V-League and the Silence After the Tackle: When Vietnamese Football Must Relearn from Its Children

I remember that night. Not for the scoreline. But for the whistle, and the silence that followed — longer than the match itself.

Văn Hậu went in for the ball. Doãn Ngọc Tân grabbed his leg. The referee pulled out the card. In the stands, people started shouting — not at the players, but at each other. Everyone wanted to say something. No one could.

A four-match suspension. That is the number the press will quote. But numbers cannot describe what it feels like when a player looks up into the stands and sees a silence colder than the late-season rain. I stayed behind after that match. The pitch was wet. The floodlights stayed on. And I asked myself: are we punishing a player, or punishing a culture that was never taught?

The pitch never lies; we are simply not slow enough to hear it.

Early this season, V-League witnessed a run of incidents no one could call coincidental. Văn Hậu — a defender who has worn the national team shirt and played in the Netherlands — received a four-match ban after a challenge on Doãn Ngọc Tân. Within the same short window, Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn each committed take-downs on Đình Bắc, a rising young forward of Vietnamese football. Three incidents, two victims, one season barely a few rounds old.

I have followed V-League long enough not to be surprised. But following it long enough also means I have watched this repeat too many times — until it became ambient noise, a sound the crowd is used to, a detail commentators skip to focus on the next attacking phase.

In a recent interview with Dân trí, a European expert — one who has spoken about Vietnamese football many times — framed the issue differently. He did not talk about individual challenges. He talked about teaching. The problem of V-League is not the players, but the people who taught them to play football when they were still children.

This is a framing I find far more decent than calling out individuals. But decent does not mean comfortable. Because if the problem is in the teaching, then we cannot solve it with a suspension, a fine, or even a press conference.

According to this expert, tackling technique is a skill that is taught, not a born instinct. How to go into a challenge, how to handle duels, how to decide when to commit — all of it can be coached. And if a professional player challenges dangerously, then it is very likely that he was — or was not — taught in an environment where "playing rough" is seen as a sign of maturity rather than a mistake.

What he emphasised made me pause longest: habits formed young become locked in over time. By the time a player is used to "playing rough" at professional level, fixing it is no longer teaching — it is curing. And curing is always harder than teaching.

I thought about hot afternoons at Hòa Xuân stadium, where kids in local academies fight for the ball while no one holds a whistle. I thought about young coaches of twenty-five or thirty, who used to play street football, who used to watch football on television, now standing up to teach children — simply because no one qualified is available for that position. What the expert calls "a shortage of licensed coaches" is really a human-capital gap that has accumulated over many years, and is very hard to fill overnight.

According to his analysis, a substantial portion of Vietnam's youth coaches rely mainly on playing experience or street-football experience, without having passed through a properly structured certification system aligned with AFC standards. This gap is not one of enthusiasm. It is one of method. A passionate teacher without proper training will teach what he knows — and what he knows is sometimes exactly what should be discarded.

The expert pointed to a transmission mechanism that I consider the intellectual highlight of the entire exchange: young players always look up to their seniors as role models. When a crude challenge in V-League is not punished heavily enough, it is not only that player who learns something. Twelve-year-olds watching on television learn something too. When violence becomes normal at the top, it becomes the standard at the bottom. This is one of the most powerful cultural transmission mechanisms in football — and one of the hardest to see.

He went further, noting that some youth training environments — not all, but a significant portion — actively encourage children to play aggressively or to intimidate opponents psychologically. The phrase "creating fear" was used to describe something taught, not something spontaneous. If true, we are dealing with a problem far deeper than punishing players who tackle badly.

I reread my notes from that match. In my notebook I wrote: "Minute 68. Văn Hậu goes in. Tân goes down. Ninety seconds before he stands up." I wrote it because I believe numbers do not only speak of time. Ninety seconds on the ground for an opposing player is ninety seconds in which the tackler also did not truly win. The match went on, but part of it had stopped.

People remember the name of the scorer, but I remember his run ten seconds earlier.

That is why I want to stop at a perspective the expert himself perhaps did not fully articulate.

There is a truth that the "education from the roots" framing sometimes inadvertently obscures: these challenges are not entirely the result of ignorance. Looking at the specific incidents — Văn Hậu on Doãn Ngọc Tân, then Tấn Sinh and Văn Sơn on the same player, Đình Bắc — we see a pattern hard to call random. A defender challenging an opposing midfielder is normal football. But two different players targeting one young forward in the same window is not only a technical problem.

It is deliberate intimidation. And deliberate intimidation cannot be fully explained by "the players were not taught how to tackle". It needs to be called by its proper name: a part of Vietnamese professional football still operates on the logic of "make the opponent afraid" — an old logic, a legacy of the era before professionalisation.

If I stand on the side of the weak in this story — and I always lean that way — then the weak here are not the tacklers. They can be suspended, fined, dropped. The truly weak are Đình Bắc — who must train every day with the sense that an opponent may come for him at any time. And weaker still are the children watching on television, learning that to succeed in Vietnamese football, you sometimes have to accept a little violence as part of the game.

The glory of the loser is a light only those who stay behind can pick up.

What I value in the European expert's framing is that he does not take sides. He speaks of shared responsibility between the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) and the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) — two organisations jointly responsible for the league. He speaks of sanctions needing to be sufficiently deterrent and applied consistently. He asks a simple but lethal question: if dangerous incidents continue despite disciplinary measures, are those measures themselves failing?

That question made me think about the nature of punishment. The purpose of a suspension is not to punish a past act — that is a secondary purpose. The primary purpose is to prevent recurrence. If it recurs, then no matter how heavy the ban, it has not fulfilled its task.

And here is what I consider more important than all: the consistency of punishment may matter more than its severity. A disciplinary system applied consistently, even with moderate sanctions, creates a clear frame of reference for every player. A system applied arbitrarily, even with occasional heavy sanctions, creates only resentment and the habit of "gambling on whether I get punished this time".

This is where I think analysis must go beyond the discipline story. Vietnamese professional football exists in a structural contradiction: it demands short-term results (win matches, gain points, keep the coach's job) while culture-building is a long-term process. When result pressure weighs on a young coach without proper training, the easiest option is always to choose aggression. Aggression looks like determination. Aggression looks like maturity. Aggression, in some dressing rooms, is still quietly rewarded.

That is why the advice "train licensed coaches" — which sounds administrative and dry — is in fact the most systemic advice in the entire exchange. A properly trained coach does not only know how to teach safer tackling. He knows how to build an environment where aggression is no longer an attractive option. He knows how to separate "determination" from "violence" — two things Vietnamese football sometimes merges into one.

In the stands, I learned to count time by breaths, not by minutes and seconds.

There is one thing I always remind myself when writing on subjects like this: do not rush to conclude. A lesson as large as the lesson of football culture cannot be solved in one season. Nor can it be solved by changing a few rules, or sacking a few coaches. Culture accumulates slowly, and it dissolves slowly.

But slow does not mean it cannot begin. And the starting point is most clearly visible not in V-League. It is at youth level — where twelve-year-olds are learning to challenge for the ball, to respect opponents, to understand that the pitch is a place to play, not to fight.

If there is one thing I want to keep from this conversation, it is the recognition that everything can be fixed — if people are willing to fix it. The problem of V-League is not that there are too many bad players. The problem is that there are too few adults willing to take responsibility for the children they taught.

That European expert may remain unnamed in the article; it does not matter. What matters is that his framing touched exactly the point we usually skip: when Vietnamese football loses on the pitch, the cause is usually not in that match. It is in the training sessions no one watches. It is in the lesson plans no one audits. It is in the young players being taught the wrong things by teachers who do not themselves know they are wrong.

We never touch the ball, but the ball always touches us.

And it is still touching — every season, every round, every time a young player goes down and a stadium falls silent. The question is no longer who will be suspended next. The question is: what will we re-teach, and when will we begin, before another generation grows up believing the pitch is a place to subdue each other rather than to present our very best?

When it is silent, I hear an entire generation waiting for something wild — something like a Saturday afternoon with nothing on the pitch but the ball, the running, and the applause. That is not so wild, if we are willing to start teaching again.