Vietnamese Football and the Rough Gem in the Mud: When the Pitch Tells Its Story Through Silences

Da Nang, a July afternoon. Hoa Xuan Stadium lay so quiet that I could hear the ball sigh.

It was not a headline match. Not a single national-team star stood on that grass. There were only some three thousand spectators scattered across Stand B, the Da Nang sun pouring down on the pitch like thick honey, and a U19 side still fumbling to find each other through short passes that had not yet found their rhythm. I arrived late, lost my way, and sat in the wrong seat. Sometimes that wrong turn is what takes you to the right place — a place you should have reached long ago.

The 73rd minute. The home side's No. 10 — a name nobody sitting beside me could pronounce correctly — received the ball on the right flank. He did not shoot, nor did he pass at once. He set the ball with the outside of his right boot, turned his body a small angle the way one turns an old door, and the ball traced an S — soft, cold, impossibly precise — before striking the post and bouncing out. I did not know who the boy was. I only knew my heart raced as it does when a strange poem is read aloud at midnight.

After the match I tore through the squad list, replayed the clip twelve times in slow motion, and wrote a piece titled 'The Boy Who Drew an S on the Grass.' The U19 head coach read it, and weeks later the name appeared on a training camp list. Since then, I have never opened a piece with a scoreline.

A rough gem needs no polishing — only an eye patient enough to love it. I first wrote that line in a yellowed notebook, and today, at sixty-seven, I still believe it the way I believe the sun rises in the east. But for that belief not to become cheap jewellery hung around Vietnamese football's neck, I must say plainly what I saw at Hoa Xuan that afternoon — and what so many people overlook when they look only at the V.League table.

Vietnamese football, over the past few seasons, has entered what I call 'the season of silences.' The table still shuffles after every round, clubs still race to buy foreign strikers, and stadiums still have their packed nights of roaring. But beneath that lively surface runs a quieter current: a shift in systems, the ageing of a generation of pillars, and the rise of young players whose fate depends on whether someone is patient enough to watch them.

I have covered eight Olympics, eight World Cups, and long stretches of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. I have watched footballing nations rise, and I have watched footballing nations quietly decline with nobody noticing. The greatest lesson is not about tactics but about the ability to read weak signals. A footballing nation does not collapse overnight. It collapses in silence — when youth pipelines are neglected, when local coaches are replaced by costly foreign names who do not understand the place, when global sponsors care only about the return on their shirt advertising rather than the community of fans in a provincial town.

Our V.League holds a paradox. Organisationally, it is far more professional than a decade ago. Commercially, clubs boast sponsors I once could not have dreamed of. But in identity, many clubs are becoming interchangeable: the same back four, the same deep defensive block, the same reliance on a foreign striker to score in the closing minutes. Tactical diversity is being traded for a strange kind of safety. And inside that safety, creative young players — the ones capable of a pass like an S — are usually the first sacrificed.

For weeks I sat in corners of stadiums nobody wanted to sit in, talking to lottery-ticket sellers, to the old woman hawking sugarcane juice, to groundskeepers who had watched football for decades. They remembered players the bulletins forgot. They told me about a midfielder once so good the whole neighbourhood skipped dinner to watch him, then vanished after an injury nobody reported. The stands are empty, but history still needs spectators to recount its most beautiful sadness. And in those stories I realised one thing: Vietnamese football is losing its capacity to wait.

We wait for goals, not for people.

On tactics, there is a detail I have tracked across many recent matches that worries me more than results. It is the PPDA metric — the number of opponent passes allowed before each defensive action. Good pressing sides in Europe keep it under ten. In the V.League, I have observed many teams letting opponents pass freely with values above fifteen, sometimes eighteen. What does that mean? It means our clubs, though they speak of modern tactics, still defend mainly by waiting — dropping deep, hoping the opponent errs, then countering. That is a legitimate strategy when you are the weaker side. But when the whole league does it, match quality stalls and young players learn the habit of waiting instead of seizing.

The irony is that when a team presses proactively, it often cannot control the space behind its defence. I have watched matches where a side pressed fiercely in the first half, took the lead, then collapsed after the break as its back line was carved open by simple long balls. That is not a failure of spirit but of structure. The difference between a beautiful match and a winning match lies not in inspiration but in the ability to control vision. A good player is not the one who runs the most, but the one who sees five square metres of space a teammate has not yet noticed.

In that context, the goalkeeper's distribution is being sanctified with suspicious enthusiasm. Clubs pour money into keepers who can play long passes accurately, while ignoring a harsh reality: basic reflexes — the foundation of every great keeper — are declining in a not-small share of them. I have seen a keeper with a towering transfer fee pass like a midfielder, yet concede from a not-particularly-fierce shot at the near post. Modern football tends to price people by easily measurable skills, while qualities hard to measure — concentration, calm, the instinct to read a situation — are undervalued.

All of this leads me back to Hoa Xuan.

I tell the boy's story not to make a pretty anecdote. I tell it to pose a hard question: if I had not lost my way and sat in the wrong stand, would he have been called up to the U19 national team? And if he had not been called, where would he have gone? I know the answer. He would have gone home, played weekend pickup games, and become a story a few elders in the neighbourhood tell their grandchildren — a small legend nobody recorded.

Here is where I part ways with the majority. When people discuss Vietnamese football's development, they talk about academies, professional youth training, following the Japanese or Korean model. All true. But I hold that the critical issue is not infrastructure; it is laziness in observation. We have enough pitches, enough money, enough youth tournaments. What we lack are people willing to sit in an empty corner of a stadium and watch a seventeen-year-old play a fine pass in a match nobody bothers to film.

I have been called 'a poet on the broadcast.' At the 2026 World Cup, when I described a Luka Modric pass as 'a low cello note amid a choir of falling snow,' the internet instantly turned me into 'a poet who wandered onto a pitch.' But a week later, as the quarter-final went to extra time and the goal came, I stayed silent for seven seconds before saying that the Russians drowned in their own winter while the Croatians embraced the cold like a gift. The head of the sports channel called me: 'Keep doing it that way. The audience hates it but keeps watching.' I realised that difference was my asset.

Being called a poet on the broadcast is something I am proud of — the ball has always been poetry. But I must also confess: poetry cannot replace precision. A poem about football with no concrete detail is just a cloud with no sky to hold it. So whenever I write, I force myself to anchor to a real moment: a touch, a silence, a bowing of the head, a keeper's darting glance after conceding. Without those, I do not write.

And so I never convict a young player with a blunt insult. When a boy loses the ball in midfield and lets the opponent score, I name the error — clearly, without shielding him — but with the respect of someone who knows that all of us have lost the ball in the middle of our own lives. That boy does not need tactics; he needs someone who can read the hunger of his ambition. Gentleness is not hiding mistakes. Gentleness is placing a mistake in its right place within a larger picture.

Vietnamese football stands at a crossroads. On one side is pure professionalisation, where everything is measured by money and results, where young players are goods and fans are consumers. On the other is the path of building identity, where clubs belong to communities and young players are fed by the memory of a place. I am not naive enough to say we do not need money. But I believe that when shirt advertising destroys the bond between a club and its local fans, we are selling our most precious asset to buy a fragile light.

There is one thing I think Vietnamese football administrators should engrave: At sixty-seven, I still believe in magic, because I have seen a gem find itself in the mud. But that magic does not happen by luck. It happens because someone — a scout, an old coach, a lost journalist — chose to stay through a scorching afternoon when nobody required them to.

I do not want this piece to end with a summary. I want it to end with a question left in the reader's heart, like a ball rolling slowly across the grass with no one knowing where it will stop. If your club has a young player benched all season and you only remember him when the team suffers an injury — would you dare give him three consecutive games, even if he loses the ball and you concede? If the answer is no, then every story about a rough gem is merely a pretty line to read for fun, and Hoa Xuan will stay silent for a long time yet.

Hoa Xuan lay so quiet that I could hear the ball sigh. I still hear it. And I will still sit there, in the corner of the stand nobody wants, waiting for another pass that draws an S.

Because a ball rolling in silence is still a ball telling a story. And sometimes the only storyteller needed is an old man with nothing left to prove, holding only the belief that a patient eye can grow a gem.