Vietnam team focuses on big match with Iraq

While the home team used a fairly old squad, the away team, on the contrary, fielded a squad of mostly young players, with the presence of Tuan Tai, Minh Trong, Thai Son, and in the second half, Van Cuong, Van Tung and Dinh Bac. The best central midfielder pair of Vietnamese football at the moment, Hung Dung and Hoang Duc, were out. Ngoc Hai was not even on the reserve list but on the list of 5 players… eliminated. Xuan Manh was also not allowed to play for a single minute?

However, the strong personality of Mr. Philipe Troussier in changing the playing style based on the change of a series of personnel in this match began to prove its reason for existence. The French coach asked his students to "play with ball control, take advantage of space and make reasonable decisions" which was proven against an opponent with only physical height, the policy of playing high balls and the advantage of home field, artificial grass was completely not enough. Mr. Troussier used Tuan Anh and Thai Son in the role of regulating and controlling the playing style. One was a famous player from the Park Hang-seo era with the ability to turn extremely well, not afraid of collisions and knowing how to retreat to defend and support the back line. The other was newly discovered by the coach since SEA Games 32, the more he played, the more mature he became thanks to his youth and strong will.

While still controlling the ball together to create an active game, not allowing the opponent to deploy attacking moves, in the "dreamy" state of the passes back and forth, suddenly Thai Son from the center "made an accurate decision" with a long pass to Tuan Hai, the ball bounced to Van Toan's feet and Tien Linh joined in, so that Van Toan had a cold kick, knocking down goalkeeper who used to play in the Premier League Etheridge, pouring cold water on the home team, bringing the game back to the full initiative for the away team Vietnam. The second goal of the Vietnam team was also a brilliant counter-attack situation by two young factors Van Tung and Dinh Bac, in which the 19-year-old striker Dinh Bac officially stepped into the light, playing in the regional and continental arena, affirming that a new generation of Vietnamese football has begun to appear and is capable of doing new things, worth waiting for.

At this point, it can be seen that Mr. Troussier is not as conservative as someone thought after the series of poor friendly matches in October. That is, he is both steadfast in his policy of controlling the ball and knows how to attack effectively. Remember the overlapping coordination on the left wing between Tuan Tai-Minh Trong so that Tuan Tai is not only someone who only knows how to pass long from below but can coordinate, penetrate the penalty area and pass the ball like a set to his teammates. When Van Cuong entered the field, he also had an extremely good coordination to move into the center, passing the ball beautifully to his senior Tuan Hai. Unfortunately, neither Van Toan nor Tuan Hai could handle it successfully. This later made it difficult for the Vietnamese team when they did not know how to finish off the opponent early, allowing the opponent to rise from the 60th minute onwards and if they were lucky, who knows what would have happened?

Obviously, the concerns about both the attack and defense are still there, even though the Vietnam team just met an average opponent, even though they got 3 points, they did not concede a goal. We certainly still have to wait for the return of Ngoc Hai and Duy Manh, when Thanh Binh or Viet Anh can play the ball well in the air, but playing the ball low, handling the ball short and coordinating with teammates still has some worrying "errors". The situation where Thanh Binh handled the ball slowly and lost the ball at the end of the match is a very unfortunate minus point for Viettel's center back. The wing defense of Van Thanh or Minh Trong is not good when allowing the opponent to exploit it to penetrate and shoot the ball close to Van Lam's goal more than once.

Meanwhile, the central midfielders also became overloaded when they had to retreat to defend too much like the situation in the second half, especially in the final minutes of the match, making the defense very difficult to defend and inevitably mistakes would happen. As mentioned above, there were quite a few good coordination situations to put the ball in shooting range but unfortunately the strikers missed and wasted too many, especially Tuan Hai even though he was extremely energetic and aggressive.

After the above-mentioned somewhat… close-run victory, many people think that Mr. Troussier is planning for the long term by keeping many key players such as Ngoc Hai, Hung Dung, Hoang Duc, Xuan Manh to focus on the decisive match with the Iraqi team at My Dinh Stadium? If anyone watches the Iraq-Indonesia match (5-1), they will see that the French coach's approach is wise and correct because the West Asian opponent is very formidable even though the media deliberately downplays it due to some internal issues. In fact, any team has internal problems, the problem is who handles them well and who doesn't.

With the format of the World Cup Qualifiers in the second round, finishing behind Iraq is normal and inevitable. The question is whether Vietnam or Indonesia will achieve the final result in 2nd place to enter Round 3 as planned? If Vietnam achieves an acceptable result against Iraq over the 2 home/away rounds, with a better goal difference than Indonesia, for example, it is already a success. Therefore, in the upcoming match at My Dinh Stadium against Iraq, let's not talk about "controlling the ball and attacking", but rather make the most effective use of existing human resources, experience combined with youth, taking advantage of home field advantage, the advantage of having more rest than the opponent... to turn into real strength through each ball, through each defensive or attacking situation...

Whether Mr. Troussier and his team can learn valuable lessons from the friendly defeats against China, Uzbekistan and South Korea, after the opening match with many bright spots and dark spots against the Philippines, to face a powerful official opponent like Iraq is certainly not an easy question to answer.