Chelsea: Impossible to put a number on Olivier Giroud and N’Golo Kante

Paul Pogba was 31 minutes away from finishing the World Cup with the same number of goals as Olivier Giroud and N’Golo Kante. Pogba saved himself from this particular banter machine, but his bearded compatriot from Chelsea is stuck justifying his stats sheet.

We’ve got some real geeks around here. Tactical wonks, player obsessives, data nerds, calcio aficionados and connoisseurs of le beau jeu all have a home under our masthead. And since we tend to talk in the third-person singular, let us point out that I am one of them. If I can crunch some numbers and ggplot2 a visualization related to Chelsea in some way, I will.

But sometimes numbers hit their limits. Olivier Giroud and N’Golo Kante are two such examples. Giroud finished the World Cup with no goals and no shots on target in 546 minutes. Despite being a striker who did not force any saves nor put anything past the opposing goalkeepers, Giroud was a vital part of France’s World Cup win.

Without Giroud, Antoine Griezmann and Kylian Mbappe would have had very different tournaments. If you want a hint of what their – and France’s – World Cup would have looked like, rewatch the first 70 minutes of France’s opener against Australia. Griezmann and Mbappe were in their own isolated worlds for the game. They attacked, but France did not attack. The midfielders and fullbacks did not have a reference point on which to focus the build-up, and Australia’s defence marked out Griezmann and Mbappe with little consequence for the space behind.

Giroud spent the subsequent six games switching seamlessly between target man and false-nine. France structured their press in a way that covered for Giroud’s lack of speed. He pressed elegantly and efficiently. The faster French players squeezed the play back to where the slower Giroud could close in on the opposition’s deep man.

In the attack, Giroud would start the play as the target man holding up the ball, but would finish it as the decoy, the distraction. The man with little speed but a commanding physical presence opened the lanes for the men with less presence but pure speed and finesse.

Unfortunately for Giroud, “creating space” and “hold-up play” does not show up on any stats sheets. Not even the white-label services can quantify what Giroud did.

Normally, we would be right there saying strikers fall into the “you had one job” category. We certainly said as much about Alvaro Morata. But the pressure on Giroud to perform that “one job” was far less, given his teammates. When a striker has Antoine Griezmann on one side and Kylian Mbappe on the other, he can not score and – as long as he does all the other components of his job – still be crucial to the team’s success. It’s a luxury France have that Chelsea do not.

This was one of Didier Deschamps’ triumphs over the month. One of his biggest challenges was binding a team from a collection of massive talents and even more massive egos. His man-management and his tactical management came together perfectly in the person of Olivier Giroud.

Giroud is a striker’s striker, a man who always wants the ball at his feet or on his head whenever he is in the box. He was plenty aggrieved when his chances missed the mark in the World Cup, or when his teammates did not feed him the ball or when a call went against him. But those were all exceptions. Giroud played a supporting role to Griezmann and Mbappe to perfection. He played 546 minutes for a reason. France won the World Cup for a reason. His lack of goals will quickly be a historical curiosity.

N’Golo Kante, on the other hand, finished the tournament with an impressive stats sheet, but one that still falls far short of what he truly did for France. His 20 interceptions shared the lead for most in the tournament, and he tied for third with 15 tackles.

But what number of defensive actions, what measure of distance covered or number of sprints can quantify his omnipresence? What data point captures how thoroughly he pocketed Lionel Messi? How much of Eden Hazard’s performance data must be analyzed, visualized and digested before driving home the fact that N’Golo Kante was the only player to dispossess his Chelsea teammate?

N’Golo Kante intercepted those 20 passes, but he prevented dozens more from happening. France’s opponents trying to play through midfield would have to stop and try to pass around Kante, often ending up going back to their own goalkeeper and starting over. Where is the stat for that?

Teams that normally play up the middle had to play out wide in an attempt to circumvent Kante. How do you quantify this tactical adjustment? How many of Benjamin Pavard’s or Lucas Hernandez’s tackles were a result of the opponent choosing to test their luck against the full-backs, knowing their cause was hopeless against the diminutive destroyer?

A team cannot win the World Cup with any dead weight. Each player has to play his role to perfection, or the team will be found out. To a certain extent, the fact of winning the title proves the 11-for-11 success of the players and the team’s tactics. Yes, the logic geek in me cringes at the post hoc prompter ergo hoc argument, but it’s true.

Chelsea will need more goals from Olivier Giroud than France did. He should not go six games and over 500 minutes without a goal. But Maurizio Sarri will expect different things from him than Didier Deschamps did. Giroud proved beyond a five o’clock shadow of a doubt that he can fulfill more roles than No. 9, and do more than “just” score goals.

Next: Chelsea must sever Eden Hazard, Thibaut Courtois contract talks

And N’Golo Kante? Chelsea need to sign him on terms far greater than anything he would ask for himself. Hopefully his agent is more demanding than the World Cup champion too shy to ask his teammates for his turn for the trophy. He is priceless, in every way.