Nagoya, 13 September: Vietnam U23 Land With Two Gaps Still Open

At 00:15 on 13 September, the runway at Noi Bai Airport was still lit. The flight carrying coach Dinh Hong Vinh and his staff took off in darkness. More than five hours later, as the sun rose over the low rooftops of Nagoya, the members of Vietnam U23 were standing in the arrivals hall of Chubu Airport, queuing at immigration counters. I was born in Japan and have passed through Nagoya many times. Mornings here are quiet enough that you can hear each suitcase wheel rolling across the tiled floor. Thanh Nhan walked at the front, followed by the young players who had just left the cabin. After completing procedures, the squad moved to the hotel arranged by the organisers, and the first training session was scheduled for the afternoon of 13 September. A training session on the very day of landing. To outsiders it looks like a procedural detail. To me it is the most telling fact of the entire trip. Asiad 20 takes place on Japanese soil. Vietnam U23 sit in Group C alongside Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Kuwait. The schedule is fixed: Kuwait on 15 September, the Philippines on 18 September, Uzbekistan on 22 September. Read those three names in match order and a familiar curve of Asian youth football appears. Kuwait is the opening opponent, the kind of team you must beat to build momentum. The Philippines is the second match, where fitness and squad depth begin to show. Uzbekistan is the final match, usually the one that decides top spot, and usually the one won by the team with fresher legs. Three matches in seven days. That is the density of a youth tournament, where 19 and 20 year old players must recover faster than their bodies allow. But the story of Vietnam U23 in Nagoya does not begin with the group. It begins with the squad list. As things stand, the team is still short of numbers. Nguyen Quoc Toan of Quy Nhon and Dang Tuan Phong of Hai Phong will only arrive in Nagoya right before the opening match. In other words, both will enter the biggest international tournament of their age group with almost no full tactical session alongside the squad. Earlier, after beating Hanoi FC 4-1 in round two of the LPBank V-League 2026/27, six SLNA players only just joined up in time to fly to Japan with the group. Among them, Cao Van Binh impressed with steady form in goal, while Quang Vinh scored a brace within a matter of minutes. That win gave the young Nghe An players extra confidence before the Asiad campaign. Two stories overlap here, and I want to separate them. The first story is the calendar. Round two of the LPBank V-League 2026/27 took place just days before Vietnam U23 boarded the plane. That means part of the U23 squad had to play club football, at the intensity and pressure of a professional match, then immediately depart for an international tournament. Meanwhile the rest of the squad had been in camp, training to a separate programme, rehearsing combinations the coaching staff prepared for the Asiad. Two groups of players, two physical states, two timelines, meeting in Nagoya. I have observed Vietnamese youth football for nearly a decade and I am used to this scene. Every Asiad, every SEA Games, a group of players arrives late because of the domestic league. U23 coaching staffs must work with a squad permanently in a state of becoming. That is a working condition, not a choice. The second story is the quality of the late arrivals. And this is where I want to spend the most time. The six SLNA players boarded the flight having just won 4-1. Cao Van Binh kept a portion of the goal intact, Quang Vinh scored twice within minutes. Psychologically they boarded with a winning feeling. Physically they boarded with heavy legs. The two players from Quy Nhon and Hai Phong are in a very different situation. They reach Nagoya just before the opening match. No session with coach Dinh Hong Vinh's tactical system. No time to learn the movement rhythm of the man beside them. In youth football, the first thing a late arrival loses is not fitness but spatial orientation: where to stand when a teammate has the ball, which channel to attack when the opponent pushes up, which line to drop into when possession is lost. I have watched many Vietnam U19 and U23 training sessions as an observer. There is something cameras never capture: the first three seconds after a new player enters the pitch. Those three seconds are when his eyes sweep the opposing shape, compare it with what he has been taught, and decide. Players with full sessions lose those three seconds; they read the game instinctively. Late arrivals stretch those three seconds into five, then seven, and the opponent is already in front of them. That is why I never underestimate the so-called first training session on the afternoon of 13 September. It is not procedure. It is the first lesson of an exam. On Cao Van Binh and the goal. In youth football, the goalkeeper is the most misjudged position. People measure keepers by spectacular saves, by dives, by one-on-one situations. But in short youth tournaments like the Asiad, what decides a goalkeeper's survival lies elsewhere. Cao Van Binh enters the tournament in good form. A young keeper's form is made of three things: reflexes, command of the box, and the quality of the first pass. In a tournament where your team will be under pressure for long stretches, the latter two matter more than the first. A keeper who commands his box well saves his defence two or three dangerous situations per match simply by coming and going correctly and shouting loudly enough. A keeper who passes well helps his team escape pressing, which Uzbekistan will certainly apply. I do not have detailed save statistics for Cao Van Binh in V-League round two. I have something else: memories of matches where I sat in the stand, turned off my phone, and watched only the goalkeeper for the entire first half. When the television is muted, the match begins to say truer things. You hear what the keeper tells his centre-backs. You see who pulls the whole back line five metres deeper before a corner. If Cao Van Binh does that in Nagoya, Vietnam U23 saves one goal every two matches. In a group containing Uzbekistan, one goal can be the entire difference between progressing and going home. On Quang Vinh and the brace in minutes. A brace within a few minutes is the kind of fact I like most. It does not say the player is better than others. It says something more specific: that player can recognise the moment a match opens up, and rush in at the right time. Speed is the only thing that needs no explanation, and also the hardest thing to read. A player who runs fast is visible to everyone. A player who runs at the right moment is visible only to those sitting close enough. Quang Vinh's brace belongs to the second category, and it came when his team was already winning, meaning he did not score out of desperation. Scoring while your team leads is harder than people think, because instinct in that moment is usually to preserve. At the Asiad, if Quang Vinh keeps that instinct for the right moment, he will be the most valuable substitute option coach Dinh Hong Vinh has. On Thanh Nhan and the invisible role. Thanh Nhan was in the early group. He was among the first to walk out of the airport doors. Details like that sound meaningless, but in a young squad assembled from four or five different clubs, the man who acts as the bridge is the most important one. I dig beneath the bench, where nameless bones wait for the day they shine. The role of a player like Thanh Nhan is not measured in goals or assists. It lies in keeping a group that has just landed in a strange city from splitting into six small factions. In a three-week tournament with a match every three days, a collective breaks from within before it breaks on the pitch. The contrarian angle. There is a prejudice Vietnamese sports media often repeats: the team that assembles earlier has the advantage. In U23 tournaments, I think this is half true. The true half is tactical. A fully assembled team understands each other better, passes with more confidence, presses in sync. The false half sits exactly where few people look: real match intensity. The six SLNA players have just played a V-League match at high tempo. Their bodies are in a state called match fit. Players who gathered earlier have spent two or three weeks on fitness programmes and internal practice matches, the kind where nobody tackles hard and nobody sprints at minute 85. Against Kuwait on 15 September, I will be watching from minute 60 onwards. If the SLNA group still has legs and still reads the game, that is evidence that their late arrival is not the disadvantage people assume. A real match is the best training session, and no training session can simulate it. A second contrarian point concerns me and people who do this job. We often describe late arrivals as supplementary cards, a phrase with a flavour of charity. Late arrivals are not being granted a favour. They are placed in a professionally disadvantaged position by a calendar designed by people who do not bear the consequences. This is a systemic fault, and in Vietnamese youth football it repeats often enough to look normal. One more thing. Asiad 20 takes place in Japan, where I was born and where I have watched how Japanese organisers run youth tournaments. Host cities in Japan prepare training pitches, dressing rooms, recovery rooms, menus and schedules down to the minute. Teams that use that infrastructure gain a hidden edge. Teams that treat it as trivia lose that edge to someone else. No statistics sheet ever records this. The risks. I see three specific risks for Vietnam U23 in Group C. The first is the opening match. Kuwait on 15 September. With two players only just arriving, with a squad only just meeting, the first half of the opener will be the loosest half of the whole tournament. If the team starts slowly and falls behind, pressure on the Philippines match on 18 September doubles. The second is density. Three matches in seven days, with a defence under pressure against Uzbekistan in the last one. If the team uses nearly the same starting eleven in all three matches, muscle injury becomes the biggest variable. The third is rarely mentioned: if Vietnam U23 beat Kuwait and the Philippines, the Uzbekistan match on 22 September becomes one where a draw may suffice. That kind of match is the most dangerous in youth football, because it demands tactical discipline 20 year olds rarely have. Protecting a result is harder than earning one. Chances of progressing. Uzbekistan are the strongest side in Group C, with one of Asia's deepest youth development pipelines. The Philippines and Kuwait are opponents Vietnam U23 can and should overcome. Four points from the first two matches would make qualification very likely. For me, the metric worth tracking is not goals scored. It is the number of minutes the Vietnam U23 back line holds its shape within 25 metres between minute 60 and minute 90. On the bench, people do not see the match; they see fate. In Nagoya, the fate of Vietnam U23 will be written in late afternoon sessions, in overnight flights, in the time nobody watches. In the silence of a closed training session in Nagoya, I hear the sound of a generation taking root. The answer will not come from the stadium. It comes from 13 September, when a group of young players stepped out of an airport door and were asked to learn a new tactical system before the sun went down.