Regardless, Toshiya Miura is still the 'Special One' of Vietnamese football.

After half a year of working with Vietnamese football, he has been able to make many accurate assessments about expertise, even issues outside of football. He has shaped the playing style for the national team. He is flexible and decisive in using personnel. He dares to speak his mind and take responsibility before the public. Toshiya Miura really makes people admire him not only for his modern and sharp football thinking but also for his professionalism, extremely delicate observation and strong personality hidden in the small stature of this Japanese coach.

The Vietnamese team stopped at the semi-finals of the AFF Suzuki Cup, but no one can judge that it was Toshiya Miura's failure. Simply because he was not at fault, if not to say he was still the winner. Miura won because he built a national team with a distinct style of play in a short time. It's not that we only focus on playing with few touches and using short balls now, but it was only under Miura that this style of play was effectively implemented to truly become a distinctive style of play. That success was achieved thanks to Toshiya Miura's keen observation and precise professional orientation.

He said that players in the V-League are lazy to move and tend to use individual techniques to carry the ball forward by themselves. When leading the national team, he firmly changed this habit by requiring players to pass quickly, with few touches combined with continuous movement without the ball. As a result, despite only having been trained for a short time, we played short, few-touch balls quite smoothly at the recent AFF Suzuki Cup.

Mr. Miura said that V-League players are lazy to move around.

Another highlight of Mr. Miura is that he dares to put his trust in young players when they do not yet have a “brand” for that trust. A vivid example is the opportunities he gave to the young duo Huy Hung and Hoang Thinh. First, he let them try their hand at the U23 team and after they played well, he boldly put their names in the national team's squad. We all saw the results.

Huy Hung and Hoang Thinh have become two of the new factors that have created a boost for the Vietnamese midfield at the recent AFF Suzuki Cup. There are many more young bloodlines that the Japanese coach has given the opportunity to show their talent such as Ngoc Hai, Hai Anh, Huy Toan... Just seeing a player who is still quite unknown and went straight from the First Division team to the national team like Huy Hung, you can see how bold Mr. Miura is in his use of people.

His decisiveness is not only shown in his belief in young players but also in the way he is willing to let more experienced players like Cong Vinh, Tan Tai, Anh Duc… play on the bench. With Miura, there are no “no-go zones” in the use of personnel. All players are given opportunities and whoever proves their talent and desire will be selected, regardless of whether they have a “brand” or not.

Another plus point of Miura is that while building a typical playing style for the Vietnam team, he has found ways to renew that playing style by adjusting his personnel before and during matches. What is special is that Miura is always right and it always creates positive differences for the Vietnam team as we saw at the AFF Suzuki Cup 2014.

We scored in every match and in every match, Mr. Miura created something new for the fans. In the opening match against Indonesia, he left Cong Vinh on the bench and gave Hai Anh the chance to start. After Hai Anh missed a great chance, Mr. Miura put Cong Vinh on the field and CV9 scored a wonderful goal. In the match against Laos, he let Tan Tai play from the start instead of Thanh Luong and put Van Quyet on the field in the second half. The result: Tan Tai assisted the first two goals of the Vietnamese team and Van Quyet assisted Huy Hung to seal our 3-0 victory.

In the match against the Philippines, Mr. Miura chose Hoang Thinh to replace Tan Tai. Hoang Thinh scored the opening goal and assisted Minh Tuan to score the second goal. Most recently, against Malaysia in the first leg of the semi-final, Mr. Miura sent Mac Hong Quan to replace Thanh Luong in the second half and it was Hong Quan who assisted Van Quyet to score the winning goal, 2-1 for us.

Mr. Miura has done a lot for Vietnamese football in a short time.

Not only is Toshiya Miura flexible in his use of players, he also shows admirable professionalism and he is worthy of being an example for many Vietnamese coaches to look up to and learn from. After the defeat of the Vietnamese team in the semi-finals of the AFF Suzuki Cup, Mr. Miura took full responsibility for himself and emphasized that it was a collective mistake instead of criticizing a few individual players.

Although we all saw that the Vietnamese team lost heavily to Malaysia in the second leg of the AFF Suzuki Cup semi-finals, it was mostly due to individual mistakes by the defenders, but Mr. Miura protected them from public opinion. By doing so, he really made the players respect him because they knew he was not at fault, but simply because he did not want them to fall into a state of psychological crisis or lose confidence, so he stood up and took responsibility for it.

In October this year, Mr. Toshiya Miura shared his feelings and observations in Vietnam with the Japanese media. The interview was conducted just a few months after he arrived in Vietnam to work, but it showed how sensitive and perceptive he is to football as well as our way of thinking and doing football.

He said that the V-League players are lazy to travel, the tournament organization is sloppy. Regarding the VFF, he said that working hours are cut short, they come late and leave early. He said that the vision of Vietnamese football is only as far as the AFF Suzuki Cup, while major tournaments like the Olympics or the World Cup are beyond the thinking of the country's football officials. Another comment is that Vietnamese people do not like criticism and are afraid of conflict.

Those are frank and sad words, but we have to admit that Mr. Miura was right about the current state of football. Has any foreign coach or Vietnamese coach observed and especially said and dared to say like Toshiya Miura? He certainly did not hesitate to offend VFF officials or Vietnamese fans because he simply said what he saw and felt.

He assessed that Japan has superior football skills and for them, tournaments that occur every 4 years like the World Cup are a dream, a goal, an obsession. Unlike Vietnam, which only dreams of winning the AFF Suzuki Cup and... that's it.

The truth is always cruel. But we must thank Toshiya Miura for everything. For what he has done and is doing for Vietnamese football and for his frank and objective assessments. He has no grudge or prejudice against the Vietnamese people, so if Miura said that, it must be because he saw and thought that. And those are accurate observations.

According to TTVH