Giroud shrugs off shirt curse to put Milan on cloud nine in derby victory

Even Olivier Giroud was starting to wonder if he might have jinxed himself. The Frenchman had no hesitation in accepting Milan’s No 9 shirt after he joined last summer, shrugging off the fact that no player in a decade had hit double figures while wearing it in Serie A. Ten players had tried and failed – among them such talented goalscorers as Gonzalo Higuaín, Fernando Torres and André Silva – but Giroud insisted: “I’m not superstitious.”

By the turn of the year, he was sounding a little less confident. “I don’t believe in the curse of the No 9 shirt,” he told Milan’s in-house TV station in January. “But I have thought about it a few times after all these physical issues I’ve been having.” Giroud had begun confidently, scoring twice in his home debut: a 4-1 win over Cagliari. Since then, though, his season had been a constant stop-start. He missed time due to Covid, then lower back pain, then a hamstring injury. Prior to Saturday’s derby against Inter, he had started seven league games in six months.

He had scored five times, yet Giroud’s most memorable involvement might have come during a 1-0 loss at home to Napoli in December, when he was ruled offside in the buildup to what would have been an equalising goal from Franck Kessié. That decision was contested, and the chance would never even have materialised without the striker’s smart knock-down, but since when have hexes been fair?

Milan’s manager, Stefano Pioli, continued to show confidence in Giroud, naming him in the starting XI to face Inter and describing him as a player of “international character”. Then again, what choice did he have? Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Ante Rebic were both unavailable. Giroud was the only fit striker in the first-team squad. Inter planned