2019 Southeast Asian U22 Championship: "Taking the Pulse" of U22 Timor Leste

U22 Vietnam players practice. Source: Tuan Cuong/VNA

The saying “All beginnings are hard” is true. Despite winning the opening match of the 2019 Southeast Asian U22 Championship, it must be admitted that coach Nguyen Quoc Tuan and his team had to work hard to get 3 points against U22 Philippines.

The red team dominated the field for most of the match, had more possession of the ball than their opponents, had more shots than their opponents, had many clear scoring opportunities but still let U22 Philippines take the lead and only won by a minimal margin.

But all Vietnamese fans hope that U22 Vietnam will play better in the next match of the group stage against U22 Timor Leste at 6:30 p.m. on February 19, when we have time to learn from the problems in the previous match. Meeting U22 Timor Leste is a good opportunity for U22 Vietnam to accumulate points, improve their playing style, and improve their secondary indexes to strengthen their hopes of reaching the Semi-finals.

The opponent Timor Leste is clearly rated much lower than Vietnam. They only lost 0-1 to U22 Thailand in the opening match, but the score on the scoreboard did not reflect the situation of the match as well as the correlation between the two teams in reality. Similar to U22 Vietnam, U22 Thailand dominated U22 Timor Leste, had more possession of the ball and created many clear scoring opportunities.

Timor Leste only knows how to defend and fight back, but they do not know how to organize defense, the basic skills of the players as well as the tactics of this team are very weak. The U22 Timor Leste team participating in the U22 Southeast Asia tournament 2019 has many players who were in the Timor Leste team participating in the AFF Suzuki Cup 2018, but it seems that this has not helped them. Timor Leste was defeated miserably in the tournament where the Vietnamese team won the championship at the end of last year, and the U22 team of this country will also find it difficult to avoid that risk.

They only lost by a small margin to U22 Thailand mainly because their opponents did not finish well, not because they defended firmly. Can they stand firm against U22 Vietnam? We are not subjective, but it is hard to believe that U22 Vietnam will lose points against this "inferior" opponent. The most fearsome weapon of U22 Timor Leste is just a relaxed playing spirit because they have nothing to lose. In addition, this team has no support to stop the army of strategist Nguyen Quoc Tuan.

U22 Timor Leste lacks depth in the squad, has no talented players and is very inexperienced. U22 Timor Leste plays with determination, using the majority to make up for the limitations in the individual qualities of the players, but if they concede a goal, this team can easily fall apart and fall into chaos. Against such an opponent, U22 Vietnam has a bright chance of entering the Semi-finals one round early.

Earlier that day, at 3:30 p.m., the early match of Group A between U22 Philippines and U22 Thailand will take place. Being pushed into a corner, "The Azkals" will have to show all their abilities to gain points against "The War Elephants"."to keep hope going./.

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