"Van Gaal took charge of Manchester United after the 2014 World Cup, inheriting the wreckage of the Moyes era. His first match in charge produced a seven-nil thrashing of LA Galaxy, which suggested the recovery might be swift and emphatic."
"It has not been swift, and it has not been emphatic. The club's share price on the New York Stock Exchange has fallen from just under twenty dollars in July 2014 to around thirteen dollars today, a drop of roughly thirty percent in little over a year. Last month alone, United's market value shed eighty million dollars in a single afternoon while the broader American market was actually rising."
"The analysts point to the same two causes every time: the loss of key players, and the results that have followed."
In the studio, the presenter worked through the numbers before moving to the teamsheets. Arsenal were at full strength, Ramsey back in the starting eleven after his rotation against Shakhtar, the full complement of first-choice players given the green light. Wenger had been saving them for exactly this.
United's lineup was what it was. De Gea in goal, the midfield anchored by Schweinsteiger, Rooney leading the line, Martial given the number nine role for the afternoon, Depay wide. A squad that looked considerably more impressive on paper than it had been performing on the pitch.
"Worth noting," the presenter added, "that in the last seventeen meetings between these sides, Arsenal have won only two. United have taken eleven of the remaining fifteen, with four draws. And in United's last seven away trips to the Emirates, they have won four, drawn two, lost one. Whatever the current form table says, history does not favour Arsenal today."
The Emirates was already loud when the teams began their warm-ups, and by kick-off it had graduated to something closer to a sustained roar. Banners had been unfurled across the home sections. Some of them were about the match. Several of them were about older things, grievances that had been stored carefully over decades and brought out on occasions exactly like this one.
There was history here, and it ran deep.
Wenger stood in the technical area before the teams emerged and let his mind drift back through it, the way you sometimes do when a fixture carries enough weight that the present moment feels connected to all the ones before it.
In the 1930s, Arsenal under Herbert Chapman had been the dominant force in English football while United were still finding their feet in the second tier. Then the Busby Babes had ascended and Arsenal had faded into the background. Then Arsenal had their golden period in the seventies while United cycled through another trough of their own. The two clubs had seemed to orbit around some invisible axis, their peak periods arriving in turns, never quite overlapping.
Until 1996.
Ferguson was in his pomp by then, United a machine that had already won four of the first five Premier League titles, their competition coming largely from Blackburn, Newcastle, Aston Villa. Nobody seriously expected the Frenchman newly arrived from Japan via Monaco to change any of that.
The first press conference exchange had set the tone immediately. Wenger suggested that United's results were partially a product of opponents giving them extra rest time between fixtures. Ferguson's response had been delivered with the particular brand of contempt that he reserved for people who he had decided needed putting in their place.
"A man from Japan is going to teach us how to play football?"
What followed had been one of the great rivalries in the history of the English game. The 1997-98 season, when United had seemed to have the title wrapped up and Arsenal had strung together ten straight wins to steal it, the Double arriving in Wenger's second full season. The three years after that when Arsenal had finished second every time, the backdrop to United's own treble year, Giggs weaving through the entire Arsenal defence in that FA Cup semi-final in a way that was still occasionally described on television as if it needed no further explanation.
"Every man thinks his own wife is the most beautiful woman in the world." That had been Ferguson's line. Wenger had filed it away and said nothing.
Then 2002-03, when Arsenal beat United at Old Trafford and Ferguson had turned his fury on Beckham, the boot leaving a cut above the eye that no amount of spin could fully explain. Vieira's stamp on Van Nistelrooy. The forty-nine match unbeaten run, ended eventually at Old Trafford. The Invincibles' chance at a treble, blocked by United in the FA Cup. The pizza, thrown in a tunnel, landing on Ferguson's jacket.
Wenger had lost count of their arguments. He genuinely could not remember how many times they had stood near each other and said things that would have looked terrible in print.
And now Ferguson was retired, watching from the stands occasionally, and Wenger found himself feeling something he had not quite expected. Not relief, not satisfaction. Something closer to missing the competition.
The referee's whistle ended all of it.
From the first minute, United had a man on David Qin wherever he went. Ashley Young, who was having a decent enough season to justify his place in the starting eleven, stuck close and used every small piece of physical contact the referee would tolerate. Not enough to draw a card. Just enough to be a constant irritation.
It did not matter much in the early exchanges, because Arsenal's other players were moving the ball quickly enough to expose what United's press could not cover. Cazorla, Ramsey and Sánchez worked a series of sharp triangles that opened up the first layer of United's defensive shape before anyone in a red shirt had properly woken up.
Van Gaal was on his feet within three minutes, arm out, demanding more from the front line.
Rooney simply did not have the legs for the kind of high press Van Gaal wanted. That had been quietly true for a year and was becoming less quiet by the week. He was still valuable, still capable of moments, but the engine was not what it had been, and no contract in the world changed that particular reality.
Martial, though, was everywhere. He had been given the central striking role for the afternoon, which he preferred vastly to the wide position he had been occupying, and the freedom of it had energised him. He pressed from the front and tracked back and made himself a nuisance in transitions, driven by the specific motivation of a young player who knows exactly who he is being compared to and is not yet ready to accept the comparison.
It did not prevent the attack from developing. Cazorla found space to slip a ball out to the right channel and Sánchez took it at full pace, leaving Darmian struggling behind him. The Italian fullback was a reasonable defender in a reasonable system. He was not built for a footrace against Alexis Sánchez at full tilt.
Sánchez reached the byline and pulled it back low and hard.
Giroud arrived at exactly the right moment, jumping slightly ahead of his marker, directing his header across De Gea and toward the far corner.
In the commentary position, Paul Dalton was already forming the words.
De Gea was on his line, set, and he got across to it. One hand, extended to his right, and he pushed it around the post with a save that had no business being made at that angle and from that distance.
Dalton hit the desk with his palm.
"Why did that fax machine have to break!"
De Gea stood up and screamed at his defence, not words exactly, just a sound that communicated everything it needed to communicate. He pumped his fist once, hard, and reset.
Daley Blind had been in the process of covering when the cross came in and had barely managed to avoid watching it go in from two yards away. He found his composure again quickly.
Carrick, from his position in the middle of the pitch, called across calmly. "Hold the shape. We are fine."
In the Arsenal dressing room at half time the previous week, after the Leicester match, Čech had given his opinion of De Gea with the economy of a man who did not waste words. Every word had been accurate. The Spaniard was at the absolute peak of his powers, the shot-stopping instinctive and extraordinary, the positioning the product of thousands of hours of work made to look effortless.
Three minutes later, David Qin received the ball in the right channel and fashioned enough room for a curling effort with his left foot, driven toward the top corner with the kind of flight that left De Gea a fraction behind it.
De Gea got there. Full stretch, two hands, deflected over the bar. The crowd noise that followed had the particular quality of disbelief rather than disappointment.
"Ten minutes gone," Tyler observed, "four shots for Arsenal, three on target. And the conversion rate is zero."
"De Gea is the reason," Neville said simply. "There is no other explanation."
The match settled into a rhythm that Arsenal dominated in possession without being able to penetrate in the final moments that mattered. Every time the move approached the critical zone, De Gea was there, or positioned correctly, or reading the trajectory before anyone else in the ground had worked it out.
United were happy enough with this. Van Gaal's team, when it could not impose itself, was built to absorb and counter, and the counter required only De Gea to claim or parry and Rooney to flick something on to Martial.
From the stands, Sir Alex Ferguson watched in the visiting section, having made the trip down from Manchester with Gary Neville's father. He had a quiet word with the man beside him.
"Give it thirty minutes. If they can't score by then, they won't. Same as always."
He said it without malice, with the settled confidence of someone who had watched Arsenal build phases of play for long enough to know where the weight of the season usually pressed. He was wrong about the pattern, but he did not know that yet.
On the pitch, David Qin had been doing his own assessment. Ashley Young was smarter than most of the fullbacks he had faced this season. He did not try to win the ball outright. He simply made every receiving position slightly uncomfortable, positioning himself close enough that David Qin had to be aware of him before he could think about anything else. Every yard gained required twice the effort.
He pulled Cazorla aside between phases.
"Work the right channel. Keep Young occupied over there. I will stay left and wait."
Cazorla nodded.
The next several minutes looked, from the outside, like Arsenal slowing down. The ball moved right, then back, then right again, patient and unhurried. Van Gaal watched from his technical area with an expression of satisfaction. Ferguson, in the stand, nodded slightly.
United's shape drifted half a step to the right to follow the ball. Just half a step. Barely perceptible.
David Qin moved quietly into the space it created on the left, not running, just repositioning, the way a chess piece slides into a square that has just opened.
Ashley Young was a yard behind where he needed to be.
Cazorla saw it. Three months of training ground work, hundreds of repetitions, and the connection between them had become something close to telepathic. He remembered exactly the weight and height of pass they had been working on, the one that arrived chest-high, that gave a receiver with the right technique something extraordinary to work with.
The ball left his right foot and curved upward, tracking a gentle arc across the face of the penalty area.
De Gea read the delivery and moved immediately to narrow the near post angle, calling out his instruction as he went.
Ashley Young heard the goalkeeper and slowed, waiting for the ball to drop, waiting for the moment of control that would give him the chance to intervene.
The ball fell toward David Qin's chest.
The Emirates held its breath. Fifty thousand people, and for a single moment, not one of them made a sound.
He cushioned it with his chest, letting the ball drop to his left side, and then he was turning, left foot planted, body rotating, and he left the ground.
The overhead kick was not simply athletic. It was shaped, sculpted, the right foot making contact at the precise angle required to bend the ball away from the near post where De Gea was covering, sending it toward the far corner instead.
De Gea had exceptional reactions. He moved across, fully extended, left arm reaching as far as physics allowed.
He felt the warmth of the ball as it passed his fingertips. Just the warmth. Nothing else.
The net moved.
One-nil.
"Good God." Tyler's voice came out quietly, the instinctive response of someone who has been doing this for thirty years and has just seen something that does not happen very often. "A chest trap and an overhead kick. David Qin. De Gea had the near post covered and he put it the other way. I am not sure I have words for that."
Neville said nothing for a moment. When he spoke, it was two words.
"That's special."
Paul Dalton in the ground commentary position had lost his earpiece somewhere during the celebration and had not noticed.
"He's left the ground! He's taken it off his chest and he's left the ground and De Gea couldn't stop it! De Gea! One of the best goalkeepers on the planet and he couldn't stop it! What IS this boy!"
David Qin landed, got up, and ran. Not toward his teammates first, but toward the far corner, the one where the away section sat behind the goal. He pulled his sock down as he ran, the shin guard with the small boy's blessing visible underneath, and he held it up to the Arsenal fans packed behind him as they climbed over each other in every direction at once.
The noise that came back was not a roar exactly. It was something more disorganized and more genuine than that, the sound of fifty thousand people all having the same feeling at exactly the same moment and not quite knowing what to do with it.
He stood there for a second, shin guard raised, spine straight, and let the corner of his mouth pull into something wide and unguarded.
He was getting very fond of that nickname.
---------
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!