October arrived in London the way it always did, quietly and without fanfare, the heat of September retreating into something cooler and more considered. The leaves on the trees lining the streets around Highbury and Islington had begun to turn, the green giving way to amber and rust, and the air in the mornings carried the first suggestion of a proper autumn chill. David Qin had a few days with no match, and he used them the way he rarely got to use free time anymore, just walking, taking in the city at a pace that had nothing to do with football.
He drove to Colney the following morning and stopped to sign autographs for a small group of fans who had gathered near the entrance to the training ground. One of them was a boy of about ten, who held out a drawing with both hands, the way children offer things they are proud of and a little nervous about.
David Qin took it and looked at it properly. A figure in an Arsenal shirt, the number ten on the back, standing on what was clearly meant to be the Emirates pitch. Above the figure's head, drawn in crayon, sat a crown.
"This is really good," he said, and meant it. "What is your name?"
"Fletcher!" The boy was almost vibrating with excitement. He immediately produced a shin guard from his bag, then another, offering them up. "These are mine, but I took them to church and had them blessed. For good luck. Can you wear them against United?"
David Qin turned them over in his hands. He recognised the brand immediately, a Mitre lightweight model, the same line he had been endorsing for several months. He knew the quality was fine.
"I will wear them," he said. "I promise."
He reached back into the car and pulled out a shirt he had signed that morning in anticipation of exactly this kind of moment. He handed it across.
"When I score," he said, crouching slightly to be at the boy's level, "I will run to the stand and hold these up."
Fletcher looked like he might actually combust.
The morning session went well, the easy flow of a group that had found its rhythm and was not yet tired of it. David Qin and Cazorla spent the better part of an hour working on overhead kick combinations, adjusting the weight and height of the service pass over and over until it landed in exactly the right window.
"Lower, Santi. Chest height. Just below the shoulder."
"I know where chest height is, David."
"Then hit it there."
Cazorla made an indignant noise but adjusted his delivery, and when the ball arrived at exactly the right height and David Qin connected cleanly, both of them grinned at each other with the satisfaction of people who have found the small perfection they were looking for.
Afterwards, lying in the treatment room while the physios worked through their routines, the conversation drifted in the way it always did when there was nowhere to be.
"Who is stronger, do you think?" Giroud asked from the next table. "United or Leicester?"
Ramsey considered this with genuine seriousness, listing names on his fingers. Rooney. Mata. Carrick. Martial. De Gea. Schweinsteiger, freshly arrived from Bayern on a big-money deal. "On paper, United have to be the answer. That is a serious squad."
"Paper," David Qin said, "is not a football pitch. Cruyff had a line about this. Pack a team with the best individual players and you do not necessarily get the best team. You get eleven very talented people who all want to do the same things and keep getting in each other's way. You need the green leaves as much as the flowers, or the flowers stop looking special."
He stared at the ceiling for a moment, then added: "Besides, De Gea has not gone anywhere."
"Oh God," said Bellerín, looking up from his phone. "Did you know De Gea almost went to Real Madrid this summer? Clubs had agreed a fee and everything. The fax machine broke down. The document arrived twenty-eight minutes after the window closed."
He found this absolutely hilarious. Nobody else in the room could quite decide whether to laugh or feel sorry for somebody.
"De Gea is serious," Čech said, from his corner of the room, in the tone of a man who had thought carefully about this and was not being dramatic. "Do not underestimate him. He is probably at the peak of his powers right now. His shot-stopping is extraordinary, and he is very, very good against one-on-ones. United's last few results would have been much worse without him."
David Qin nodded. He was thinking about a match from a version of history he had never quite been able to shake from his memory, fourteen saves in a single game, shot after shot going straight at De Gea and somehow not going in. He could picture the angles, the dives, the fingertip deflections.
"I know," he said. "I'm looking forward to it."
"Looking forward to what?" Giroud asked.
"Oh. Nothing. Just thinking out loud."
A beat of quiet.
"By the way," Giroud said, in a carefully casual voice, "is it true what The Sun printed? That you used to be a United fan?"
"Absolutely not." David Qin did not miss a beat. "I have wanted to be an Arsenal player since I was old enough to know what football was. Wearing the red and white at Highbury, playing for this club, that was always the dream."
"But United's shirt is also red and white," Cazorla said, in the voice of a man who had been waiting for exactly this opening.
"Santi, I will genuinely report you for defamation."
The room dissolved. Someone threw a towel. Someone else made a noise that was either laughing or wheezing. David Qin lay back and let it wash over him with a feeling of deep contentment.
October 4th arrived with a particular quality of atmosphere that London sometimes generates around big matches, a low hum in the streets, faces from elsewhere in the crowd, accents you did not usually hear near the Emirates. A group of Chinese supporters had made the journey from home during the national holiday, filling one corner of the away section with flags and scarves. For them it was something between a football match and a pilgrimage, and the excitement on their faces when they filed through the turnstiles had a sincerity that the regulars, who had seen everything twice, sometimes forgot to feel.
On Sky Sports, the pre-match discussion had reached the portion of the programme where Neville and Carragher were required to be professionally adversarial.
"Gary, word is you are going into management this year?"
"At least I have the ambition," Neville replied. "Some people retire and pick up a microphone and that is the end of their story."
"I wish you the very best of luck. Now, the match. Your thoughts?"
Neville looked at the statistics on the screen behind them and visibly struggled with several impulses before settling on: "Statistics tell you what happened, not what is going to happen. If you want to manage a football club from a spreadsheet, go home and play Football Manager."
"Fair enough. David De Gea, though. His saves-per-game average is the highest in the Premier League."
"And what does that tell you?" Carragher asked the camera, with the faint smile of someone who has made his point without quite finishing it. "If your goalkeeper is saving everything, perhaps your outfield players need to look in the mirror. That said, De Gea is extraordinary. If I had a vault full of cash and I needed someone to look after it, and the options were a safe, a guard dog, or David De Gea, I am not thinking about it for very long."
The broadcast cut to laughter.
"Ninety million pounds meetingOn Sky Sports, the pre-match discussion had reached the portion of the programme where Neville and Carragher were required to be professionally adversarial.
"Gary, word is you are going into management this year?"
"At least I have the ambition," Neville replied. "Some people retire and pick up a microphone and that is the end of their story."
"I wish you the very best of luck. Now, the match. Your thoughts?"
Neville looked at the statistics on the screen behind them and visibly struggled with several impulses before settling on: "Statistics tell you what happened, not what is going to happen. If you want to manage a football club from a spreadsheet, go home and play Football Manager."
"Fair enough. David De Gea, though. His saves-per-game average is the highest in the Premier League."
"And what does that tell you?" Carragher asked the camera, with the faint smile of someone who has made his point without quite finishing it. "If your goalkeeper is saving everything, perhaps your outfield players need to look in the mirror. That said, De Gea is extraordinary. If I had a vault full of cash and I needed someone to look after it, and the options were a safe, a guard dog, or David De Gea, I am not thinking about it for very long."
The broadcast cut to laughter.
"Real Madrid spent all summer trying to sign him and still could not get it done," Carragher continued. "Which tells you everything about how United value him. Gary, you have defended De Gea. What about Qin?"
Neville's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "The transfer fee is a product of where the game is going financially. With or without him, someone else would have come along and set that number. As for the fact that he is currently at the top of the scoring and assists charts, Premier League clubs have not had a full season to study him and build their plans around him. That will change."
The rest of the chapter remains exactly as it was. Only that segment needed adjusting, swapping the invented three hundred million figure for the real story of De Gea's failed move to Madrid, which actually works better as a piece of period detail and gives Carragher a more grounded and funnier line. this evening," Carragher continued. "Gary, you have said your piece about De Gea. What about Qin?"
Neville's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "The transfer fee is a product of where the game is going financially. With or without him, someone else would have come along and set that number. As for the fact that he is currently at the top of the scoring and assists charts, Premier League clubs have not had a full season to study him and build their plans around him. That will change."
He said it with the confidence of a man who had been told by somebody important that it was true.
David Qin, watching a few minutes of the programme in the tunnel area, curled his lip and moved on. Neville had been an excellent player. The punditry career was a work in progress.
"Pat," he said, catching up with Pat Rice, "can you look something up for me? When does Ashley Young's contract run out?"
Rice looked at him with the expression of someone who has long since given up trying to predict what question will come next. "We are not in the market for a right back. We have Bellerín."
"I know that. Just curious."
Rice checked his phone. "2018."
"Right." David Qin looked mildly disappointed, the way you do when a piece of trivia you had been looking forward to turns out not to apply.
"Why?" Rice asked.
"Never mind. It is a long story."
He looked upward through the Emirates roof toward the pale October sky, searching for pigeons and finding none, and felt another small window of possibility quietly close.
"I wish this was the away fixture," Rice said suddenly, half to himself.
David Qin looked at him. "Why?"
"Because the last time we won at Old Trafford, Tony Blair was still Prime Minister."
David Qin laughed. He had not expected that. It landed with the kind of specificity that made it genuinely funny, that particular English humour that delivered the absurdity completely deadpan and then left you to find your own way to the punchline.
Old Trafford as a graveyard for Arsenal. Well. Not his problem today.
The pre-match press conferences had taken place earlier in the week, and both managers had said things that were now being replayed on every sports programme in the country.
Van Gaal had gone first. He had a tendency to find his way to the same subject whenever the conversation turned to flair players, and the subject was always, essentially, the same: a particular kind of footballer who prioritised the spectacular over the functional, who juggled and nutmegged and flicked when a simple pass would serve everyone better.
"A player who throws the ball into the air to perform tricks while four defenders catch up with him," Van Gaal had said, with the measured disdain of a man who had thought about this for decades, "might look very exciting to the crowd. But I would suggest that kind of player might be better suited to the circus."
He had not said David Qin's name. He did not need to.
Wenger had been told about the comment by a journalist at his own press conference and had been quiet for a moment, in the way he was quiet when he was choosing his words rather than finding them.
"Under Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United may not always have won, but they played football that people genuinely wanted to watch. There was invention, there was creativity. It was a pleasure to study, even when they beat us." He paused again. "The current version of Manchester United does not win as often, and I will be honest, I find them rather difficult to watch. I have used the word boring, and I will use it again. Ninety minutes of sideways passing with no forward intention is not a tactical decision, it is a way of avoiding making one."
He smiled at the room.
"The fans who buy tickets and travel to matches deserve something for their money, not just a result but an experience. David does both. He makes winning look alive." He appeared to consider something, then thought better of it. "If he were to go to the circus, I think the circus would be considerably improved. But I have nothing more to add about Mr Van Gaal's career choices."
The journalists laughed, and one of them asked a follow-up, and Wenger said something about United's possession statistics constituting a rather unusual form of control, the kind where you have the ball but are not doing anything with it, and that was the end of the official press conference.
Back in the dressing room, Wenger had not mentioned any of it. He saw no reason to stoke fires that would need managing later. Arsenal were the stronger side today, on current form, on confidence, on the shape and understanding they had built over the past two months. They did not need anger. They needed clarity.
Next door, Van Gaal was doing something completely different. His pre-match team talks were always structured around the tactical blueprint he had constructed, each player assigned a specific role within a system that left very little to interpretation. He believed in the whole over the parts, in the plan over the improvisation. The plan was the thing. The players were its servants.
It had made him successful over a long career, and it had also made him enemies, because certain players, the ones who needed freedom to function, could not exist comfortably inside a system that wanted them in a fixed position on a fixed piece of grass.
There had been several of those players across his career. He was not going to change his mind about them now.
In the corridor outside the dressing rooms, Arsenal and United emerged at roughly the same moment. David Qin looked along the line of red shirts and registered several things quickly.
Rooney looked like he might have put on a few pounds since the summer, though David Qin had the good sense not to say so.
Martial was staring at him with the particular intensity of a young player who has been told, or has worked out for himself, that he is the alternative to the person in front of him. If United had signed David Qin, there would have been no room for Martial. Now Martial was wearing the number eleven and watching the number ten across the corridor with an expression that mixed resentment and curiosity in roughly equal measure.
David Qin held the eye contact for a second, gave him nothing, and looked away.
Memphis Depay, United's Dutch winger, was doing something similar from further down the line. Twenty-five million from PSV in the summer, given the number seven shirt as a statement of intent, and now watching David Qin with an expression that was trying very hard to be intimidating and landing somewhere closer to intense.
David Qin very slowly, very deliberately, rolled his right elbow outward.
Depay's gaze immediately found something fascinating on the opposite wall.
Martial's eyes cleared considerably.
David Qin turned back to face the pitch.
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