Without Xuan Son, Vietnam's Attack Isn't Just Weaker - It Loses Its Entire Structure

I arrived in Bandung, Indonesia, three days before the match. A 65-year-old journalist who still keeps the habit of arriving early, standing long in the stadium corridors, and listening to the sound of players' studs echoing on concrete before kickoff. There are sounds that tell me more than any press conference. That afternoon, when the Vietnam national team came out for a warm-up, I noticed Dinh Bac walking alone, wearing headphones, not speaking to anyone. I had watched him play since his days in the Song Lam Nghe An youth system, and I knew he was a wide attacking spark, preferring to receive the ball ahead of goal and operate in open space. He is not a target striker. Yet in the match against Thailand, he was assigned exactly that role. That is one of the reasons I write this article. Not to criticize Dinh Bac, nor to lament a defeat. But I have lived through four decades of football, from sitting in the stands of Hang Day Stadium listening to old-timers hurl insults, to standing in the modern stands of Busan watching the K-League. I have learned one lesson: there are lessons that do not come from victory, but from the jeers in the stands. The 0-2 defeat to Thailand in Group B of the ASEAN Cup 2026 in Bandung, Indonesia, on the night of December 17, is clearly such a lesson. But the story is not as simple as the headlines many newspapers have written: without Xuan Son, the attack is weaker. The real story runs much deeper. When I was a young reporter in Madrid, I had an elderly Spanish mentor who once told me how he reads a match. He said: "The rhythm of a match is not in the ball, but in the silence between two passes." I did not understand that until I witnessed this match. The silence between the passes of Vietnam's midfield, when the ball was passed square from Dinh Bac back to Hoang Duc, then from Hoang Duc wide to Do Duy Manh - that silence lasted long, empty, with no idea born inside it. Thailand exploited precisely that silence. Thailand's opening goal came from a foul committed thirty meters from goal, a long-range strike by Sarach Yooyen. But if you watch closely, you will see that goal was created by an indecision in advancing by Vietnam's defense - a pocket of space where a center-back should have stepped up to press - and by a three-fold loss of concentration thirty seconds earlier, when the midfield lost the ball three times in a row. Thailand needed no more than one mistake. A team with the habit of punishing mistakes will always find one, even against a team with more than half its starting lineup unavailable. At this point, I want to talk about Xuan Son - not as an absent hero, but as a part of a machine. When Xuan Son was injured in the match against the Philippines, some thought that simply replacing him with another number 9 would be enough. They misunderstood. Xuan Son is not just a number 9. He is a system. With his physique, strength, and spatial awareness, Xuan Son is the only player in the current Vietnam squad who can receive long balls over the top while facing away from goal, hold the ball up, and draw two opposing center-backs toward him. When he does that, attacking midfielders like Hoang Duc, Hoang Van Toan, or Nguyen Quang Hai gain extra meters of space to move and shoot. Without him, every long ball becomes a sprint that Dinh Bac cannot win, and a physical battle that a lone youngster fights against two much taller Thai center-backs. Look at how Thailand operated. They deliberately sat deep, conceded the initiative to Vietnam, and used Chanathip Songkrasin as a false nine. That was a deliberate tactical choice, not an accident. Chanathip did not need to occupy space in the box. He dropped deep to receive the ball, pulled Vietnam's center-backs out of position, and opened space for midfielders to advance from the second line. This left Vietnam's defense in a prolonged state of confusion: follow him and lose your position, or leave him alone and let him turn and pass. In the first half, I watched Vietnam's center-backs constantly exchanging glances, unsure who should step out to track Chanathip. The silence between two passes - this time in Vietnam's defense - was exploited once more. Kim Sang Sik, the South Korean head coach, tried to adjust. He switched from a 3-4-3 to a 3-5-2, pulling Cao Quang Vinh from left-back into central midfield. I have watched many South Korean teams over three decades, and one of the unwritten rules of Korean coaches is: in crisis, add another body to midfield. But that is like putting a great swimmer into a drying river - you cannot create water if there is no water upstream. Cao Quang Vinh is a good left-back, not a central midfielder. Put in an unfamiliar position, he tried hard and showed fighting spirit, but his passes carried no attacking rhythm, only safe, backward balls. The deeper problem is not in this match. It lies in the fact that, in recent years, Vietnamese football has not produced a true central midfielder - someone who can receive the ball under pressure, turn, and control the tempo of the game. We have Hoang Duc - but Hoang Duc just returned from injury, and in this match we saw that he could not sustain his movement for ninety minutes. We have young midfielders who play adequately in the V.League, but none who can influence a big match like this. When facing a Thailand with better squad depth - which allowed them to make substitutions freely without losing strength - Vietnam exposed a gap between the golden generation and the next one. I recall a story from seven years ago, when I wrote an analysis about Busan IPark deploying a young midfielder out of his natural position, and received more than 500 critical comments. Supporters pointed out that the player had just recovered from injury, and I had overlooked that. That was the first time I realized that before writing about tactics, I must understand the people - injuries, fitness, psychology, and what is happening in the stands. Three times I mispronounced a defender's name, and I learned to listen before writing. Since then, I spend thirty minutes every day reading fan comments before putting pen to paper. And what I read over the past seven days, after the Thailand defeat, is anger - part directed at coach Kim Sang Sik, part at Dinh Bac, and a very large part at Vietnamese football itself. Many comments say we do not have enough good players, that the V.League does not develop anyone, that relying on a naturalized player is a shame. I understand that anger. But I wonder if we are blaming the right thing. Dinh Bac is not a bad player. He is a young player with potential who was placed in a role he was never trained to play. It is like asking a swimmer to run a marathon - he will run, but he will never finish with a high ranking. This match showed, in the clearest possible way, the cost of not having a target striker in the squad. Since Cong Phuong left the national team, we have never had a real target man. We have relied on Xuan Son - a naturalized player with the physique and back-to-goal playing ability of a European striker - but we have never built a backup plan for his absence. During 92 days away from the pitch during the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote an online journal about every Busan IPark player - one character, one moment, one story. I did it because I believe people make the game, not numbers. And looking at the current Vietnam national team, I see people carrying a system designed for someone who is not there. Now, let us talk about expert Doan Minh Xuong, who sparked controversy when he told Tuoi Tre that without Xuan Son, Vietnam's attack is clearly much weaker. His assessment is correct - but it is correct in a dangerously convenient way. It creates a cognitive trap: if we believe every problem lies in the absence of one player, we will never look at the structural issues. And those structural issues are growing. Look back at the match: Vietnam had more possession, more passes, but low attacking efficiency. We mostly shot from outside the box - the classic signature of a team with no way to bring the ball into dangerous areas. In the second half, when Kim Sang Sik pushed the team higher, a goal by Tien Loc in the 58th minute was disallowed by VAR for offside. I sat in the press area, watching the VAR monitor - the silence before the whistle was where I saw a certain truth: even when the ball went into the net, Vietnam could not create enough clear chances to win. A disallowed goal is not a goal. It is only a psychological shock that made the attack even more stagnant. After the match, I stayed in the stands for another thirty minutes. A group of Vietnamese supporters remained, sang a few sad songs, then quietly left. An elderly man about my age sat next to me, looked down at the pitch, and shook his head. He said in Vietnamese: "Won last year, lost this year, but this feeling is familiar. Every time we need a goal, we feel emptiness." I did not answer, but inside my head rang a sentence I wrote many years ago: Busan taught me that the hearts of supporters are the most honest measure, even when they wound the writer. And the hearts of Vietnamese supporters right now are pointing to one truth: we lack a number 9, and we need to do something about it. To say that without Xuan Son the team is weaker - expert Doan Minh Xuong is right. But if we stop there, we are deceiving ourselves. Because Thailand will age, Indonesia will rise, Malaysia will play annoying defensive football, and every tournament, Xuan Son gets one year older. If Vietnam does not develop a new generation of strikers, the "without Xuan Son" story will be repeated like a mantra, until there is no Xuan Son at all. In South Korea, when a K-League team lacks a good striker, they do not sit and complain to the press. They open academies, they send young players to Europe, they change the development philosophy at youth levels. When I started writing journalism in Madrid in 2026, I witnessed how Spanish football rebuilt its entire youth system after failures. No system is perfect, but football cultures that look in the mirror and say "we have a problem, and we must fix it" are cultures that progress. The question for Vietnam after this match is not why we lost, but: do we dare look in the mirror? Will the football federation admit that our youth development system has not produced a striker or a central midfielder in a decade? Will V.League clubs - which tend to favor foreign strikers for the number 9 role - accept rebuilding their development philosophy to give domestic players a chance? Will administrators learn the real lesson from this battle, or will they again evade it by finding another naturalized player? That is a big question, but the answer will determine not only a future rematch with Thailand, but an entire generation of Vietnamese players to come. The beat keeper does not need a loud drum, just the right moment, the right place, and enough love for the craft to stand long. But if the drum is never given a new skin, no matter how skilled the drummer, the sound will not travel far. Today, in the Bandung stands, I heard the drums of Vietnamese supporters beating until the 90th minute. They still sang, still danced, still placed their faith in the team despite trailing by two goals. That moved me - because I know that faith is not born spontaneously. It was built through countless matches, generations of players, joy and tears. If we keep relying on one naturalized player without building the development system from the roots, that faith will one day run dry. But I choose hope. Because I have seen too many resurrections in world football to believe there is no way out. What Vietnamese football needs now is not a revolution, but a return to fundamentals: proper development, tactics that fit the squad, player health and fitness care, and not letting one man's shadow obscure the problems of an entire system. After the match, I rose from the stands and saw a boy of about ten, wearing a Vietnam jersey, sobbing in his mother's arms. The boy asked: "Mom, when will Xuan Son recover?" I smiled, but felt a little bitterness inside. Because the boy did not ask "when will the team have a new striker," did not ask "when will we beat Thailand," but only asked about one person. That is not the question of a sad child whose team lost. It is the question of an entire generation - people who were taught that for Vietnam to succeed, it needs a hero. I hope that in ten or twenty years, when that boy grows up, he will not have to ask the same question with a different name. I hope he will witness a Vietnam team with nine or ten attacking players capable of scoring, a team that does not depend on any individual. And I hope that then, in the Bandung stands or anywhere in the world, I will still be there, sitting in a corner, listening to the sound of studs echoing on concrete, smiling as a new generation continues the story we - the old ones - once dreamed of. This defeat is not the end. It is just one page in a long book. But this page was written by a team missing the most important thing: a backup plan. And if we do not learn the lesson, future seasons will simply repeat the same story with different endings. In Busan, where I have lived for nearly three decades, there is a saying: "When the sun sets, you cannot blame the sun. You can only blame yourself for not preparing for the dark." The sun of the Vietnam national team was setting in Bandung that night - not because Xuan Son was missing, but because we did not know how to keep the match lit from other sources. And only when we accept that truth can Vietnamese football move forward. On some afternoons in Busan, I sit by the sea watching the waves crashing on the shore. Each wave has its own rhythm, but if you watch long enough, you will see a common rhythm flowing through all of them. The Vietnam national team is searching for that common rhythm, and this defeat is a loud knock reminding us that a common rhythm cannot depend on one person. It must come from a system - from academies, from the domestic league, from training sessions, from tactical notebooks, and from the tears of a ten-year-old boy in the Bandung stands that afternoon.