After the restart, neither side blinked first. Leicester sat in their familiar shape, looking to absorb and counter. Arsenal probed patiently, working the ball through their lines without hurrying. Neither team was willing to let the other dictate the tempo, and the minutes slipped by in a rhythm of measured pressure and careful resistance.
"David Qin picks it up and Mahrez is onto him immediately, Kanté sliding across to support from the side!" Tyler tracked the movement. "He goes direct this time, just bursts past them!"
"That is not his usual approach," Neville said, "but look at the effect. Gets him clear of the press before it can properly form."
"Just a shame De Laet recovers in time to knock it out for a throw. Another yard and Qin was through on goal."
On the pitch, David Qin sat for a moment adjusting his shin guard, one knee up, taking stock. Sometimes the uncomplicated answer was the right one. Mahrez, Kanté, De Laet — not one of them could match his raw acceleration in a straight footrace. If he kept trying to finesse his way through the press, he would eventually get swallowed. Hit the gap early, before it closed.
Kanté, watching from a few yards away, was already thinking two moves ahead.
"They have done this before," he said quietly, in the direction of nobody in particular. "Qin pulls the shape, Sánchez gets the space on the other side. We cannot let him keep running at us. Our defensive balance is already shifting."
When David Qin received the next ball, Leicester came with real intensity. De Laet hit him hard from behind, Kanté pressing tight from the left, Mahrez tracking back to complete the ring.
David Qin moved the ball to Coquelin before the situation became truly uncomfortable. He had wanted to angle a run into the channel, combine and go again, but Kanté moved with him step for step.
"You are following me around, are you?"
He didn't bother waiting for an answer. He peeled wide to drag Kanté out to the wing, freeing the lane through the middle, and Coquelin shifted the ball sideways to Flamini.
Mathieu Flamini was thirty-one and had been around long enough to know exactly what he was looking at. Somewhere beyond the stadium walls he had a company worth close to twenty billion pounds, GF Biochemicals, the first business in the world capable of producing levulinic acid at industrial scale, with factories in Italy and more than four hundred employees across different countries. Arsenal's entire market value was a tenth of that.
He played football because he loved it. And right now he loved the gap he could see opening up on the right.
He clipped it out to Sánchez, who had been finding his rhythm all evening. The Chilean drove at Schlupp with a couple of sharp stops and starts, got to the byline, and tried to whip a ball across for Giroud. Morgan got across and headed it clear.
Leicester defended the space around their box well. Drinkwater nodded the clearance back over his own head and Albrighton was off, full tilt down the right channel.
The King Power Stadium held its breath.
Two players, full speed, the touchline narrowing around them.
Bellerín got there. He was quicker, just, and he timed the challenge well, coming in from the side and steering the ball away before Albrighton could get his cross in.
"Lovely!" Tyler said. "The young Spaniard from Arsenal's academy, getting better with every passing month."
"Arsenal break now!" Neville leaned in. "Flamini recycles it forward. Cazorla picks it up. And where is Qin?"
The local ground analyst Paul Dalton had already developed the habit of scanning for David Qin the moment Arsenal moved forward. He found him inside the box, already there, drawing Kanté with him like a weight on a string.
He knew Kanté would not loosen his grip. So he used it. If the Frenchman was going to follow him everywhere, the least he could do was take him somewhere useful.
On the touchline Wenger stood with his arms folded, eyes forward, taking in the whole picture. Even with David Qin as the axis of everything they did, this Arsenal side was never about one person. It had to be about all of them.
This was the moment for someone else to stand up.
Cazorla understood. He carried the ball into the left channel, shaped to shoot with enough conviction that Drinkwater's weight shifted onto his front foot.
"Careful!" Morgan's voice carried across the pitch.
But by the time Drinkwater moved to block, Cazorla had already pushed the ball quietly past him and glided through the gap, smooth and unhurried, like he had always intended exactly that.
David Qin watched from inside the box and smiled inwardly. Wonderful.
He took two steps back. Kanté, his shadow all evening, did not follow this time. The Frenchman had been pulled into an emergency covering position and was scrambling to recover shape.
David Qin glanced across at Huth, one of Leicester's two central pillars, and gave him just enough body language to suggest he was making a run toward the byline. Huth bit.
He moved.
"Santi!"
The shout came sharp and sudden, and David Qin cut back across his run in the same instant, stepping into an entirely different space.
Cazorla's pass arrived in the next heartbeat.
Inside the box, the Leicester defenders lurched in two or three directions at once, voices overlapping, arms reaching. The penalty area became briefly chaotic.
Schmeichel kept his nerve.
David Qin didn't hear any of it. He had already decided what he was going to do before the ball arrived. One touch to shift it into his stride through the middle. Then the right foot, low, side-footed with a little curl on it, driven toward the corner.
The arc it took was beautiful, the kind that looks unhurried until you realise it is already past you.
Schmeichel got down quickly and well. His fingertips found the ball. They just could not hold it back.
One-two. Arsenal in front.
"It is in!" Tyler's voice rose above everything. "A wonderful team move! Cazorla draws the defenders, feeds Qin, and the finish is immaculate! Arsenal have turned this game around!"
"Twenty-seven minutes gone," Neville added, "and Arsenal lead. That is a proper team goal. Patient, clever, and when the moment came, ruthlessly taken."
In the broadcast studio, the two analysts were practically bouncing. It was one thing to watch David Qin take a game apart on his own. Seeing the whole Arsenal machinery click together like that, everyone moving in the right direction at the right time, was something else entirely. More satisfying, somehow. A reminder that even the most gifted individual played within a team.
Though exceptions existed, of course. Kaká carrying that ageing Milan side to the Champions League in 2006-07 was one. But that era was gone. Football now demanded more from everyone.
"Arsenal have cracked the press," Neville said, settling into his analysis. "Leicester only have one Kanté. Arsenal have Qin pulling him one way, Cazorla threatening through the middle, Sánchez on the right. The moment you try to shut one of them down completely, the other two have room. Leicester simply cannot cover all three."
On the pitch, David Qin pulled Giroud and Sánchez into a loose embrace as they jogged back. There was laughter in it.
"My run," Cazorla said, eyebrow raised, clearly pleased with himself. "Go on. Tell me. Was that close to your level or what?"
David Qin held his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart.
"That close."
Giroud laughed immediately. "He says that every single time, Santi. Do not believe a word of it. Enormous room for improvement."
They walked back toward the halfway line in good spirits, arms around shoulders, the easy looseness of a group that had found its groove.
Behind them, Kanté stood for a moment looking at the scoreboard. The feeling was not quite frustration. More like the particular discomfort of knowing you had done almost everything right and still come up short. His coverage could stretch across half a pitch. It could not stretch across the whole of it.
"We go back to the plan," he said, more to himself than anyone else. "Tighter. More layers behind. Disrupt their rhythm before they can find the final pass."
Morgan was already rallying everyone around him, voice raised, demanding a response. Leicester were not a side that folded. The previous season had proved that, beyond any doubt. This group of players knew how to hurt and keep going.
Vardy positioned himself alongside Mertesacker and began a steady stream of low-level noise in his ear. Back in the lower leagues he had been capable of ninety minutes of it, winding up defenders in four different directions at once. Mertesacker shot him a glare.
To make it worse, the man was attempting it in German. Mangled, barely recognisable German, with the accent of someone who had learned it from a phrasebook at a petrol station.
Vardy just grinned and kept going. He had grown up where psychological edges were carved out of nothing, and he had never lost the habit.
"Arsenal are struggling to make their counter-attack count!" Tyler observed as the game resumed. "Leicester are pressing higher, disrupting the buildup before it develops."
"And Okazaki is everywhere," Neville added. "Six games in, he has transformed how Leicester's attack functions. His running connects the midfield and the front two. Nothing flashy, just relentless."
Drinkwater played a diagonal over the top. Mahrez brought it down on his chest with the kind of first touch that made it look as though the ball had simply decided to stop there. In a Sky Sports poll of Premier League ball control, David Qin had taken thirty-four percent of the vote for first place. Mahrez had come fourth, and watching him now, that ranking felt about right.
The King Power responded to him as he turned and drove inside. His cutting runs off the left were slightly less devastating than Robben in his pomp, but they carried the same quality of inevitability, the sense that everyone in the ground knew what was coming and could not quite prevent it. Three goals this season already, all of them curled in off the left foot. All of them from the same angle.
The shot was on. Left foot, curling toward the top corner.
Čech would not have saved it. De Gea might have. Nobody else.
But Coquelin had tracked Mahrez's run, and in the moment before he could pull the trigger, came a quiet, firm nudge from behind. Not cynical enough to draw the whistle, just enough to knock the contact off.
The ball flew harmlessly into the stand.
Mahrez spread his hands in the direction of the referee, incredulous.
"Surely that is a foul?"
The referee shook his head. "Honest challenge."
David Qin watched from nearby, hiding his smile. It happened to everyone who came to the Premier League. There was an adaptation period, a calibration, learning where the line sat between what was punished and what was permitted. He had gone through it himself. Mahrez would find his feet.
The forty-minute mark came around almost without notice. The afternoon heat had been building throughout, and the medical staff were beginning to look meaningfully in the direction of the fourth official. Neither side had got a water break. Bodies were running a little heavier, reactions a fraction slower, concentration just slightly less absolute.
David Qin noticed.
In a long game there was always a window. Not when both teams were sharp, not when the press was at its tightest. But in the moments when concentration loosened, when legs felt the weight of the afternoon, when a defender's eyes moved half a second too late. That was when you moved.
"Press him!" Flamini's voice cut through the midfield.
When Drinkwater received the ball and looked for Mahrez again, Sánchez was already across him, shoulder first, body angled to take the space. Flamini arrived a step later to complete the tackle cleanly.
The two of them had barely needed to speak. Eleven years at Arsenal, surrounded by players like Vieira and Gilberto Silva in his formative years, had given Flamini instincts that arrived before conscious thought.
The ball broke loose off his boot and spun out toward the left channel.
"Hold the line!" Kanté called out, switching suddenly to French in the urgency of the moment. He knew what happened when Leicester's midfield dropped too deep against this team. Arsenal would slice through with quick one-twos and a through-ball, and the whole defensive structure would unravel.
But Flamini had been reading defences for over a decade, and the weight and direction of his pass was precise. It dropped into space outside the Leicester midfield line.
David Qin took one look before collecting it. De Laet was hanging back, waiting for support rather than committing.
He left him a small invitation. The ball settled half a yard too far from his foot, just enough to suggest a hesitation, just enough to make a defender think he saw an opportunity.
De Laet came for it.
David Qin took it back with a simple drag, shifted his weight, and was past him before the Belgian had even finished his lunge. Clean. Nothing wasted.
"Oh, look at that!" Tyler's voice lifted with delight. "De Laet goes for the ball and Qin just ghosts past him! Beautiful touch, no fuss, and he is into the box!"
"Burned him," Neville said simply. "Completely burned him."
Thirty thousand people at the King Power watched the figure racing into the penalty area and held their collective breath. One by one the defenders hesitated, each uncertain whether to commit and risk opening a gap, or hold and give him time to pick his spot.
Huth did neither. He settled his weight low, cut off the inside lane, and waited.
Smart. Experienced. Not easily panicked.
David Qin slowed.
The two men regarded each other for a moment, neither moving. Huth's eyes were streaming slightly from the sweat running into them, but he did not blink.
"Waiting for someone? So am I."
David Qin caught Sánchez in his peripheral vision arriving at the far edge of the area, cutting inward from the right, exactly where he needed to be.
He looked left. Deliberately. Pointedly.
Huth's head turned, just for a fraction of a second, just enough.
The pass went right. No look. One clean contact, the ball rolling across the face of the box.
By the time Huth understood what had happened, the ball was already gone.
Sánchez had been timing his run from the moment the counter began, drifting toward the centre of the area so that when the pass arrived, he had space, time, and a clear picture of the goal. He struck it properly, low and driven.
Schmeichel saw it all the way, got his body behind it, and watched the ball go through him anyway.
One-three.
"Arsenal!" Tyler's voice soared to the roof. "Sánchez finishes and it is three-one to the Gunners! What a counter-attack! And that pass from Qin, without even looking, leaves Huth completely helpless!"
"He looked left," Neville said, shaking his head with something close to admiration, "and passed right. Huth had no chance. That is just wonderful footballing intelligence."
The away end was shaking.
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