The ball left David's foot with a clean, decisive sound and curled through the air in a wide, beautiful arc, passing over Firmino's head and bending into the empty left side of the goal before Mignolet could complete his dive.
Two-one.
Paul Darton's voice filled the Emirates with something approaching pure joy. "David Qin steps up for the free kick, and look at the ease of him, the complete absence of doubt in every line of his body. The ball bends. It curves toward goal. Nobody in that red shirt can stop it. The right foot does it again. Arsenal lead once more, and every supporter in this ground who made it here tonight is living through something they will not forget."
Below him, three sides of the Emirates had risen together, a wave of red and white that moved around the ground and came back louder than it started.
On the pitch, David ran to the corner flag, dropped to his knees and slid, feeling the grass burn pleasantly against his legs, and then rose in a single movement and punched the air with both fists, turning to face the north stand.
"Come on you Arsenal!"
He shouted it along with them, the words carrying out of him before he had decided to say them. His teammates arrived around him, arms going over his shoulders, hands slapping his back.
"That right foot is pure magic," Giroud said, with the specific wonder of a man who had been thinking about his own goal return and was now recalculating it upward.
"David," Cazorla said, "from now on, no argument about who takes the set pieces. Left side or right side, it doesn't matter."
"Santi, we should develop a routine. Sometimes you stand over it while I take it, sometimes I stand over it while you take it. Keep them guessing about both of us."
Cazorla laughed. It was a genuinely good idea. Two technically complete players sharing a free kick, each capable of delivering from either side of the ball, was the kind of problem that defenders found genuinely uncomfortable in training and actively dreaded in matches.
Sánchez looked up at the scoreboard and let out a long, quiet breath. The tension he had been carrying since Coutinho's equaliser, which had come partly from his own decision to shoot rather than pass to Giroud in a better position, settled and released. He filed it as a lesson. Not the first. Not the last. But one he intended to keep.
The Liverpool players had the look of a group that knows the game is gone but has not yet decided whether to acknowledge it. They glanced at the touchline. Klopp was already thinking ahead, processing the match as a collection of information about what his team could and could not yet do, rather than as a defeat that required an emotional response.
He asked the bench to warm Ibe and made a straightforward decision: drop the press, protect the shape, see if a counter-attack could produce a consolation and at minimum keep the score from getting worse.
Arsenal, reading the shift immediately, simply kept the ball. They moved it side to side with the unhurried patience of a team that understood possession as a form of victory in itself, and Liverpool's players, who had spent sixty minutes running at extraordinary intensity, could not generate the urgency required to press the ball back.
The Emirates relaxed. The tension that had accompanied the early Klopp press and the Coutinho equaliser dissolved into something warmer, more comfortable.
Then the stadium screen lit up with a piece of footage from the Arsenal bench.
It showed Wenger sitting forward on the edge of his seat as the free kick was being taken, his neck extended, his expression stripped of its usual composed authority and replaced by something openly anxious. The moment the ball hit the net, he turned and buried his head against Pat Rice's shoulder.
The ground laughed. Not unkindly. With enormous affection.
"Adorable," someone near the north stand said, which captured the general feeling precisely.
In the stands, Arsenal supporters who had spent years watching Wenger manage matches with the composed dignity of a man who considered public emotion a private matter, found themselves watching footage of him hiding in his assistant's shoulder like a child, and the gap between the image they held of him and the reality of what they were seeing produced something that felt very close to love.
David heard the laughter from the pitch, looked up at the screen, and worked out what he was seeing.
"His whole image just evaporated," he said, in a tone that was affectionate rather than mocking.
These months had given him a Wenger that differed meaningfully from the version he had read about on the internet. Not worse. Fuller. More human. The composed philosophical authority was real, but so was the man who had told him football was all he had ever had, and so apparently was the man who buried his face in Pat Rice's shoulder when David Qin scored a free kick.
"Right," David said, turning to his teammates. "We need to make that happen again. Which means we need another goal."
Giroud smoothed his hair with one hand, entirely prepared.
The energy in the Arsenal squad lifted noticeably. Liverpool, drained of the press that had been their primary weapon, were defending deep and narrow and offering almost nothing going forward. Every time Klopp made a substitution, Arsenal simply adjusted and kept the ball.
Seventy-fifth minute. Gabriel came off for Gibbs, Ramsey made way for Arteta. Sensible changes, both aimed at protecting the right side against Coutinho's range and maintaining the midfield control that had settled the second half.
Five minutes later, Sánchez forced a run down the left channel and instead of taking the shot he might have taken earlier in the match, laid the ball off to Arteta.
The Spaniard had played at Everton as an attacking midfielder, had arrived at Arsenal and gradually taken on a deeper, more functional role, and had been growing quietly into exactly the kind of player a title-chasing squad needed: reliable in possession, composed under pressure, capable of seeing the picture that the more expressive players around him sometimes missed. His passing had not declined with age. If anything the vision had improved, the way it sometimes does when a player accepts the limits of their physical gifts and invests instead in the quality of their decision-making.
He looked up and played it long.
The ball crossed forty metres of pitch and found David in stride.
Clyne came across. David used his shoulder to redirect it centrally, finding Cazorla, who chipped it into the penalty area.
Giroud attempted a scorpion kick.
It was magnificent in conception and caught Lovren on the way through, deflecting away for a corner. Giroud looked at his own foot with the expression of a man reviewing footage of a near-miss.
Cazorla played the corner short to Koscielny, whose header struck Skrtel and ricocheted out to the edge of the area.
Coquelin arrived first in the scramble, taking a full-shouldered challenge from Emre Can to win the ball cleanly, and David called for it immediately.
"Good work, Francis."
He took it on the half-turn and looked up. Liverpool's defensive shape was disorganised from the corner sequence, players still finding their positions, the clearance lines not yet established. He counted the gaps without counting, the way a player does when the reading has become instinctive.
He changed direction, moving from the edge to the channel, drawing Milner toward him, then playing a quick wall combination with Giroud and arriving in the penalty area on the left side.
His shot struck Mignolet's near post.
Arsenal won the corner.
In the aftermath of the scramble that followed, the ball broke to the right side of the area. Five metres of space. Clyne was the nearest defender and he was five metres away.
David set it.
Right foot, the target fixed on the top right corner of the goal.
He ran, planted, and the drive came out of him with the full weight of the leg behind it.
The shot was better than the free kick. More pace, more power, the same placement, the ball arriving in the corner before Mignolet had finished deciding which way to move.
Three-one.
The Emirates erupted for the third time in the evening.
Martin Tyler's voice carried over the noise. "David Qin! His second of the night! A Premier League brace in only his third top-flight appearance, and this goal is the one that ends the contest. Liverpool have nothing left to give."
Gary Neville was matter-of-fact. "Three league matches. Four goals. If anyone was still wondering whether the move to Arsenal was right for him or whether he needed time to adjust, those questions are answered. He has not adjusted to the Premier League. The Premier League is adjusting to him."
At the corner flag, David stood with his teammates arranged behind him, the three St. George's Cross flags rising in the stands above them, the cameras fixed on him from every angle.
"King!!!"
The north stand gave him everything they had.
He stood in the noise and felt it move through him and allowed himself, for just a moment, to think about what he wanted to do with this feeling. He wanted to carry it forward. He wanted more nights like this one, and more after that, and more after that, until the Emirates was associated in people's minds not with library jokes but with the specific electricity of watching football played at its best.
Arteta arrived beside him. "Four goals in three matches. That is a terrifying return rate."
"We're only getting started," David said.
"This is what we signed for," Cazorla agreed.
"Arsenal are invincible," David told the group, and the laughter and the agreement came back at him simultaneously.
He had already decided which photograph from tonight he would print and put on the second page of his red-and-white album.
On the touchline, Pat Rice had given up trying to maintain professional composure and was shaking hands with everyone within reach.
"Wenger," he said, turning to find the manager standing with his expression at its most carefully neutral, the corners of his mouth doing something independent of his intentions. "You may as well smile properly. Your reputation for inscrutability is already gone."
Wenger's mouth moved.
"Chelsea. Liverpool. Those are only the beginning," Rice continued, not waiting. "City, United, and yes, Spurs. We can beat all of them."
He was not speaking from optimism. He was speaking from what he had seen over the past eight weeks, the quality that had arrived at the training ground and raised everything around it, the way the squad had responded, the specific and irreplaceable thing that David Qin did to the atmosphere and the results of a football team.
It felt different from the previous years of being close but not quite there. It felt like something that was actually going to happen.
Across the pitch, Klopp gathered his players without theatre. The result was what it was. He had known coming here, genuinely known, that winning was unlikely. Two months was not enough to build what he needed to build. The real work was ahead of him, and this evening was part of it. Information. A measure of the gap. Something to work toward.
From the away section, several thousand Liverpool supporters were singing.
The anthem rose from them clearly, carrying across the ground despite the noise around it.
Though your dreams be tossed and blown, walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone.
David listened to it properly as he walked back for the restart. The melody was calm rather than rousing, nothing like the explosive anthems some clubs used, but there was something in the steadiness of it that worked. The words held a particular kind of resilience, the kind that wasn't about triumphalism but about continuing regardless of what the scoreboard said.
No wonder it had lasted this long.
It didn't change what the scoreboard said, though. Three-one. And Arsenal were not finished.
Eighty-seventh minute. Monreal overlapped and crossed, and David shot from the same area where Cazorla's corner had found him, but the ball struck a defender and went out.
In stoppage time he kept moving, kept looking for the chance that would give him the hat-trick, but the legs were telling him what sixty-plus minutes of high-intensity football against a Klopp press will eventually tell any player. He had more than he usually would at this stage of a match, but not quite enough to manufacture a third goal from nothing.
The board went up showing five minutes. David chased every ball.
The whistle came.
Three-one. Full time.
In the broadcast studio, the presenter was wrapping up.
"Arsenal win again. David Qin scores his first Premier League brace. Three matches in English football's top division, four goals. We should stop calling him a teenager and start calling him what he is, which is one of the best players currently playing in this league." He turned. "One question to end. The Golden Boy Award, the young player prize. Could he win it?"
His colleague considered this for about two seconds. "The Golden Boy Award? I think you should be asking about the Ballon d'Or. Look at the young players in the top five leagues right now and tell me who you put above him. I can't find one."
"No," the presenter agreed. "Neither can I."
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