The first half ended and Chelsea walked off trailing by two goals, the Stamford Bridge crowd offering the kind of reception usually reserved for visiting opposition rather than the home team. Mourinho walked down the tunnel ahead of his players, his posture communicating everything he had decided not to say until the dressing room door was closed.
David Qin heard the noise from the home stands and glanced at Giroud.
"Are they booing their own side?"
"The season they are having," Giroud said, "I think the fans have run out of other options."
"I almost feel sorry for them."
"Almost," Mertesacker said, from just ahead.
Wenger let the half-time break run for a few minutes before he spoke, waiting for everyone to settle. When he did, his tone was measured rather than celebratory, which was itself a kind of message.
"Two goals up away from home against a side that won the title eight months ago. That is a good position to be in. Do not mistake it for a comfortable one." He moved to the board. "The twenty-eighth minute, that Chelsea counter: Francis, you tracked wide correctly, but Per, you did not push up to cover the channel it created. If their attacking midfielder had moved across half a second earlier, that was a chance."
He went through two or three other moments with the same precision. His analysis of the defensive shape, a correctable moment in Arsenal's own build-up that had been slightly too casual, and then one observation that was aimed without ambiguity at David Qin.
"Your body language tells your teammates nothing. When you want the ball in a particular position, when you have read what the next phase should be, the others cannot see inside your head. You need to give them something they can follow. A movement, a gesture, something they can read from twenty yards."
David Qin nodded. He had been aware of the tendency without quite naming it. He and Cazorla had built a shorthand over months of training that operated almost without signals, but the assumption had begun to spread to the rest of the group, where the shorthand did not yet exist.
"We are guilty of starting to believe our own form," Wenger said, pulling back to the wider point. "The table is not the game. The table is the result of the games. Focus on the game."
Sánchez was the first to speak. "He is right. We have been treating this like it is already won."
"It is not," Wenger said. "Not this half, not this season."
The second half was not dramatically different from the first. Chelsea were better in the sense that they tried harder to be, Hazard finding more of the ball on the right side, Matic continuing to be the only midfielder on either side who looked genuinely comfortable, Costa making a nuisance of himself through various means that were largely legal and occasionally not. But the coherence that a well-functioning team generates was not there, and without it the individual qualities felt disconnected, like instruments playing in different keys.
Sixty-seventh minute. A corner from the right, swung in by Hazard, and Costa arrived at the near post with the specific experience of someone who has been manufacturing space in penalty areas for a decade. The elbow that created his separation from Mertesacker was not visible to the assistant referee. The header that followed was clean and accurate.
Čech, who had been the best goalkeeper in the world at his peak and was now something different, not less than that exactly, but diminished in the specific physical ways that goalkeeping diminished you over time, got across a half-step later than he once would have.
The ball was in.
Chelsea one, Arsenal two.
The Stamford Bridge crowd found their voice again, briefly, the specific relief of people who had been bracing for a worse outcome and had been given a reason to hope instead. Mourinho allowed himself one small movement of the arms, quickly controlled.
David Qin drove at Ivanovic's outside six minutes later, beat him at the byline, and Zouma came across to clear. The corner found Mertesacker arriving at the far post with the force of a man who had just conceded a goal he felt responsible for.
Three-one.
Wenger made his substitutions shortly after, bringing Arteta and Flamini on for Cazorla and Ramsey, pulling David Qin off and replacing him with Walcott. The squad was already thinking about Tuesday.
The match ended where it was. Three-one to Arsenal, Chelsea still on eleven points after nine rounds. The ninth-place side on eleven points. The defending champions.
Mourinho stood at the edge of his technical area as the final whistle went and listened to his own supporters express their feelings about the performance. His expression was the expression of a man who has weathered many things and is in the process of deciding whether this particular thing is weatherable.
David Qin walked past and caught a glimpse of it. He remembered what it had been like at Arsenal before, the years when things went wrong and Wenger had stood in exactly this kind of noise, from his own supporters, and kept standing. He did not particularly like Mourinho. But he understood the specific humiliation of being booed by the people who are supposed to be yours.
He glanced at Wenger, who had not said anything to the press about Mourinho's position since the match ended, and saw something in his expression that was harder to read than usual.
On the bus home, someone's phone showed the Manchester City result. Six-nil against Newcastle, with De Bruyne providing three assists and Agüero scoring five.
David Qin stared at this information for a long moment.
He had nine league goals from nine matches. Agüero had just scored five in one afternoon. The gap at the top of the scoring charts, which had been four, was now two.
He made a sound that was not quite a word.
"You are staring at your phone like it owes you money," Giroud observed.
"De Bruyne has three assists tonight. He has drawn level with me on the assists chart."
"Kevin is very good," Giroud said, without any apparent awareness of how unhelpful this was.
"I know Kevin is very good."
"He was at Wolfsburg with you."
"I know he was at Wolfsburg with me."
He checked again fifteen minutes later, when the data had refreshed properly, and discovered he had misread. The City result he had first seen was from Round Eight. Tonight they had beaten Bournemouth five-two, with De Bruyne on two assists rather than three.
He was still at the top of both charts.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling of the bus and felt slightly better about everything.
The next day he went to Bertrand Carlsen's bar because Hannah had insisted on buying him a meal by way of thanks for the goal and the dedication and the general business of keeping a promise nobody had expected him to keep. He went partly because he liked the warmth of the place and partly because Hannah's enthusiasm for everything was genuinely contagious in a way he had not encountered often, the particular infectious energy of a person who finds the world interesting and has not yet learned to manage that enthusiasm down to an appropriate level.
He had barely sat at the bar before the stool beside him scraped out.
Maria Guardiola, who he had last seen in front of her father's building at half past eleven on a dark October night.
"Do you speak Spanish?" she asked.
"No. German, English and Mandarin."
She had been curious about him, he gathered, in a way that had something to do with Wolfsburg and the previous season and the particular story of a team that had beaten Bayern to the Bundesliga title, which was the kind of story that interested people who had grown up around football at its highest level and understood what it meant. Her father had files on Wolfsburg. She had not been able to open them.
"Would you like to join us for dinner?" she said. "I am inviting you. My bill, my choice."
He raised an eyebrow.
She explained, quickly and clearly, that there was a Luis who had been looking at Hannah in a way that would become a problem if they were left alone, and that his presence would prevent that situation from developing, and that this was the actual purpose of the invitation.
"And," she added, "Papa's credit card."
"Fine," he said.
Hannah arrived ten minutes later and was visibly pleased to discover both of them already there. The dinner was at a restaurant that charged prices reflecting its postcode, and the food was very good, and the conversation moved between the four of them, because there was a fourth, in the way that good conversation does when no one is performing for anyone else.
The fourth was the coincidence.
They were leaving when he recognised the voice.
"I thought you had lectures."
Léa Wenger turned from the friend she had been talking to and smiled at him with the particular composure of a person who is never caught off-guard.
"Not every day."
Her eyes moved to the two women behind him with an expression that was interested rather than curious, in the way that mathematicians are interested in equations they have not seen before.
Maria stepped forward with the easy confidence of someone who has been introduced to important people since childhood. "Maria Guardiola."
"Léa Wenger. Cambridge, neuroscience."
They assessed each other with the efficiency of people who understand the information they have just exchanged.
Hannah, caught between them, experienced the precise sensation of being a junior student unexpectedly standing between two prefects. She introduced herself in a slightly formal rush that included her year and school, which she had not intended to mention.
Léa smiled at her warmly and then looked at David Qin with an expression that asked, without words, what exactly was going on and when had Guardiola's daughter entered the picture.
He read the expression accurately and decided the pavement outside a restaurant at nine in the evening was not the ideal setting for that explanation.
"We should get going," he said. "Send me those football questions whenever you like."
"I will," Léa said pleasantly.
He shepherded both of them toward the street and got them into separate cars and went home and fell asleep earlier than he had intended, which was its own kind of relief.
The Sun's editorial team had not slept. They had been watching David Qin for the better part of three months with the focused attention of people who have decided a story exists and are waiting for the evidence to cooperate. Their legal counsel had been clear: the people around him had good solicitors and the tolerance for speculative reporting was low. Small human interest pieces were acceptable. Anything that touched his reputation required actual evidence.
Now they had photographs.
The photographs showed David Qin leaving a restaurant with two women, one of whom was photographed at an angle that, depending on how you chose to interpret shadows and movement, could be described as close.
The Sun, October 19th: "REVEALED: The True Identities of the Two Mystery Women Seen Out with Arsenal Star David Qin."
The article named both women correctly, noted their connections, and said almost nothing that could be legally challenged.
Pep Guardiola was in a good mood when the notification appeared on his phone. City had won, he had slept well, the morning had been pleasant. He opened the article and looked at the photograph for approximately four seconds.
He called Maria.
"Can you trust The Sun?" she said, before he had finished his opening sentence. "They published a story last week claiming Rooney's wife Colleen was going on a reality television programme. They also said Colleen believed Wayne could change his ways. Do you believe any of that?"
He could not immediately construct a counterargument.
He sat down in a chair and looked at the ceiling for a while.
In north London, Arsène Wenger had seen a different photograph in the same article. This one showed Léa at an angle that, combined with the caption about her connection to David Qin, invited an interpretation that was not impossible but was also not demonstrated by anything in the image.
He did not call Léa. He had recently been through a period of trying less hard to manage her feelings and finding that this produced better outcomes than the alternative.
He did not ask David Qin either. The question would be strange coming from a manager and stranger still given the photograph's ambiguity.
He put his phone down and thought about Tuesday's Champions League match instead.
In the bar, Bertrand Carlsen was genuinely happy that week. His son Luis had been coming in more often, apparently motivated by some calculation of his own, and Bertrand attributed this to personal growth and a newly discovered appreciation for family time, which made him feel that something he had been doing differently lately was working.
This interpretation was, in various ways, incorrect, but it made him very content, and contentment at that age is its own kind of success.
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