"Full time! Full time at the King Power Stadium!"
"Arsenal win four-one away from home, and that is seven consecutive Premier League victories to start the season!"
"Seven straight wins. The last time Arsenal managed that was 2002-03, the Invincibles season. And in 2001-02 they put together fourteen in a row, the longest in their history. Whether this side can approach that kind of run remains to be seen."
Wenger, walking slowly across the pitch toward his players, had already decided privately that it probably would not happen. October was coming, and with it a fixture list that tightened like a vice. Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. Manchester United, Chelsea, Everton in the league. The winning run would end somewhere in that stretch, and he had long ago made his peace with the idea that chasing records was its own kind of trap. You started playing for the streak instead of the game, and the streak always broke you in the end.
He pulled Giroud into a hug, then Cazorla, working his way through the group with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had waited a long time for something and was now holding it carefully.
"Shame about the hat-trick today," Giroud said to David Qin, with genuine regret in his voice, as though the missing goal had been his personal responsibility. "You could have taken the match ball home."
"You were one short as well," David Qin pointed out, nodding toward Sánchez.
"Two goals is fine." Sánchez was genuinely unbothered. He had grown up with very little, and that upbringing had given him a particular relationship with contentment. When you stripped away the wanting things you had no business wanting, the things you actually had looked considerably better.
"I'm going to get someone to choreograph us a proper routine," David Qin announced, looking around at the group. "Ten minutes every day when we get back. Proper rehearsal."
There was laughter, general agreement, a few theatrical groans from the older members of the squad. But everyone knew they would do it. That was how it worked with David Qin. The idea always sounded slightly absurd and then somehow became the thing they all looked forward to. Shared routines, shared jokes, the small private rituals of a group learning to trust each other: it mattered more than most coaching manuals admitted.
David Qin walked over to where Kanté was standing, slightly apart from the Leicester group, still in his kit. He mimed the universal exchange gesture, pointing at his own shirt and then at Kanté's.
"Sure, yes," Kanté said quickly, already pulling the shirt over his head. "Thank you!"
Except what came out of Kanté's mouth, filtered through a thick French accent that had not yet made peace with certain English vowel sounds, sounded considerably more like something you could not say before the watershed.
David Qin stared at him.
Kanté's expression was completely open. Innocent. The face of a man who genuinely believed he had said something polite.
"Not... the other thing," David Qin said carefully. "Thank you. Try it again."
Kanté went slightly pink under his dark complexion and repeated it slowly, mimicking the shape of David Qin's mouth. He knew his English was poor. He had known since arriving in England that it was going to cause him problems, and he was right.
"Better," David Qin said.
"See you next time," Kanté said, carefully, and David Qin nodded and turned away.
Walking back toward the tunnel, he found himself slightly unsatisfied with the match, not with the result, but with the feel of it. Today's Leicester had pressed and harried and made him work harder than most opponents this season. They had targeted him with real thought behind it. But they had not been the Leicester he remembered from history, the fully evolved version, the side that would somehow win an entire Premier League title in the following spring. Kanté himself had not yet become the force he would eventually be. There was still room between who he was now and who he was going to grow into.
Which meant today had not been the fullest test. And David Qin, if he was honest with himself, had not been entirely satisfied.
He filed that away and kept walking.
The post-match press conference was brief and precise. Wenger spoke with the measured warmth of someone who had done this several thousand times and knew exactly how much to say.
"Away from home, against a well-organised side who made us work hard from the first minute, our players showed real composure. Conceding early is always a test of character. Today we passed it." He paused for a beat. "We want to play like this every week. Knowing what we need to do and trusting that we can do it."
Privately, walking back to the dressing room after the cameras were off, he was already thinking about February. The injury table that always arrived in the second half of a season, the accumulated fatigue of three competitions, the moments when the squad depth would be measured and found wanting or otherwise. This was when the points needed to be banked. While everyone was fit, while the confidence was running hot.
The Community Shield and the FA Cup could take care of themselves. Wenger had long since decided he was no longer interested in those particular trophies, and he had Mourinho's example to point to if anyone disagreed. The man had literally discarded a runners-up medal. Priorities were priorities.
In the other press room, a journalist from The Sun arrived with the look of someone who had rehearsed a question designed to cause trouble.
"Is Arsenal's number ten really as good as he looks?"
Ranieri smiled at the premise and declined to take the bait. "Yes," he said simply. "He is exceptional. Everyone saw what Arsenal were missing before he arrived. He gave them something that changed the entire shape of the club. And I still find it difficult to accept that he is only eighteen years old." He settled back slightly. "In 2005, when I had some time away from the game, I used to write columns for the press. If I were still doing that, I think I could fill several very long pieces just on him."
He added, after a moment, with characteristic honesty: "Our goal this season is still to stay in the Premier League. Losing to Arsenal is not a surprise. What we saw today tells us where we need to improve."
The team bus back to north London was quiet in the way that post-match buses usually were, the particular silence of people who had exerted themselves completely and were now letting their bodies settle. David Qin sat near the back, not sleeping, just thinking about nothing in particular.
"Four days until Shakhtar Donetsk," he said to the general vicinity. "Anyone know much about them?"
Arteta, who had been studying for his coaching badges and had consequently developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of European football structures, looked up. "Played against them before. Decent side. On Premier League terms you would put them somewhere in the bottom half, maybe a bit better than that in their prime, but they have had disruptions."
That was an understatement. Shakhtar had been forced to relocate their entire operation from Donetsk in the east to Lviv in the west, a journey that crossed most of Ukraine, driven by circumstances that had nothing to do with football. Several of their best players had taken the opportunity to move abroad. Some things were more important than contracts.
"David, for that match you will not be in the starting eleven." Wenger's voice came from the front of the bus, unhurried. "I want you fresh for Manchester United in October. This rotation has been planned for a while."
"Fine by me," David Qin said. And he meant it. He had played a lot of football in a short space of time, and he could feel it in the edges of his concentration, that slight blunting that came from sustained effort. A match on the bench, watching, thinking, resting without fully resting, sounded exactly right.
He was dropped off at the Colney training complex and climbed into the small car his assistant was driving. It was late by the time they reached north London, the streets quieter, the lights of the city reflecting off wet pavements. As they passed Arsenal station he leaned forward.
"Is that Hannah? Pull over a second."
Hannah was standing outside the station exit with another girl, both of them looking at their phones with the slightly lost expression of people waiting for a cab that had not arrived.
He wound the window down. "Hannah. Where are you headed? We can drop you."
She spun around, and her face went from mild anxiety to complete delight in about half a second. "David! What are you doing here?"
"Just finished up at the training ground. Do you need a lift or not?"
"Yes, please! God, that would be amazing. The train back from Leicester was delayed and it's been an absolute nightmare and your goal today was incredible, especially that pass where you didn't even look, how do you even do that without..."
She was still talking when she got in, her friend sliding in after her. Hannah's enthusiasm for football, for Arsenal specifically, for everything generally, was one of the more reliably cheerful things David Qin had encountered since arriving in England. It was hard to feel tired around her.
"Your friend first," he said. "Where does she need to go?"
"Oh, Maria, sorry! This is Maria, she lives in Zone One, she's my senior from uni and she came with me to the match today and..."
"Hi," David Qin said, with a nod.
"Hello," Maria said.
She said it quietly, but her eyes were doing something else entirely, moving around the interior of the car, settling on him, moving away, settling again. She had been told about him. Her father had mentioned him, briefly and without warmth, at some point during the summer. The description she had been given and the person currently sitting in the front seat did not quite match up.
David Qin did not notice. He was already talking to Hannah about the match.
They reached Zone One twenty minutes later, and when the car stopped and the door opened, David Qin looked up and immediately did a double take.
Standing on the pavement in the London night, looking considerably less pleased than the occasion seemed to require, was a bald man with a particular way of standing that David Qin recognised instantly.
"Mr Guardiola," he said, recovering quickly. "Good evening."
Pep Guardiola stared at him for a moment, then at his daughter, then at Hannah, then back at his daughter. The stare of a man rapidly constructing a narrative he was not sure he wanted to complete.
He had driven down from Manchester in a mood that was already dark. Tottenham had played the game of their lives that afternoon, the kind of performance that only came once a season, pressing and running and attacking with the abandon of people who had decided the result did not matter and had consequently made it matter enormously. The final score had been four-four, a result that had no business existing in a match City should have controlled, and the drive south had given Guardiola four hours to replay every moment of it.
He had come to London because tomorrow was Maria's birthday, and whatever else was happening in his professional life, he was not going to miss that. His wife Christina had met him downstairs and they had been about to go for a late dinner.
And then this.
Late at night. His daughter. A car. A boy.
Not just any boy, either.
"You said you were getting a taxi," he said to Maria, in a tone that was technically neutral and in practice anything but.
"Santi," Maria said, gesturing at Hannah, "is friends with David, and he saw us outside the station, so he gave us a lift. That is it."
Guardiola absorbed this. He was a reasonable man and he knew he was probably overreacting. He also knew that knowing you were probably overreacting and stopping yourself from overreacting were two entirely different skills.
"It is getting late," David Qin said pleasantly. "We should leave you to it. Enjoy your evening."
He nodded, the window went up, and the car pulled away.
The Guardiola family walked back inside. Maria's two younger sisters, who had been watching from the doorway, immediately wanted to know everything. Christina walked alongside her husband with the expression of someone who had been married long enough to know exactly what he was thinking.
"How do you know him?" Guardiola asked, after a silence that had lasted approximately half a block.
"Through Hannah," Maria said. "They met at her uncle's bar, apparently, after she broke up with Mac."
"Hmm."
"Were you at Bayern together? Was he in the first team or the second team?"
The question landed somewhere tender. Guardiola's expression shifted in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
He had thought about that season more than he would ever admit to anyone. The year everything had collapsed. Four competitions, four empty hands. It was the only period of his career as a manager that he could not revisit without something uncomfortable moving through him. And Qin Ming, David Qin, had been part of that story, not through any fault of his own but simply by existing, by being the player that Bayern had mishandled before Guardiola could intervene, by leaving for Wolfsburg and becoming the player that helped make Guardiola's final European campaign at the club one he would rather forget.
He blamed ten Hag, mostly. That was the honest answer. The decision had been made above him and without him, and by the time he understood what had been lost, it was already gone. Sometimes he let himself imagine a version where he had pushed harder and earlier, where the transfer had gone differently, where David Qin had stayed.
He had never found a satisfying ending to that particular daydream.
"We were not especially close," he said finally.
"Right," Maria said.
She was quiet for the rest of the walk. But Guardiola noticed the particular quality of her silence, the kind that meant she was thinking rather than listening, and it did not improve his evening.
"Maria," he began, in the careful tone of a man navigating a field he knew well and trusted not at all, "you came to London to study. That was the agreement. A new environment, a fresh start. I want you focused on that."
"I know, Papa."
"That boy is not..." He searched for the right word and settled on something general. "He is not always what he seems. On the pitch he is quite rough. Elbows. He broke someone's ribs."
"Papa."
"I am telling you as someone who has seen him play."
"I know. You told me."
She went upstairs without prolonging the conversation, which was the most effective thing she could have done.
Christina watched her husband stand in the hallway for a moment, staring at the stairs.
"Your daughter," she said, with the small smile of someone who had been waiting patiently for this particular evening for approximately sixteen years, "seems quite interested."
"Do not start," Guardiola said.
"I remember 1994," she said pleasantly. "I was modelling for Antonio Milu. You were just a midfielder. And I was curious."
He did not have an answer for that.
"Today was genuinely terrible," he said, to nobody in particular. "Four-four against Tottenham. And now this. I cannot catch a break."
Meanwhile, the cause of his anguish was at home, wrapped in a towel, wandering through his flat in a state of general wellbeing.
The template fusion had ticked up. The Premier League table showed Arsenal two points clear of City. Chelsea had been pegged back by Newcastle in stoppage time. Liverpool had beaten Villa, United had beaten Sunderland, so not everything had gone his way, but enough of it had.
He hummed something tuneless, found the remote, and decided it had been a good day.
Four days later, the Emirates under the early autumn floodlights, the stadium filled to the sort of anticipation that only European nights produce. Arsenal against Shakhtar Donetsk, Champions League Group Stage, Matchday Two.
David Qin sat on the bench in his club tracksuit beside Arteta, watching the game develop with the detached patience of someone who knew they were not needed tonight and had made their peace with it. He had a bottle of water and a running commentary from Arteta, who noticed things at a slightly different angle than most.
Without him in the eleven, Arsenal's attack moved through different gears, slightly less fluid in the final third, the combinations arriving a half-second later than usual. But Shakhtar were a diminished version of themselves. The relocation had taken a toll that went beyond geography. Players had left, rhythm had been lost, and the club that arrived at the Emirates was a long way from the side that had once troubled Europe's best.
Thirtieth minute. Walcott collected on the right, looked up, and looped a cross into the area. Pyatov, the goalkeeper, gathered it and then, in the way that certain goalkeepers occasionally do when the pressure of a crowd and a cross arrive simultaneously, did not gather it at all. The ball slipped free.
Giroud was in exactly the right place. He does not miss those.
One-nil.
Fiftieth minute. A foul in the box, Stepanenko going to ground under pressure from Chamberlain in a way that left the referee no real choice. Red card. Walcott stepped up and converted with the smooth efficiency of someone who had been practicing that particular move since childhood.
Two-nil.
Seventy-eighth minute. Shakhtar won a corner, worked it cleverly, and a header found the net at the far post. Two-one.
Arsenal saw it out without too much difficulty, holding their shape through the final twelve minutes with the composed assurance of a team that knew they had enough.
The final whistle went. Two-one. Six points from six in the Champions League group stage.
David Qin applauded from the touchline, already thinking about the weekend.
Manchester United were coming.
---------
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!