Giroud's return is rather interesting though. Our move away from the target man, instead opting for a mobile front line has brought us obvious rewards so far this season, so it may have been an ideal opportunity to give Lucas Perez a chance to lead the line once more, perhaps a chance to see how the likes of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and perhaps the Jeff can replicate our first choice trio up front, but I don't see Giroud being left on the bench when he clearly needs minutes so we may well look a little different in our approach this evening
We lacked Santi Cazorla's creative passing from deep without question but I'm not entirely sure that was the main reason for our flat performance. I thought we got the ball into our front players in decent positions many times over the course of the 90 minutes, the problem was that our attacking players were just off the pace on the day. Alex Iwobi was pretty decent in the first half, probing and finding spaces in the pockets between midfield and defence as he does so well, but his teammates were off their game. Mesut Ozil who had struck a hat-trick a few days earlier was not at his best and neither was our main scoring outlet from the right Theo Walcott
