who know how to raise their level at the right moments: in the Champions League he scored against Napoli, Salzburg (brace) and Dinamo Zagreb. In the championship he brought at least twelve points, including the hat-trick against Sampdoria in the last round. He hadn’t scored so much since the 2016-2017 vintage, that of thirty years celebrated in London, on the Arsenal side, a happy island after the title won with Montpellier. Giroud remained the same as in Grenoble, the one who was told he would never play in Ligue 1. And then he won it. The boy whose ear someone whispered that a ghost with the number nine roamed the San Siro. “He enjoys poking anyone wearing that number”, they said: Pato, Piatek, Luiz Adriano, Lapadula, Matri, Destro, Higuain, André Silva, Fernando Torres. Giroud listened, smiled and finally took the 9. “I’m here to break the curse”. The others had said so too. He succeeded. Champion of Italy in the land of the ancestors. His grandmothers, Yvonne Avogadro and Antonia Gaiatto, one from Trieste and the other from Bergamo, taught him Italian and passed on his love for Milan. In the end it was destiny.

Future and CDK

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Giroud turns 37 and will stay at Milanello for at least another season. “The head is there, the body holds up. As long as it is like this, I want to continue playing”. At the end of the game he gave the shirt to a fan in the stands, but instead of running on the pitch shirtless he knocked on the shoulders of De Ketelaere, who remained on the bench throughout the game: “Could you lend me your shirt?”. So Olivier celebrated under the curve with the Belgian’s jacket, then flew to midfield to hug everyone during the final speech. In the post-match he said he was happy and gave an assist to Leao, now armored by Milan and awaiting the official announcement: “I hope he stays another ten years”. Olivier will have quit a long time ago, but now he’s thinking about improving himself.