White Hart Lane was still fizzing when the final whistle went. The Spurs supporters had not stopped directing their feelings at the Arsenal players, channeling the frustration of a three-nil home defeat into noise, as if volume could retroactively change what had happened on the pitch. The Arsenal squad walked through it toward the tunnel with the practised composure of people who had done this before and expected to do it again.
At the edge of the technical area, Wenger met David with an embrace that was slightly uncharacteristic and entirely genuine.
"Those two goals were perfect. Truly." He stepped back and looked at him properly. "Do you remember the speech at Cambridge?"
David waited.
"I spoke about what a supporter should feel when he wakes up on a match morning. He should expect to win, yes. But he should also expect to see something beautiful." Wenger glanced toward the away section, where the Arsenal supporters were still singing. "I think you have given that to them. And not just tonight. I think they will wake up on every match day from now on and feel exactly that."
David considered this for a moment.
"If I can do more than just make them expect it," he said, "if I can make them look back and feel that they were alive during something they will remember forever, that seems like the real thing. That's the difference between being good and being worth remembering."
Wenger looked at him with the expression of a man who has heard a great many players speak about their ambitions and can immediately tell which ones mean it.
"In thirty years of coaching," he said, "I have rarely met someone with your combination of qualities. The technical gifts are one thing. The desire to leave a permanent mark is something rarer."
"Then you should enjoy watching," David said, and patted Wenger's shoulder once with the comfortable familiarity of someone who has stopped feeling like a guest.
"I've been training with you every day for months with no days off," Pat Rice said, appearing at Wenger's side, "and you walk straight past me to hug him. I'm deeply wounded."
"Mr. Rice, a free hug and my sincere gratitude," David said, and delivered both.
Rice made a noise that was not quite a laugh but was clearly satisfied.
The post-match routine was quick: acknowledgements to the travelling supporters, a final wave toward the away section, and then the bus back north. David retrieved his phone from the changing room and found his notifications had been running continuously since the first goal.
He had been tagged in a video compilation. An Arsenal fan account had cut together every significant moment involving David against Tottenham across the two seasons, the Wolfsburg Europa League match and now tonight, step-over after nutmeg after inside-out finish, set to something appropriately triumphant. The view count was already substantial.
"My highlights really are impressive," he said, tilting the phone toward Giroud.
Giroud watched with the concentration of a man studying a rival. "You can't learn that," he said finally. "I've watched it from two metres away and I still don't know how he does it."
He was more content than he might have been a year ago, when being the number-two option in an attack would have felt like a diminishment. The logic had reordered itself: with Sánchez and David operating on either side of him, he was receiving the ball in positions that made scoring straightforward, and his numbers reflected it. The striker who works within a system that suits him will always outperform the striker who fights against one that doesn't.
The bus back to Colney was warm and comfortable in the way that team buses are after away wins, the conversation loose and the silences easy. David watched London approach through the window and thought about the next fixture.
He had delegated the arrangements for his parents' visit to the assistant who handled his schedule. His father had watched Italian football through the eighties and nineties with the devotion that older Chinese football supporters often had for Serie A, when the league had been genuinely the best in the world and its players were the best in the world. A Milan derby at the San Siro was something his father had mentioned more than once across the years, and the October international break offered a clean window to make it happen.
"All arranged," the assistant confirmed when he checked. "Hotel, match tickets, a local contact to look after them."
Good. He put the phone down.
The house in Hadley Wood was quiet when he got back. He stood in the kitchen for a minute and thought about getting a dog. Something with energy and presence, the kind of animal that makes a space feel occupied. He filed it as a plan to revisit when the season was less dense.
He made himself something to eat and settled in front of the laptop to watch Leicester footage.
The compact midfield block, organised and difficult to penetrate through the middle. Kanté's coverage: remarkable even on video, the way he appeared in spaces you hadn't expected him to be, the engine running in every direction simultaneously. The defensive line sitting deep, inviting pressure, then releasing Vardy into the space behind with single passes.
And the right back position, he noted, was a potential exposure. The left side was better covered. Something to keep in mind.
He wrote nothing down. He rarely needed to.
Before he slept, he noticed on his football app that Manchester City had been held to a draw by West Ham in the previous round of league fixtures. Arsenal had won their six matches and had moved to the top of the table.
The fan reaction online was predictably split.
@NorthBankNoodles: We are unbeatable.
@RealistCN_AFC: We've said this before. We've said it a lot. Something always happens in February.
@TacticalGnome_GZ: Winter window is key. The holding midfield situation needs addressing before January.
@BeiGooner88: Usmanov wants Chinese investment. If that comes through alongside Qin's commercial numbers, there might actually be money to spend.
@CanaryWharfGooner: The second-largest shareholder wants to bring in Chinese capital. The biggest shareholder wants to spend nothing. This has always been the problem.
@FootballMathGuy: Get rid of the big shareholder. Keep the rest. Simple.
The conversation continued in the way that football supporter conversations always do, circling the same questions with new urgency because the table, for the first time in several years, said something genuinely promising.
The next afternoon, David took a dance class.
Not because he was developing an interest in dance, though the physical demands were more substantial than he had expected. The specific motivation was that his goal celebrations had become repetitive: slide, fist, badge. He wanted something with more personality, something that reflected the actual feeling of scoring rather than the reflexive performance of someone who has scored many times before.
A few basic moves, learned and practised until they sat in the body without thought. The coach was professional and discreet and did not ask questions about why a Premier League footballer was spending a Tuesday afternoon working on footwork in a studio in Hertfordshire.
Two days later, the squad loaded onto the updated team bus and headed northwest. Leicester was a hundred and sixty kilometres from London, slightly over an hour on a clear run, though the route into the city itself tended to be interrupted by traffic signals. Leicester had more of these per square kilometre than anywhere else in the United Kingdom.
"Why is the river red?" someone asked, looking out the window at the Soar.
"It wasn't always," Pat Rice said. "The textile mills used to discharge directly into it. Different era."
"Is that the stadium?" David had spotted a large structure appearing through the gaps between buildings, something substantial and modern.
"That's Welford Road," Ramsey said. "Leicester Tigers. They're to rugby union what Real Madrid and AC Milan are to football. Multiple European titles, historic traditions."
"Why didn't you use Arsenal as the reference point?" Cazorla asked, with innocent curiosity.
Ramsey considered this. The honest answer was that the comparison he had reached for was based on trophy counts and continental standing, and he preferred not to complete that thought aloud.
"Come and watch a rugby match sometime," David said, rescuing him. He had watched American football since childhood, had been briefly fascinated by the Super Bowl halftime performances before realising he was staying up primarily for those rather than the sport. Rugby had a different quality, the direct physical contest of it, the set pieces.
The bus stopped.
And stopped again.
And stopped again.
"Traffic lights," Arteta said, answering the question before it was asked.
The temperature when they stepped off was thirty-five degrees. Wenger frowned. Arsenal had come from an intense League Cup match with limited recovery time, in unusual heat for September, against a home side that had been building momentum across the opening weeks of the season.
"Manage your energy," he said.
Before the match, Sky Sports ran their preview.
The presenter's name was Ryan, and he had grown up twenty miles from the King Power Stadium.
"Arsenal under Wenger have been completely transformed since David Qin's arrival," he said. "The attacking system has evolved into something genuinely difficult to handle. Sánchez has settled into a role that suits him, the team moves at a higher tempo, and the depth of threat across the front three is real. The holding midfield remains a concern, but they haven't been seriously tested in that area yet. Spurs and Chelsea weren't equipped to expose it."
He turned toward the tactical board. "Leicester are a different proposition. Ranieri has something clear in mind here. The defensive organisation is sound, Kanté is exceptional in the middle, Vardy's pace is a constant threat on the counter. If they can sit deep and absorb Arsenal's possession without conceding, the transition could hurt them."
He paused. "I think Leicester can get something today. But then, I grew up a Leicester supporter, so adjust accordingly."
At the pre-match press conference, Ranieri was as he always was: warm, composed, generous in his assessments without giving anything away.
"We have signed several good players," he said. "Kanté, Okazaki, Inler. They adapted to the league quickly and they have something that I value more than technical skill, which is resilience. This comes from their backgrounds, from what they have been through. You cannot teach it."
He spoke about Arsenal with respect. About Wenger with genuine admiration. About David with the careful enthusiasm of someone who knows that focusing too much attention on one opponent in public tends to go poorly.
Wenger, in his own session, praised Leicester's organisation and noted several players by name, including Huth and Kanté, with the authority of someone who had watched their footage carefully.
In the tunnel, the two squads arranged themselves in parallel.
David looked along the Leicester lineup with the particular attention he brought to opponents he had studied but not yet encountered. Vardy at the front, with that restless, slightly aggressive energy that non-league football tends to either destroy or concentrate into something very specific. Mahrez on the side, technically gifted and unpredictable. Schmeichel in goal, his father's name above his head in every room he entered.
Okazaki saw David looking and met his eye with a nod that acknowledged the shared history: two Asian players in the Premier League, competing at the top end of it, both of them aware of what that meant in the wider context.
Then Kanté.
The compact, bald-headed French midfielder was studying David with the focused attention of someone who has been given a specific task and takes every task seriously. He was 169 centimetres and looked slightly smaller than that. The gap between his physical presence and his actual effect on a football match was one of the larger discrepancies in the league.
Ranieri had given him one instruction: limit Arsenal's number ten.
Kanté had watched the footage. He had read the numbers. He had arrived at his own honest assessment, which was that limiting David Qin was going to be very difficult.
He had arrived at another conclusion also, which was that this had never prevented him from trying before and was not going to prevent him now. He had picked bottles and cans from the street as a child to help his mother pay bills. He had buried his father at eleven and understood what carrying a weight you did not choose meant. He had played his first professional match at nineteen in the second tier of French football and had become the division's leading midfielder within twelve months.
He was not afraid of difficult.
David noticed the gaze and smiled. It was a genuine smile, the kind that comes from recognising quality in an opponent.
Vardy, watching the exchange from two places down, thought his own thoughts. His path had been rougher than Kanté's in some respects, smoother in others: lower-league football, drinking, an electronic tag at sixteen for an altercation that he did not particularly want to discuss, years of wondering whether the window was going to close before he found the right door. He had found it. He was not sentimental about it.
Okazaki, further down the line, was thinking about the comparison that followed him everywhere since David had arrived in English football. Two Asian forwards, playing in the same league at the same time, one of them the world's most expensive footballer and one of them signed for a fee that would not have appeared in most newspaper headlines. He had learned not to give the comparison more weight than it deserved. He was who he was. He would play the way he played. The result would be what it was.
The referee called both captains forward.
The King Power Stadium was full, the blue shirts covering every tier, the noise beginning to build even before the teams had taken their positions.
---------
If you want to read ahead, head over to: [email protected]/ HappyCrow
As always, thank you for the support, the comments, and those precious power stones!