Before the training match began, David glanced across at the far goal.
Petr Čech was going through his ritual, tapping each post three times with his right index finger. It was rooted in Czech folk tradition, a small private petition for the woodwork's favour, and had somewhere along the way become simply part of who he was. He was thirty-four years old, had arrived from Chelsea for ten million euros, and showed no particular signs of slowing down. If anything he seemed to have grown more settled, more assured, as if the years had deposited something useful rather than taking anything away.
David had felt this in training already. Terry's comment to the press, that Čech alone would be worth ten to fifteen points to Arsenal, hadn't seemed like flattery once you'd watched him work.
Čech noticed the attention and smiled. Beneath the famous protective helmet and the composed, somewhat austere exterior was a personality that was genuinely modest, slightly reserved in a way that connected back to a childhood that had not been uncomplicated. David found himself quietly admiring the man.
If he had Oliver Kahn's voice to go with everything else, he thought, he'd be completely untouchable.
The assistant coach Paolo Primaveri blew for kick-off.
Giroud played to Ramsey, who occupied the number ten slot in today's 4-2-3-1. The Welshman had Arsenal football threaded into him at some deep level, the kind of midfielder who understood without being told where the spaces would open. The broken leg inflicted by Shawcross in 2010 had cost him nearly four years of his development, and the residual fragility in contact situations was still there if you looked for it.
"Aaron!" David moved sideways and called for the ball.
Ramsey's combination play in tight spaces was excellent, and the pass arrived clean. He had already begun his forward run to continue the move when his mouth fell open.
David had sensed Bellerín arriving from behind without looking. The outside of his boot caught the ball at precisely the right angle, a feather-light redirection, and it rolled neatly through the Spaniard's legs. David was already turning away from the nutmeg before it completed, gliding around Bellerín's momentum and collecting the ball on the other side.
"That's King right there!" Giroud's shout carried across the pitch.
He was not being generous for the sake of it. The more productive David was, the more chances Giroud would get. He understood the arithmetic perfectly. He made a diagonal run across the channel, occupying Koscielny with his movement while positioning himself as a lay-off option.
Bellerín, nutmegged and furious, turned and pushed into a sprint. His recovery pace was extraordinary, close to 9.65 metres per second, and he began closing the gap with alarming speed.
David didn't look up at Giroud.
"Joel!"
He spotted Campbell on the far side, where the defensive shape had shifted to cover the left and left the right flank unguarded. His left foot swung through the ball and sent a curling pass across the width of the pitch.
Campbell had spent three years on loan across France, Spain and Greece before finally getting his chance, and his coaches had consistently praised the unusual maturity of his crossing for a man of twenty-one. He received the ball, took one look at the space available, and very nearly laughed.
Could drive a bus through here.
He understood immediately why. David had drawn every available body toward the left. Campbell moved forward and clipped a low cross at waist height toward the near post.
David had already started to write the opportunity off when Giroud's right heel connected with the ball from behind his own standing leg.
The scorpion kick.
It was magnificent and slightly too powerful, and the ball crashed off the crossbar and away.
"Olivier, that was extraordinary," David said, walking over with a raised thumb.
Giroud accepted the compliment with appropriate dignity. "I'm not boasting, Qin," he said, "but I genuinely think I might be the only person in this entire squad who can keep up with the way you think."
From somewhere nearby, a more measured voice spoke up.
"Qin, your left foot." Cazorla was watching him with a curious expression. The Spaniard had spent weeks studying Wolfsburg footage in preparation for working alongside the new signing, and something wasn't quite matching what he remembered. "The accuracy is different. Noticeably better than it was six months ago."
"I've been putting extra work into it," David said, which was truthful even if it wasn't the complete explanation. Šuker's talent had settled into his left foot like something that had always been there waiting, but he had still restructured his training to build around it properly.
Cazorla looked at him for a moment. "It took me several years of deliberate practice to develop a usable left foot," he said. "I remember the right foot injury, how I had no choice but to use the left, and then kept going with it afterwards. Several years." He shook his head with a small, warm laugh. "So that's what it looks like."
The match continued. When the blue team won possession, Sánchez came alive.
There was something immediately recognisable in how the Chilean played, an intensity that felt almost personal, as if every ball were a small argument he was determined to win. He drove at Débuchy, absorbed the contact with his shoulder and chest without breaking stride, rolled two step-overs, and struck hard toward the near post.
Čech, utterly concentrated behind his helmet, went sideways and got a single palm to it. The ball deflected over for a corner.
"Brilliant, Petr!" David called across.
Čech pushed himself up from the turf and nodded. He had wondered, when he left Chelsea, whether he'd made the right decision. Being around young players, being around this young player, made him feel something he hadn't quite expected. A kind of renewed energy, as if the proximity to that much hunger was itself invigorating.
On the touchline, Wenger turned to Pat Rice.
"You see what he does to the atmosphere? Not just the quality. The atmosphere."
Rice had arrived at Arsenal as a fifteen-year-old in 1964, played over five hundred games at right back, managed the youth side, served as Wenger's assistant through everything, and briefly held a hundred percent win rate as caretaker in the days before the Frenchman arrived. He had a slight Northern Irish lift to his voice that never quite left him, even after sixty years in North London. He nodded slowly.
"Like Les," he said. "The way Les talked, the way he ran, his whole manner. Changed the energy of the place." He paused. "This one's something similar."
"Watch," Wenger said.
Čech punched clear a Cazorla corner. The ball carried to the left touchline and David took it.
Bellerín came in hard and high with his shoulder, trying to knock David off during the first touch. David redirected it with his shoulder into Monreal's feet, using his own body as the delivery mechanism, and the ball arrived clean. Monreal, surprised, played it square to restart the build-up.
David frowned slightly and kept moving.
At Wolfsburg, Rodríguez would have immediately driven forward or played a diagonal through the channel. But that wasn't something you solved in a single session. He kept running, kept offering himself.
When the ball eventually reached Ramsey, the Welshman spotted David making a run into a position that looked briefly quite dangerous, though Wilshere was lurking in the blind spot to his right, reading the same intention.
Ramsey hesitated for a fraction of a second, then trusted his instinct and played it.
Wilshere had been wearing the number ten since Van Persie left for United. Wenger had come to him personally, asked with genuine feeling that he give up the shirt for the new signing, and Wilshere had agreed because he could not refuse his manager. But he hadn't stopped wondering whether David had earned it yet. He set himself, watching the feet, ready to intercept the moment the first touch was taken.
David didn't take a first touch.
His right foot came across the ball in a flat arc, a rainbow flick, and the ball lifted cleanly over Wilshere's outstretched leg before he had finished the motion of attempting to win it.
The players around the pitch made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a laugh.
David was already accelerating into the space, the ball dropping back to his feet, his head up and scanning. Wilshere had stepped too far forward. Coquelin was out near the wing. The gap between the two holding midfielders was wide open.
He hit it.
The shot was right-footed and heavy, and it covered the distance to goal before the young reserve goalkeeper Matt Macey had completed the decision to dive. He went left. The ball went right. It hit the inside of the post and settled in the net.
David stood still for a moment after the follow-through, reading what his foot had just told him. The connection had felt different, cleaner than he remembered, sharper. He clenched his fist once, privately, and let it go.
"Well done, Qin!"
Giroud announced his intention to become the first name on the new centre-forward's list of preferred suppliers. He had watched those Wolfsburg highlights with the concentrated attention of a man studying for an important exam, and Dost had shown him exactly what was possible.
"Not bad," David said without false modesty. Then he looked at Ramsey and raised an eyebrow.
See? Trust me.
Ramsey breathed in slowly. What he had just watched, the escape from Wilshere, the composure, the weight of the finish, produced in him a very strong inclination to give David the ball whenever he asked for it and to do so without the half-second of doubt he'd just wasted.
On the touchline, Rice shook his head gently. "Extraordinary young man. The touch, the vision. You make it look simple, but there's nothing simple about any of it. The surface he chooses, the weight, the timing."
"Do you know why I had to sign him?" Wenger's voice was quiet, and the brown eyes behind his glasses were somewhere in the past. "He reminds me of Dennis."
Rice looked at him, surprised. Then he thought about it and smiled.
Not in style. Bergkamp and David operated from entirely different instincts. But there was something they shared, a quality that went beyond technique, something closer to imagination, a sense that the football was always slightly more interesting when they were involved in it.
The possession was good but the tempo was uneven. Without a De Bruyne to create constant forward pressure through the pass, the team's build-up tended to go sideways rather than through. He had been spoiled, he knew. A player of Kevin's quality was not a given, had never been a given even at Wolfsburg, where they had built something genuinely rare.
He wouldn't look for someone else to solve the problem. He would absorb it into his own game, take more of the tempo-setting onto himself, exactly as Wenger had suggested in their early conversations. Use the dribbling not as an end in itself but as an accelerant. Carry the ball to force the defensive shape to shift, then play through the gap before it closed.
When Monreal played him in for the second time and he went again, Bellerín was better prepared. He had been studying the patterns, trying to herd David toward the outside, cutting off the inside line. It was intelligent defending. It just didn't account for the quality of what it was trying to contain. Two step-overs opened the gap on the outside, and when Bellerín committed to blocking that route, David pulled it back with his left foot, created the space with one movement, and crossed low and hard.
The ball spun into the penalty area at an exact height.
Giroud peeled off his marker, got to it first, and headed it firmly into the bottom corner.
His shout of celebration was louder than the training ground probably required.
"Olivier, brilliant." David meant it. He had been watching Giroud with genuine interest. The criticisms were real, the finishing could be uncertain, the footwork limited, the tendency to hold the ball a beat too long a problem when service was erratic. But give him clear delivery and a defined role and the man was genuinely useful. Dost had taught him that. A centre-forward who understands his purpose and performs it without ego is worth considerably more than people give credit for.
"Your delivery makes everything simple," Giroud said, and for once he sounded almost shy about it.
He was thinking about what he had just experienced, the way Mertesacker had been pulled to the edge of his defensive zone by David's run, leaving the area stretched, the ball arriving at exactly the right moment and height to make the header as straightforward as headers can be made. Dost had described this, in slightly less analytical terms, as the best feeling in football. Giroud now understood completely.
Across the pitch, Sánchez was thinking.
He had played left wing since he was old enough to have a position. It was his. He had been the axis around which Arsenal's attack turned for a year, and he had done it with everything he had, the relentless pressing, the individual brilliance, the refusal to accept a ball as lost. He had come from too far back and fought too hard to cede ground easily.
But he was watching David now, and what he saw produced a feeling he didn't immediately have a name for. Not intimidation, exactly. Something more uncomfortable than that.
Wenger saw it too from the touchline and said nothing. He had been thinking about this since watching Wolfsburg dismantle Spurs, thinking about what happened when you introduced a player of this quality into a team that already had a dominant personality. The friction was inevitable. But friction, properly directed, produced something useful.
Sánchez was one of the most driven players Wenger had ever managed. As a child in Tocopilla he had performed acrobatics in the street for small change, forward rolls and backflips and side-flips, waiting for the coins to land in the dust, picking them up after the crowd drifted away. He had sworn he would never go back to that. The hunger was completely real and had made him extraordinary. It had also, occasionally, made him difficult, the tendency to keep the ball a beat too long, to seek the individual solution when the collective one was available, to leave teammates feeling like they were playing supporting roles in his personal story.
What Wenger was betting on was that the arrival of someone genuinely better at the things Sánchez prized would not break him but sharpen him. Redirect the ambition inward, toward adaptation, rather than outward, toward dominance.
Whether that bet was correct would take time to answer.
The training match ended with a score that didn't meaningfully reflect what had actually happened, which was that something new had arrived at this training ground and everyone present had felt it.
The days moved quickly after that. Then they were on a plane to Shenzhen.
The Premier League Asia Trophy had been running since 2003, held every two years in odd-numbered years to avoid clashing with major international tournaments. This summer's edition in China featured four sides: Arsenal, Everton, Newcastle, and Guangzhou Evergrande as the host representatives. The football would be largely pre-season in character, exhibition football with competitive dressing, but nobody had told the supporters.
When the Arsenal squad walked out of Shenzhen airport, they stopped.
The terminal concourse was a wall of red and white. Thousands of people pressed forward behind the barriers, and the sound that came from them when David appeared was the kind that takes a moment to fully register.
"David Qin!"
"Arsenal — Invincible!"
"Gunners, forward!"
Giroud stood very still and looked at it.
"I score at the Emirates and it's nothing like this," he said, to nobody in particular. He rubbed his eyes as if recalibrating. He had always vaguely assumed the idea of China as a territory without football culture was roughly accurate. He was revising that assumption at speed.
Sánchez, Čech, Cazorla — they all stood there and absorbed it, each recalibrating their own sense of where David Qin actually sat in the world's consciousness.
David removed his sunglasses and cap, turned toward the crowd, and raised his hand. His smile was completely unperformed. He liked his supporters. He always had.
"Signing session at the St. Regis tomorrow," he called out, loud enough to carry. "Come along if you can make it."
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