Where there’s (a little more) smoke: Arsenal to bid for Lacazette?

All month, we’ve been hearing about Arsenal reportedly having interest in Lyon forward Alexandre Lacazette, to the point where even Lyon’s president, during the European Championships, basically said "Nobody at Arsenal has asked us about him" in response to reports that Arsenal were prepared to pay his release fee.

We figured at the point where a club president denies even making contact, that would, as they say, be that. But not so fast! Today, we saw this:

Matt Spiro is a pretty well-regarded source in French football, so while this isn’t iron-clad guaranteed, and while "wants to move" doesn’t automatically mean "to Arsenal", I think this has a little more substance than the typical ITK garbage we see this time of year.

Anyway - who is Alexandre Lacazette? Well, Statsbomb has us covered there, with a pretty solid in-depth look at his career up to this point. TL;DR version - he’s morphed into a "goal poacher with improved link up play + movements, less reliance on counter attacks to generate quality chances but still really good at it, and a much better sense of when and where to shoot".

This was also interesting to me:

Of his 21 Ligue 1 goals in 2015-16, none of them came from outside the box and many of them came from making straightforward runs or even snatching up rebounds.

So, he’s more of a craven opportunist than a stylist, in a way. This isn’t a bad thing, and could complement Giroud’s skills pretty dang well.

I’m not getting excited yet, but I’m less not excited than I was at this time yesterday.