Wembley Stadium.
The attendance was higher than usual for a Community Shield, and the reason was obvious. Arsenal had just broken the world transfer record to bring in a seventeen-year-old. Chelsea were the reigning Premier League champions. The two managers had been conducting a running argument in public for over a decade. If you wanted to sell tickets, you couldn't have arranged the fixture better.
The history between Wenger and Mourinho went back to the summer of 2004, when the Portuguese arrived at Stamford Bridge fresh from winning the Champions League with Porto and immediately set about dismantling everything Wenger had built. The previous season had been Wenger's masterpiece, twenty-six wins, twelve draws, not a single defeat, the first unbeaten top-flight campaign in England since Preston North End in 1889. Wenger was fifty-six years old and at the height of his powers. He could not have imagined, that summer, that he was standing at the end of something rather than the middle of it.
Mourinho's first season at Chelsea produced the Premier League title. Arsenal never won it again.
What followed, on pitches and in press conferences and in corridors at grounds around the country, was a prolonged exchange between two men who were constitutionally unable to leave the other alone. Neither could resist.
Wenger had called Mourinho a voyeur. Mourinho had called Wenger a failure and a specialist in failure. Wenger had accused Mourinho of manufacturing pressure to avoid it. Mourinho had pointed to eight years without a league title and suggested the record spoke for itself. Both men had said things they probably didn't entirely mean and some things they absolutely did, and the whole business had long since passed beyond simple rivalry into something more complicated, two very different visions of what football was supposed to be, expressed through the medium of mutual provocation.
Whether they respected each other was a question that had no clean answer. Perhaps the hostility was itself a form of respect. Perhaps two men who genuinely had nothing to learn from each other would simply have stopped paying attention.
At the pre-match press conference, Mourinho settled into his seat with the comfortable authority of a man who had done this many thousands of times and found it largely beneath him.
"David Qin?" He let the name sit in the air for a moment. "It reminds me of what Alan Hansen once said, you'll win nothing with kids." He paused. "Which I know was wrong, of course. Young players can produce extraordinary things. But ninety million pounds for a seventeen-year-old." He shook his head slowly. "Arsène has lost his mind."
A reporter from The Sun leaned forward. "Is that your assessment of Mr. Wenger?"
"No, no, no." Mourinho raised one finger and moved it gently from side to side. "In this country there is one manager who faces no pressure at all. Every other manager lives with pressure every day. This particular man can talk about referees before a match and after a match. He can push people in the technical area. He can shout and complain in the morning and shout and complain in the evening, and he can go years without winning anything and still keep his job, and still receive a kind of respect I have never been given." He stood, straightened his jacket, and turned toward the door.
"Which manager are you referring to?" the Sun reporter asked, with the expression of someone who knew the answer perfectly well.
Mourinho smiled over his shoulder.
"You know."
In a separate room, Wenger sat in front of his own cluster of microphones and listened with visible effort to a relay of Mourinho's words.
"I have never believed I hold special privileges," he said carefully, "and I want to make that clear. I receive respect because I have worked hard for this club and because I have always thought first about the supporters. That is the whole of it."
He paused, composing himself.
"As for spending ninety million pounds on a young player, yes, it is the largest investment of my career. I believe it will also produce the greatest return. Time will give us the answer. I'm happy to wait."
He was about to stand when a Guardian journalist caught him.
"Mr. Wenger, in your last eight matches against Chelsea you've drawn three and lost five. And across thirteen encounters with Mourinho specifically, the record is similar. Does that weigh on you today?"
Wenger stopped.
"I don't think I need to describe my relationship with José Mourinho," he said. "He will fight for his team and I will fight for mine. But I don't see this as a competition between two managers. Some people want to create that story, I understand the appeal, but this is Arsenal against Chelsea. It's a very high-quality match and the supporters have come to watch football, not to watch us." He looked at the journalist steadily. "That's my answer."
He turned again toward the door.
"And Fàbregas?" someone called after him.
He walked out without breaking stride.
The kindling had been laid. The questions about Čech facing his former club, about Fàbregas returning to the ground where he had grown up, about Wenger's long winless run against Mourinho, about who now held the title of the world's best left winger, all of it had been aired before a ball was kicked, and Wembley carried the particular charge of a fixture that had already been debated extensively and still needed to be settled.
In the Arsenal dressing room, the squad finished their warm-up and gathered for the final word before the tunnel.
Arteta moved to the centre of the room. He had the captain's armband today, though for the match itself it would pass to Mertesacker.
"This match matters to us," he said. "We know what it means to the supporters and we know what it would mean to go out there and beat the league champions. So let's wake up and defend this trophy."
He looked across at David.
"Qin, anything you want to add?"
"As it happens, yes."
David had been at Arsenal for just over a month, and the warmth he had for his teammates was genuine. He had stopped calculating how much of himself to show.
"We've won a lot of games in pre-season," he said. "But those matches meant absolutely nothing. You can't learn anything from winning against opposition that isn't trying to beat you." He looked around the room. "If we're going to win something worth winning, it has to be against the best. Chelsea beat us last season. We don't have to wait until March to settle that. We can do it today. Right now. Let's go and take this."
Wenger had just stepped through the door as David finished speaking. He stood quietly at the back and said nothing.
He had not heard that particular note in a dressing room for a while.
"Brilliant." Arteta stretched out his right hand. "Come on, Arsenal!"
"Come on!"
The hands came together and the room emptied.
In the tunnel, the two squads arranged themselves and David found himself looking along the blue-shirted line.
Terry. Hazard. Matić. Fàbregas.
And Courtois, who had been in goal the night De Bruyne's penalty was saved. Kevin had mentioned, entirely without bitterness, that he would be in the stands today. David had already decided that if he scored, whatever celebration he chose would be partly for him.
The Chelsea players were looking at David too, with the frank curiosity of people who had read about someone for months and were now seeing them in person. The record transfer fee attached to someone this young was a genuinely strange thing to stand next to.
Fàbregas's gaze was different from the others. There was something in it beyond curiosity, something that hadn't fully resolved itself into a single feeling. He had come to Arsenal at sixteen. He had given eight years to the club and played some of the best football of his life in North London. Then he had gone to Barcelona, which had not been what he imagined. He had wanted to come back and been told, plainly, that once you leave you don't return. He had ended up at Chelsea.
Now he was watching Wenger extend resources to a new player, resources and trust and positional authority that exceeded anything Fàbregas had received in his best years here. It was not a pleasant thing to sit with, and he was honest enough with himself to name it accurately.
Win, he thought. That was all. Just win.
David noticed the look, read something of its contents, and felt a mild amusement rather than anything sharper. If Fàbregas had simply said, openly, that he wanted Barcelona, that he couldn't spend his career without a league title, and had left on those terms, that would have been honest, and honesty deserved respect. The manner of the departure had been something else. David filed it away.
Martin Tyler's voice opened the Sky Sports broadcast, carrying the warm, measured authority it had accumulated across thirty years of occasions like this one.
"Good afternoon and welcome to Wembley! The Community Shield, Arsenal, the defending champions, against Chelsea, who won the Premier League title last season. Two managers with more history between them than most rivals manage in a lifetime. And for Arsenal, the first proper examination of their record signing. Ladies and gentlemen, this one has everything."
Gary Neville settled in beside him. "The big question for me today is not whether David Qin is talented, we know he is. The question is whether a seventeen-year-old, in his first real competitive match in English football, against a Mourinho side built on organisation and aggression, can produce what he produced in Germany. The Bundesliga and the Premier League are very different animals."
"Chelsea are without Diego Costa," Tyler noted. "That changes their attacking shape considerably. Remy leads the line instead."
"It helps Arsenal," Neville said. "Costa was the focal point of everything Chelsea did going forward last season. Physical, awkward, constantly in your centre-backs' faces. Remy is a different kind of problem, sharper movement, less confrontational. Arsenal's back four will find that more manageable." He paused. "The danger comes from Hazard and Fàbregas. Those two in possession in the right areas, that's where Arsenal need to be concentrated."
The two squads emerged from the tunnel into the Wembley afternoon, and the noise that greeted them had the particular quality of a crowd that had been looking forward to this for a long time.
Online, the Chinese fan forums were running hot.
@CanaryWharfGooner: First competitive appearance. Win us a trophy, lad.
@TacticalGnome_GZ: Chelsea's back four is slow. Sánchez on the right eating Ivanović alive, Qin on the left eating whoever they put opposite him. This is the plan.
@RealistCN_AFC: Hazard and Fàbregas are the actual danger. If we don't manage those two we lose regardless.
@NorthBankNoodles: I can see De Bruyne in the stands. He's here for his mate. Not for Courtois.
@FootballMathGuy: Fàbregas at Chelsea is actually a good fit technically. Doesn't make the whole thing any less painful to watch.
Wembley. The afternoon sun sitting high and bright over the arch.
Both sides took their positions. The referee's whistle cut through the noise.
Giroud knocked the kick-off ball to Cazorla, who played it back toward the defensive line, and Arsenal's shape began to organise itself.
David moved wide to the left and immediately felt Ramires tracking him. The Brazilian had come from nothing, a childhood in a tin-roofed shack in a neighbourhood where the gangs controlled the open ground and the football pitches had to be negotiated for rather than simply used. That specific hardship had produced two very distinct gifts: the ability to make fast decisions in tight space, and a physical balance in contact that was almost impossible to disturb. Ancelotti had called him the perfect template for the modern box-to-box midfielder. His former coach Batista had said his legs ran on turbines but his brain was always half a second ahead of everyone else's.
Mourinho had put him on David from the first minute. That much was clear.
The opening twenty minutes were careful from both sides, both squads still warming into the occasion's pace. A high-tempo friendly is not quite the same as a high-tempo competitive match, and both sets of players were finding the calibration.
Hazard tried to cut inside from the left in the twenty-third minute. Coquelin read the movement and dispossessed him cleanly.
"Hazard giving the ball away again," Tyler noted. "He has not looked sharp today. A pre-season that generated some headlines for the wrong reasons, and you do wonder whether he's fully match-ready."
"He'll sharpen up," Neville said. "Hazard always does. But for now Coquelin is winning that battle, and Arsenal are starting to find a bit more rhythm in possession." He paused. "The danger comes from Hazard and Fàbregas. Those two in possession in the right areas, that's where Arsenal need to be concentrated."
When Arsenal won the ball back and began to move it forward with purpose, the feeling in the stadium shifted.
The tentative opening phase was over. Arsenal were done with feeling their way in.
---------
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!