The away end was still shaking when David Qin grabbed Sánchez by the wrist and pulled him toward the corner flag.
"Alexis. The dance. The one we rehearsed. Come on, don't think about it, just go."
He started the rhythm himself, clicking his fingers, swaying his hips, entirely unbothered by the thirty thousand pairs of eyes pointed in his direction. Sánchez, born somewhere warmer and less inhibited than most of his teammates, fell into it almost immediately, shoulders rolling, feet moving, grinning like a man who had just remembered why he got into all of this in the first place.
This was it. This was the thing itself.
Then David Qin, clearly feeling confident, went for something more ambitious. He dropped his hands to the ground, legs kicking up behind him, attempting something that resembled a Thomas flare and achieved something rather more like a man who had tripped over a garden hose.
He bailed out halfway through, rolled onto his back, and threw out a pose so completely unself-conscious that the entire Arsenal bench dissolved.
"You always find something new!" one of the coaching staff called over.
Even the Leicester supporters, those thirty thousand who had come hoping to see their unbeaten side hold firm, found themselves smiling. There was something in it that reached past the result, past the frustration of the scoreline, and touched the thing that had drawn all of them to football in the first place. An open piece of ground, two jumpers for goalposts, everyone running and laughing and not worrying about what happened next.
Ranieri stood in his technical area and applauded quietly. He felt it too.
"How was my dancing?" David Qin pushed through his teammates, looking exceptionally pleased with himself.
"Michael Jackson," Giroud said, with absolutely no hesitation and zero sincerity. "Basically identical."
"Get out of here."
David Qin had enough self-awareness to know that a failed Thomas flare did not put him in the same conversation as Michael Jackson. He still remembered watching a concert as a boy, watching that forty-five degree lean, spending weeks trying to replicate it and never once getting close. Some things required hidden mechanisms that nobody told you about.
On the touchline, Wenger shook his head fondly.
"Being around them makes you feel younger," he said to Pat Rice.
"Always has," Rice replied. "That kind of love for the game, the real kind, that's what keeps people going for decades. You stop feeling it, you stop improving. But when you have it..." He trailed off, watching the players still laughing as they walked back for the restart. "You'd run through walls."
Across the pitch, Kanté watched David Qin for a long moment. His own childhood had not been so different from Sánchez's in its rawness, its uncertainty, the way football had represented something more than just a sport. But that kind of upbringing had a way of turning football into work before you noticed it happening. The obligation swallowed the joy.
He found himself genuinely curious about the eighteen-year-old still bouncing around near the centre circle. What had shaped someone like that? Where did that particular quality come from?
"Let's hold what we have and regroup at half time," Morgan said quietly to the group. No rallying speech this time. The captain was experienced enough to know when words would land and when they would not.
Leicester kept the ball through the final minutes of the half, not with any attacking ambition, just preserving themselves, keeping Arsenal from adding another. The referee's whistle came as something close to a relief.
Half time. One-three.
"A remarkable forty-five minutes," Tyler said, settling back. "David Qin with a goal and two assists, and he now leads the Premier League in both goals and assists simultaneously. For an eighteen-year-old in his first season, that is simply extraordinary."
"What stands out to me," Neville added, "is the variety. It is not just pace or skill. It is the football brain. The chip on Kanté, the no-look pass to Sánchez, drawing defenders and releasing teammates at exactly the right moment. That is not something you usually see in players twice his age."
The clip of the celebration was already being cut and re-uploaded across video platforms, view counts climbing by the minute. In the same time slot, Manchester City were playing Tottenham on another channel. The online audience for that fixture had been quietly draining away for the better part of twenty minutes.
In the away dressing room, Wenger waited until everyone had settled before he spoke.
"We played well in the first half. We restricted their attack and we took our chances when they came." He paused, letting that land before continuing. "But I want you to think about something. Mathieu, how are your legs?"
Flamini looked up. A beat of silence, and then understanding crossed his face. "You mean the running. They were pressing us to run, not to create danger. To tire us out."
"Exactly." Wenger's tone was measured but carrying weight. "Drinkwater, Albrighton, Okazaki. All three ran at extremely high intensity throughout the first half. We were forced to match them. And we have limited cover in midfield. Francis is only just back from injury. The second half will ask more of us than the first."
The room was quiet.
"So what do we do?" David Qin asked, peeling a banana, washing it down with a mouthful of his energy drink.
Wenger almost smiled. "We attack. Immediately. They will expect us to manage the lead, to play conservatively and protect what we have. We do the opposite. We go after them from the first whistle and we kill the game before Ranieri's adjustments can take hold."
David Qin sat up a little straighter. That was the kind of instruction he never needed to hear twice.
Next door, in the home dressing room, Vardy was on his third can of something and the atmosphere had the particular quality of a group that was recalibrating rather than despairing. Ranieri laid out his plan with the patience and precision of someone who had been navigating these moments for forty years.
"First half achieved what we needed it to achieve. They spent energy. Now we give it until the sixty-fifth minute, let the first wave of substitutions settle, and then we accelerate. We attack through the left channel. Their number twenty and the backup eight are both vulnerable at high tempo." He looked around the room carefully. "When we defend, the midfield line compresses significantly. No more isolated battles. Both central midfielders cover two thirty-metre zones each. We cannot give Qin space to receive and turn."
He glanced down at his notes for a moment, then back up. "As for their number ten specifically, in the old days in Italy, we would have handled this differently. The rules have changed. What we do instead is surround him with numbers, keep him in one zone, funnel everything through that side until we force the mistake. Counter with five runners. Keep it simple. Keep it clean."
The King Power roared back to life as the teams emerged for the second half.
Giroud played it simply to Cazorla from the kick-off. Cazorla touched it back to Coquelin. Everything looked routine, unhurried, exactly what Leicester expected from an Arsenal side looking to sit on a two-goal advantage and see the game out.
The Leicester press began to push up. With a two-goal deficit and forty-five minutes to play, they needed the ball. Letting Arsenal stroke it around comfortably would only allow tired legs to recover.
But Coquelin shifted the ball sideways to Monreal, and Nacho Monreal was not the kind of player who invited pressure easily. The Spanish fullback had a smoothness to his technique, a lightness of touch that made it genuinely difficult to press effectively against him. Mahrez came and found nothing. Monreal was already past him.
He didn't hold the ball. He stuck his arm out as a signal, waited one beat, and played a long pass forward.
David Qin had already started his run. He arrived at the dropping ball at the same moment Kanté did, and used every centimetre of his height advantage to nod it cleanly down into Cazorla's feet.
"Quick, square!" Cazorla's voice barely had time to carry before he was playing it back, moving the ball before Drinkwater could arrive from the side.
David Qin received again, took one stride into space, and felt Huth beginning to track across. He did not want to carry it. One more second and Kanté would be back in position, and suddenly the numbers would be wrong.
A clipped, curling pass, side-foot with just enough bend on it to arc beyond Huth's reach and drop kindly at Sánchez's feet.
"Oh!" The away end rose together.
Sánchez killed the ball to his left, gave himself a half-yard of room, and looked up to find Giroud. The Frenchman was already there, leaning into Morgan on the right side of the box, holding the defender's weight and creating exactly the angle Sánchez needed. He did not shoot himself. He played it short, one-two, and ran off the return.
Giroud held Morgan off with the calmness of a man who had done this particular thing several thousand times in his career, shielded until the right moment, and then laid it back into Sánchez's path with simple accuracy.
Close range. First time. Driven low and hard.
Schmeichel went down fast and got his body behind it.
The ball went through him anyway.
One-four.
"Fifty-eight seconds!" Tyler's voice had that quality it only reached on special occasions, the barely controlled delight of a man watching something rare. "Fifty-eight seconds into the second half and Arsenal score! That is devastating! That is absolutely devastating for Leicester City!"
"This is the thing about Arsenal when they are in this kind of form," Neville said. "It is one thing to win a football match. It is another to take a team apart with that kind of intelligence and that kind of pace. Leicester had a plan. Wenger just ran straight through it."
The ground announcer Paul Dalton was somewhere between a commentary and a celebration.
"Where has this Arsenal been hiding? Where is the team that used to take forty passes to go nowhere? This is something completely different! Quick, direct, and absolutely merciless! The Gunners are playing like the sharpest draw in the West, and Leicester City just got shot!"
Sánchez slid on his knees through the turf, arms wide. The away end behind him was completely unhinged.
Three goals clear, second half barely started. Even Liverpool at their very best would struggle from here.
He thought about that for a moment. A year ago, a goal like this had felt like the culmination of something, a reward for everything he had put in. Now it felt different. Easier, not in the physical sense, but in the sense that the game had space in it for him. When the other side committed everyone to stopping David Qin, he had room to run. Room to breathe.
He could have got used to that.
"A thunderbolt right back at them!" David Qin threw an arm around his shoulder. "That is how you start a half!"
"Oi!" Giroud joined them, making a sound that was not quite any recognisable word in any language.
In the home technical area, the Leicester players looked at each other with the expressions of people trying to locate the moment a situation had passed the point of recovery. The half-time plan was already obsolete. They had not expected Arsenal to come out attacking. That had not been part of any calculation.
Kanté stood still for a moment, jaw set. He had been saying the word quietly to himself, the one Ranieri had mentioned in the dressing room. The old Italian approach. Rough it up. Stop the man before he can express himself.
But you could not play that way anymore. The rules had closed that door. And without it, the question became a different one: was he simply not yet good enough to stop a player like this within the proper rules of the game?
He pressed both palms hard against his cheeks, feeling the sting of it.
No. That was not the right way to think about it. There was no player in the world who could not be contained. He had not found the answer yet. That was all. Next time he faced David Qin, he would be different.
He believed that completely.
"I don't even know what to say to you lads." Morgan looked around the group and found nothing useful. He left the sentence unfinished.
Ranieri took a breath and thought it through calmly. The arithmetic of the situation was fairly clear. Three down with forty-four minutes left, against an Arsenal side that had just shown they could score within the first minute of a half. To commit men forward was to invite the fifth goal. To sit deep was to hand Arsenal the ball and let them run the clock.
He thought about what he would do in Wenger's position. Replace Giroud with Walcott. Three fast forwards on the pitch. Could Leicester afford to push up against that with Koscielny and Mertesacker sitting deep? Not comfortably. They would both play long and accurate. Chances would come from nothing. The scoreline would likely move again.
And if Leicester did not push forward, the press would never get near Arsenal, who would simply keep the ball and wait.
It was, if he was honest with himself, a closed position.
He made his peace with it, and began thinking about the next match.
Wenger had reached the same conclusion from the other side of the pitch. He waved Walcott over to begin warming up.
The second half played out in the way that well-managed winning football tends to, controlled, unspectacular from the outside, and deeply satisfying if you were wearing red and white. Walcott came on for Giroud. Arteta replaced Flamini. Leicester's midfield ran hard and found little.
56 minutes. 69. 75. 89.
The final whistle came with the scoreboard reading what it had read since just under a minute into the second half.
Leicester City 1, Arsenal 4.
The Foxes' first defeat of the season. The Gunners moved back to the top of the Premier League table with a full set of points taken from a fixture that, before kick-off, had been talked about as the sternest test of their season.
It had not felt stern by the end.
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