The Emirates had been loud before. But three goals up before half time against Manchester United, of all opponents, against the side that had spent a decade treating this fixture as a routine exercise in humiliation, this was something the stadium had not quite experienced before. The noise was not simply volume. It was release, the accumulated weight of years of afternoons that had ended badly, finally being set down.
The United players stood near the centre circle with the particular stillness of people who are waiting for something to make sense. It was not going to make sense. Forty-three minutes gone, and the game had already left them behind.
De Gea stood with his hands on his knees, looking at the patch of grass inside his six-yard box where Giroud's header had landed. He had covered the near post correctly. He had positioned himself as well as anyone could have asked. The run off the back of the movement, the ball arriving at the far post, the angle that gave him no realistic chance, none of it was a failure of ability. It was simply what happened when a team understood how to create situations that no single goalkeeper could solve, no matter how good.
He felt genuinely tired in a way that had nothing to do with his legs.
A small, quiet part of him was still thinking about Madrid.
"Let's just try to keep it at three," Carrick said quietly to those nearest him. Nobody disagreed.
Van Gaal sat down on the bench for the first time in forty minutes. His assistants, who had been standing close and saying nothing, remained standing and said nothing. The atmosphere around the United technical area had the particular quality of a room in which someone very important is extremely unhappy and everyone is waiting to find out what happens next.
In the Arsenal technical area, Wenger straightened his jacket and allowed himself a small breath of satisfaction.
"United have no fixed shape this season," he said to Pat Rice, more thinking aloud than explaining. "They have bought players and sold players and bought different players and never once settled on what kind of team they want to be. And when you do not know what you are, you cannot play with any real clarity."
Rice nodded. "Spent big. Got nothing for it."
When the half-time whistle came, the United supporters in the away section made more noise than might have been expected from a group watching their team trail by three. Some of them, the longer-memoried ones, had been talking about 2008, about Liverpool going in three goals down at half time against United and coming out transformed, all passion and belief, pulling it back to three goals apiece in one of the more extraordinary second halves the Premier League had produced. They told each other about it with the slightly desperate energy of people who need to believe something improbable is possible.
In the home dressing room, Wenger was calm and precise.
"United are not as poor as they have looked today. Their problem is structural. Van Gaal wants to play a possession game through wide positions, but his fullbacks cannot carry the ball forward and his wingers cannot create in tight spaces. When his system breaks down he has no alternative. That is why they look lost."
He paused to let it settle.
"They will adjust at half time. They will try to be more direct, more physical. We stop playing for possession because we do not need it. Instead we press in units, cut off the short pass from their ball carriers, force them to go long or sideways, and when we win it, we go immediately."
He sketched it briefly on the board. The principles were simple. The execution required everyone thinking at the same speed.
In the away dressing room, the atmosphere had a low ceiling and not enough air. Van Gaal was not a man who shouted at his players. He believed shouting was what managers did when they had run out of ideas, and he had not run out of ideas. He had simply arrived at a situation where the ideas he had were not producing the results he needed.
He spoke for twelve minutes, detailed and specific, covering angles and positions and moments of transition. It was, by any objective measure, a well-constructed tactical address. The players listened with the expressions of people who had heard this kind of thing many times and had not yet found a way to make it work on the pitch.
Rooney leaned against his locker and said nothing.
The second half began, and what was immediately clear was that whatever United had discussed at the break had not yet translated into anything resembling a change. Their forward press was disorganised. Their transitions were slow. Ashley Young worked hard and honestly on David Qin and was beaten more often than not. Darmian found Sánchez simply too direct and too quick for him to manage comfortably.
"Luke Shaw's injury has cost them more than one player," Neville said, in the broadcast. "You lose your best left back and it changes your entire left side. Ashley Young is doing what he can, but he is not a natural fullback and you can see it in moments like that."
Arsenal were content to wait. Three goals up with a full second half remaining, there was no urgency to impose itself, no need to take risks. The ball moved through the lines, patient and comfortable. Koscielny played it to Cazorla. Cazorla to Monreal. Back inside to Coquelin. Out to the right. Back again.
Van Gaal watched from the technical area with the expression of a man being slowly driven out of his mind by something he cannot control.
He had no choice but to press. Sitting back and letting Arsenal pass it around was giving them time to recover, time to breathe, time to wait for the moment. He needed chaos, contact, something that disrupted the rhythm before it settled into the pattern that was going to kill him.
He waved his players forward, urgently, repeatedly.
The press came, and Arsenal moved through it.
Mata received in the left channel, looked up, found nobody available, and was closed down by Monreal before he could create anything. He laid it back to Rooney, who took a touch and had the ball taken off him immediately by Coquelin, arriving with the straightforward physicality of a man who had been watching the pass develop for two seconds and had been moving toward it for one and a half of them.
Koscielny, head up, struck a long diagonal to the centre circle.
Giroud held Smalling off with a firm back and headed the ball sideways, not elegantly, not clinically, just effectively, finding Sánchez in space on the United half.
The move developed with the pleasant inevitability of something that had been practised many times and was now simply being executed in front of fifty thousand people.
Sánchez drove at Blind. Inside or out, it did not much matter; Blind was not quick enough to close either option in time. Sánchez went outside, looked up, and swept a low, bending cross toward the far post, beyond De Gea's reach, tracing a line that dropped into the exact corridor behind the defence.
David Qin had been wrestling Ashley Young's attention for the better part of a minute, pulling him toward the near post, then stopping, then moving again, the kind of minor physical contest that most people in the ground had not noticed. When Sánchez's cross came, he had just enough space between himself and Young to take one step and arrive at the ball before the defender could.
He did not need a clean strike. He needed the right angle.
He threw himself at it, side-footed low, redirecting rather than shooting, trusting the pace of the cross to do most of the work.
Four-nil.
The United supporters, who had been singing about 2008, went quiet.
"Four!" Dalton's voice cracked slightly. "Arsenal have scored four goals against Manchester United! Four goals against the full first team! The last time this happened was 2001 in the League Cup, and that was against a United reserve side. Today is the first team. Today this is the first team and Arsenal have scored four!"
He was breathing heavily by the end of it.
In the stands, Ferguson coughed once, then again, then settled back into his seat with an expression that those who knew him well recognised as something beyond ordinary frustration. He had built that club from the ground up over twenty-seven years. He had built the culture, the expectation, the refusal to accept defeat even when defeat seemed certain. The team on the pitch below him bore the badge and wore the colours and shared no other meaningful characteristic with the sides he had produced.
When his teams lost, they lost fighting. They lost having tried every possible thing. They lost having made the other side earn it in full.
This United was not losing. It was being carried off the pitch.
"It's a disgrace," Neville said, beside him, and Ferguson did not tell him he was wrong.
He looked at the scoreboard and then back at David Qin, celebrating with Sánchez in the corner, and thought about the summer again. The Glazers had been right about one thing: what United needed was someone who made people want to watch. The Glazers had been wrong about everything else, as usual, but on that single narrow point they had been correct.
It was too late now.
In the Arsenal dressing room after the third goal, Wenger had spoken briefly to Rice about the upcoming international break and the workload his players were carrying, and had quietly decided to ease the pressure off in the final half hour. Let United have some possession. Let the legs recover. The Golden Boy nominees were one thing, but the league was played in March and April as much as October, and certain players were going to need to travel very long distances before the week was out.
The last thirty minutes passed without further drama. United had some of the ball and did not quite know what to do with it. Arsenal held their shape and their three-goal cushion and the clock moved with the deliberate pace of a clock that knows it has already made its point.
The final whistle arrived.
Arsenal four, Manchester United nil. Eight wins from eight in the Premier League.
The Emirates sang. All four sides, the sound bouncing around the bowl of it, warm and unrestrained. Sánchez was still sliding somewhere. Giroud had already located the nearest camera. David Qin stood for a moment with his hands on his knees, breathing, then straightened up and looked around at the ground.
He was mildly irritated, if he was honest with himself. Not with the result, not with the performance, but with the small feeling that two or three more had been available if they had really gone for it. Carrick and Smalling had been confused for long stretches. De Gea had carried United's entire defensive ambition on his back and eventually been beaten by the accumulated weight of it.
But Wenger was right. The international break was coming. The last thing anyone needed was a tweaked hamstring from an unnecessary late tackle in the eighty-fifth minute of a game already won by four.
"Eight goals now," Giroud said, appearing at his shoulder. "You lead the second place by four."
"Early days," David Qin said, which was true and also out of character enough that Giroud stared at him for a moment.
"Are you feeling well?"
"Get out of here."
The laughter that followed carried them back toward the tunnel.
The post-match press conference, in the room where United's media team had set up the backdrop and the branded water bottles and the chairs, became something else entirely.
Van Gaal walked in and sat down and looked at the assembled journalists for a long moment.
"Does anyone in this room feel sorry for me?" he said. "No? Nobody?"
The room did not know quite what to do with this.
"What have we done wrong? Seriously, I would like to know. Because the tone of these questions suggests I am about to be dismissed and replaced. Is that what you believe? Is it not a fact?"
He leaned forward slightly.
"Eight rounds. Eight rounds of a thirty-eight round season. Last month we were in the top three. Next month we will be in the top three again. That is my belief in this squad and in myself. Your job is to report facts, not to construct narratives. Some of you have not been doing your job."
He sat back.
"This match was an accident. We were not prepared. Three goals before we could adjust. Some of my players needed to stand up. They chose not to. That is all I have to say."
He stood up and left before the follow-up questions arrived.
Outside the ground, the evening edition of the news cycle was already running at full speed.
The Manchester Daily carried a front page photograph of four Arsenal players celebrating and the words: "A shambles. Van Gaal blames his players after the heaviest home defeat of the season. Ferguson: United must find its will to fight."
The Guardian ran its league round-up with Arsenal sitting on twenty-four points, eight points clear of where they had been this time last year. Chelsea had been beaten three-one by Southampton. Mourinho, the note at the bottom of the page observed, had not looked pleased.
The Times carried a short piece with a single paragraph that had been written by someone who was not quite sure whether they were describing a footballer or something slightly larger: "Since arriving in the Premier League, David Qin has maintained a goal or assist in every single match. The league has not adjusted to him. Perhaps the adjustment needs to happen in the other direction."
The Sun ran a lip-reader's analysis of the exchange between David Qin and Martial, complete with a photograph of the exact moment Martial's composure had visibly cracked. The headline was: "The new Henry gets a lesson in levels from the ninety million pound man."
Online, the reaction had been running for hours.
@TacticalGnome1: "Van Gaal just told the entire press room he might be getting sacked. Mid-conference. Unprompted. Absolute scenes."
@FoxesAndFoxholes: "At least we lost four-one and not four-nil. Feels important."
@MatchdayMadness: "Martial: I'm on the Golden Boy shortlist too. Qin: I needed someone to make up the numbers. I cannot recover from this."
@GunnersTillIDie: "24 points. Eight games. Someone check on the other title contenders, they look a bit pale."
@TacticalGnome1: "Ferguson watching from the stands looked physically pained every time United gave the ball away. Which was approximately every thirty seconds."
Buried at the bottom of the Zhibo football page, beneath the match reports and the reaction pieces, was a short news item. The World Cup qualifier in Asia, Group Stage, Round Five. China away to Qatar, October 8th. Both sides unbeaten, both on nine points. David Qin confirmed in the squad.
He was already thinking about the flight.
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