Diary of an Unplayed Match: When Vietnamese Football Learns to Stand Up from Scratches

There are walls that are not built to block, but to let hearts beat together. I sit in a corner of a small cafe on Haeundae Street in Busan, looking out at the thick grey sea of November. My laptop is open to a Vietnamese sports news page. Beside me, a cup of coffee has long gone cold. On the screen, the line about Vietnam's squad for the third-place match of the Southeast Asian championship appears fragmented, like pieces of a puzzle not yet assembled. I remember the day I sat here, three years ago, also in this corner, following coach Kim Sang Sik's team through a flickering link. That day, news from home barely crossed over to let me know the team had lost. But today, the story is no longer about winning or losing. People often say football is a sport of numbers: scores, points, rankings. But there is something football can never measure, which is how a football nation faces itself when the numbers no longer stand on their side. And sometimes, in moments that seem most hopeless, people find something more original, more real than any victory. I came to Vietnamese football not through resounding victories. I came to it through afternoons sitting at roadside tea stalls with my father, listening to him tell stories of matches past. Through times when the whole neighbourhood gathered around an old television, cheers erupting when the ball hit the net. Through times I sat alone in Busan, replaying old match recordings on my phone, just to remember the smell of sweat and the sound of flip-flops from home fans. Vietnamese football in recent years has gone through no shortage of seasons. There were seasons fans lived in complete joy. There were also seasons, like this one, when people must learn to accept that a tournament can end in a way no one expected. The national team did not reach the final. The coaching staff spoke of disappointment. Fans spoke of regret. But behind those words lies a bigger story, a story about how a football nation operates under the harshest conditions. Coach Kim Sang Sik said something I think anyone in sports writing like me should note: that the number of players gathered for this camp is quite limited, so planning alternatives for the second half faces many difficulties. This is not an excuse. This is a pure tactical truth that any coach must face when his resources thin out due to injuries. I have spent many years following Vietnam national team matches from afar, and I have realised one thing: when the bench is not deep enough, the coach loses his most important weapon in the second half. No plan to change the game. No ability to turn the tide with an unexpected personnel change. The match becomes an endurance race, where the team with more energy wins, and that is a race the current Vietnam team does not have the advantage in. I still remember vividly the night in Kazan, when South Korea defeated Germany two-nil. I sat in the noodle shop of an elderly Busan man, surrounded by older Korean men, some still wearing hearing aids, but their eyes never leaving the screen. When Kim Young-gwon scored in the 90+3rd minute, the whole shop erupted. One man held his child and wept. Another silently stared at the ceiling, tears streaming down his cheeks. They did not cheer as I expected. They cried. They cried from happiness, from pride, from a belief that seemed to have run dry after so many years of waiting. I wrote about that night, nine hundred words, and the piece was shared three hundred times in a single night. Not because I wrote well, but because I wrote exactly the emotion millions were feeling. I realised that the story on the pitch is only the tip of the iceberg. The submerged part, the more important part, is the emotion of the people sitting outside the pitch, those who cry, laugh, cheer, and fall silent. And that is why, when writing about Vietnam's national team now, I do not want to begin with the score. I want to begin with stories about people. Vietnam's national team is entering the third-place match with a depleted squad. Names like Hoang Hen and Tai Loc are absent due to injuries or fitness issues. Viet Anh has a muscle injury, and his availability remains uncertain. Coach Kim Sang Sik said he must wait for the medical board's conclusion before deciding whether to field Viet Anh. These pieces of information, if merely read in newspapers, might just be dry bullet points about squad situation. But to me, they are fragments of a larger picture about how Vietnamese football is operating. Look at the broader picture. Vietnamese players have gone through a dense sequence of match days: from the Southeast Asian championship, to the V-League, then back to national team camp. The human body is not a machine. When drained across consecutive tournaments, accumulated injuries arrive as an inevitable consequence. And when injuries strike, the coach no longer has enough people to rotate, to calculate, to change the game. I do not want to use dry statistical numbers to talk about this. I only want to say that there is an invisible thread connecting the V-League to the national team, and that thread is stretching to breaking point. When the domestic league is not adjusted to make way for the national team, when fixtures overlap and there is no reasonable rest period, the consequence is not just minor injuries. It is the decline in quality of an entire football nation. Coach Kim Sang Sik spoke about the match against Malaysia. He said the team needs to prepare better to stop Malaysia's naturalised number 9, Bergson. He said Malaysia is now much stronger. This is a notable admission. Not because it shows weakness, but because it shows respect for the opponent — and above all, it shows clarity in assessment. Malaysia, with its naturalisation programme, is changing the landscape of Southeast Asian football in ways few anticipated. Bergson is not the first naturalised player to wear Malaysia's colours, but he is the latest example of a trend reshaping the regional football map. Player naturalisation is a talent-acquisition strategy that Southeast Asian federations are increasingly using, because it allows them to fill quality gaps without waiting for a new golden generation. This raises a big question for Vietnamese football. If Malaysia can naturalise a quality striker to solve its attacking problem, what must Vietnam do to maintain its competitive edge? The answer cannot be just developing young players, because youth development is a long-term process, while competitive pressure in the region is immediate. Vietnam needs a multi-dimensional strategy: developing internal strength, seizing opportunities from the transfer market and naturalisation, and improving the domestic league system to reduce pressure on players. I remember the feeling of sitting in that noodle shop in Busan on the Kazan night. The Koreans around me did not care about tactics. They did not care about what formation their coach used, how he made substitutions. They cared about only one thing: that their national team had won, and what that victory meant to their lives. That is the lesson I have carried through all my years writing about football from South Korea. When writing about Vietnam's national team, I never forget that behind every match are millions of fans, each carrying their own story, their own memory, their own hope. And my task — as with any sports writer — is to tell the story of those fans, not just the story of the match. The upcoming third-place match may not be a match of peak professional quality. That is understandable when both teams have gone through a long and exhausting tournament. But to me, it is still a match worth watching, because it will show the character of Vietnam's national team in adversity. A strong team is not only one that wins when everything is favourable. A strong team is one that knows how to rise after defeat, knows how to fight for honour even when there is no chance of winning the title. I once wrote about this in the series "Echoes of Empty Stands" back in 2026, when COVID-19 forced K-League matches to be played in empty stadiums. I conducted a survey with Busan IPark fans and received fifty responses. Seventy-eight percent of them said they watched matches on television because they missed their father's cheering from 2026. I turned that number into a story: for every three viewers, one heard their father's voice in the cheers from the stands. I tell that story not to boast about my writing ability. I tell it to say that there are things in football that cannot be measured by any index. A father's cheer, homesickness, hope in a team — those are things beyond any statistical table. And if sports writers do not see them, their work, however accurate, is merely soulless numbers. Back to the third-place match. Coach Kim Sang Sik said that although it is only the third-place match, the team will try their best. He said the more difficult it is, the more the team must unite. These are words worth pondering, not because they are new, but because they reflect a reality: Vietnam's national team is in a difficult period, and how they face that difficulty will shape their future. There is one thing I have always believed after many years following football from afar: defeat does not define a team. How a team rises after defeat defines them. And sometimes, matches with no chance of winning the title are the most important matches, because they show who a team truly is when there is nothing left to lose but honour. I still often think about Vietnamese fans, those who will stay up late to watch the upcoming match. They will sit before screens, in cramped rented rooms, in roadside cafes, in small houses in faraway rural areas. They will cheer when the team scores, and sigh when the team loses. They will continue to believe, continue to hope, continue to love football in a way only Vietnamese people can love football. And I, from this cafe corner in Busan, will continue to write about them. Not because I want to tell about numbers, but because I want to tell about people. About sweat on the pitch and tears in the stands. About erupting cheers and silence-filled moments of reflection. About a football nation learning to grow through each defeat, and a generation of players learning to rise after every fall. Empty stands only lack people, but echoes do not know how to rest. And in those echoes, I hear the voice of an entire football nation pondering its way forward. Tonight, I will sit here again, following the match through a flickering link. I will not follow the score. I will not follow the ranking. I will follow how Vietnamese players step onto the pitch, how they fight, how they rise after each tackle. I will follow how they play for honour, for pride, for the millions of fans waiting for them. And if they win, I will write about joy. If they lose, I will write about lessons. But whatever the result, I will write about people — because that is the only thing that never changes in this ever-shifting world of football. There are walls not built to block, but to let hearts beat together. Vietnam's national team is building such a wall — a wall of belief, of unity, of aspiration to rise. And I, from the other side of the hemisphere, will continue to stand beside them, write about them, and believe in them. Because in the end, football is not just a sport. It is a part of life, a part of memory, a part of being human.