Becamex TP.HCM 2-1 CLB TP.HCM: The 90+4 Bicycle Kick and the Price of a Beautiful Goal

I was standing in the technical area at Bà Rịa stadium, my pen still hovering above the page, when the ball left Daniel Dos Anjos's boot in the 90+4 minute. The bicycle kick curled into the far corner of CLB TP.HCM's net. There was a two-second silence, then the roar tore out of the small stand. Next to me a young reporter dropped his notebook. He said only: "90+4, bicycle kick, 2-1."

That is everything a match report needs. But I stayed another forty minutes on the concrete seat, and in those forty minutes I realised the real story of this match was not the bicycle kick. It was that Becamex TP.HCM had to survive on the bench, on an opponent's mistake, and on a goal in the final seconds of stoppage time.

Three rounds, seven points, fourth place. It sounds like a good start. But because I have followed football for forty-nine years, I know how dangerous that feeling is. A team does not change its rhythm because of tactics, but because of the weights it carries that nobody sees.

When defender Nguyễn Hùng Thiện Đức played a square pass back across his own box, I wrote four words in my notebook: back pass under pressure. That is the phrase the opposing coaching staff will underline in the tactical meeting. A team coached by a Spaniard should, in theory, build from the back, hold its structure, be patient. But building from the back in a division where opponents are willing to press aggressively across the pitch is a high-risk game. CLB TP.HCM only needed one bad pass to punish, and they punished. The opening goal came from exactly that gap.

The strange thing is that nobody in the technical area seemed shocked. What I read from Gerard Albadalejo's body language was not anger but a kind of pre-programmed calm. He signalled to the bench. Bùi Văn Bình came off. Hoàng Vũ Samson came on.

I have followed Samson since his years in China. He is around thirty-eight now, holds Vietnamese citizenship, and counts as a domestic player. On paper that is an administrative detail. In reality it is an enormous structural advantage in Hạng Nhất. In this division the foreign quota is tightly restricted, commonly reported as one slot per club. A club with an internationally calibre naturalised forward plus a foreign forward like Dos Anjos is, on paper, an illegal team. Technically, they are entirely legal. They have two spearheads. Their opponents have one.

In the 64th minute Samson drove forward and was pulled back in the box. Penalty. Dos Anjos equalised.

Let me pause here, because this is the point where I want the reader to look carefully. The equaliser did not come from a combination, a line-breaking pass, or a hinge moment. It came from an individual dribble, a defender's error, a whistle. That means Becamex solve the low block through individual quality rather than collective rhythm. In football, that is a far more expensive way to solve a problem. You must have someone better, stronger, faster than his marker. And when that man is absent, the problem has no solution.

But stoppage time is where the real story opens. Hà Đức Chinh came on and contested an aerial ball with CLB TP.HCM's tallest defender. The ball dropped loose to Dos Anjos's feet. A textbook second ball. That is a direct strike at the final second, and it reflects something very specific: when Becamex cannot play short, they play long. When they cannot circulate, they contest. When the system does not work, the bench has to work. And it worked.

If you read any bulletin the next day, you will see exactly one line: "Becamex staged a spectacular comeback thanks to a 90+4 bicycle kick." I do not dispute that fact. But that is surface-level storytelling, and I will push it to the bottom of the analysis.

Becamex are currently winning on squad depth rather than systemic superiority, and those are two entirely different things.

Look at the table. Becamex have seven points from three games, fourth place. Hưng Yên have seven, Khánh Hòa have seven, both above them on goal difference. Thái Nguyên lead with nine. Read those lines closely and you will see that tonight's spectacular win did not turn Becamex into the best team in the division. It merely kept them in rhythm, maintaining a two-point gap to the leaders. Three teams on seven points, three teams unbeaten. The gap between winning by a 90+4 goal and winning by three goals in the first half is not a feeling, it is a number that will decide the standings next May. Goal difference is the first tiebreaker when teams are level. Three teams are level. Anyone praising Becamex tonight should remember that.

A team does not change its rhythm because of tactics, but because of the weights it carries that nobody sees. At Bà Rịa I counted three invisible weights.

The first is the stadium. A team carrying the name Ho Chi Minh City but playing home fixtures roughly one hundred kilometres from the city centre. That says a great deal about organisation, licensing and identity. Two clubs carrying the same Ho Chi Minh City name in the same second division. One of them must travel far from home. This is not a joke.

The second is the wage bill. Becamex possess several players who have worn or currently wear the national team shirt, plus a foreign forward who scored both goals, plus a naturalised former star. A squad like that can only exist one way: promotion. Hạng Nhất revenue, with thin broadcast rights, limited gate receipts and few commercial partners, cannot sustain a wage bill designed for V.League 1. Without promotion, the club cuts. Cutting means losing the very pay premium that keeps national-team players in the second tier. That is a loop the board has certainly seen.

The third, and the most important, is one head. Both of Becamex's goals tonight belonged to Daniel Dos Anjos. No domestic player scored. No set-piece pattern produced a goal. One finisher. If you have followed football long, you know this state is called single-point dependency. When single-point dependency combines with a tightly restricted foreign quota, the blow to the team is simply one match in which Dos Anjos is absent. A team with no equivalent backup cannot replace a foreign player with a lower-tier domestic one. That problem is not solved with money, only with a smart transfer window.

The tears at Kazan are not there to be wiped; they settle so that I can decode them. In 2026, in Kazan, I skipped the stat sheet to record one sentence. Today, in Bà Rịa, nobody cried. He smiled, raised his arms, ran to the corner. And in that instant I recognised something more worrying than tears.

This team has not lost a match, but they have not won one comfortably either. Three rounds, two wins, one draw. I remember this 2-1 and I see a pattern: nibbling. That is my word for teams that gnaw one point at a time through narrow wins and discover at season's end that they are short by exactly two goals in the goal-difference column against the team above them. In a division with a table this compressed, goal difference is not a secondary statistic. It is the ticket.

Seven years is the distance my apology had to roll through one generation of players. I mention this not to boast that I know how to correct myself. I mention it to say to the young reporters who are excited tonight: Dos Anjos's bicycle kick is a beautiful work, but if tomorrow you write "Becamex are the strongest candidate for promotion", you will brand yourself with a definition the data cannot support. Three rounds is not enough of a sample. Three rounds is enough for a story, not a conclusion.

An empty pitch keeps the drumbeat for everyone who knows how to be silent. In the first half I watched Albadalejo. He did not shout. He stood, observed, took notes, signalled. In the second half, when his team went behind, he kept that rhythm. Two substitutions directly produced two goals. A coach can be wrong about the system and right about the people. That is not a bad start, but it is not a settled system either. For a Spanish coach in Hạng Nhất, the question is not whether he is good, but how much time he has to prove otherwise.

On the other side, CLB TP.HCM conceded in the 90+4 after leading. I have seen many thin squads lose this way. Not because they lost technique, but because they lost energy, concentration, and the exact ten seconds a match demands. For a side sitting near the danger zone, this kind of early-season defeat is not just three points lost. It is a psychological crack that will be recalled on a December afternoon.

I want the reader to notice one more detail. Two teams carrying the same city name. A real derby. This is unique to Vietnamese football, because the second tier is where city clubs, urban brands, relocate, rename and move grounds. The Bà Rịa stadium will haunt Becamex far longer than a 90+4 bicycle kick, especially when V.League 1 licensing is assessed on documentation, stadium, floodlights and youth academy. A team that wins on the pitch but fails licensing is a story Vietnamese football knows well.

I know you will ask: so who goes up? Nobody yet. And that is the most accurate answer with three rounds gone.

Look at Thái Nguyên. Nine points from three, top. Look at Hưng Yên and Khánh Hòa. Seven points, better goal difference than Becamex. Four clubs are separating from the rest. This is a four-horse race, not a one-horse race, and big wage bills have never automatically won a four-horse race in the second tier. Because the second tier is defined by the number of matches, by pitch surfaces, by twelve-hour bus journeys, by games where focus matters more than technique. In that environment, squad depth becomes the most valuable asset. Becamex have depth. Today it saved them. But a season has thirty rounds, and depth only saves you while it is not worn down.

I closed my notebook when the stand had emptied.

There is a sentence I wrote years ago that still holds: football is for children to dream, not for adults to hurt. The team at Bà Rịa tonight is dreaming. The fans in Ho Chi Minh City are dreaming. The board is not dreaming. They are calculating. They are investing, building, preparing a licensing file, balancing next season's wage bill.

I will not say Becamex TP.HCM will be promoted. I will not say they will not. I will say this: this club is landing into a season in which they have no right to finish second. And tonight's 90+4 bicycle kick, beautiful as it looks right now, may be their only friend next May — and also the very reason people will love them too much at the moment they most need to be looked at closely.

The next match. I will reread this notebook before entering the stadium. And I will count the goals that do not belong to Dos Anjos.