Coach Troussier: To upgrade the Vietnamese team, we must call up many overseas Vietnamese players like Nguyen An Khanh.

Coach Troussier has called up 25 players to the Vietnam U23 team for the FIFA Days gathering in June 2023 with many new faces. Among them, the most notable is the Vietnamese-American midfielder Andrej Nguyen - Nguyen An Khanh. This is a player from Do Luong, Nghe An, currently living in the Czech Republic, and is the first Vietnamese-American player to join the Vietnam U23 team under coach Troussier.

Coach Philippe Troussier explains why he called up player Nguyen An Khanh.

Explaining the reason for calling this player, the French strategist said: "Unlike many other overseas Vietnamese players, An Khanh has a Vietnamese passport, so I only need to talk to the player's family and the player personally to call him up. Nguyen An Khanh is a case in point so that we can have more flexible policies for overseas Vietnamese players later."

"We have to do a lot of work if we want to upgrade the national teams from U20, U23 and the Vietnam team. Training alone is not enough, tournaments like V.League, First Division, Second Division need to compete continuously, from 40-50 matches/season. The second method comes from overseas Vietnamese.

Player Andrej Nguyen - Nguyen An Khanh could be a key case to upgrade the Vietnam team.

The recent success of African teams does not come from domestic players but from players playing in Europe. That is the reason why the strength of African teams has been raised so quickly. In Southeast Asia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, the naturalization and calling of foreign players to the national team is carried out vigorously. Vietnam has about 20 players of Vietnamese origin, playing and residing in many places in the world such as: Korea, Japan, Czech Republic, Russia, France... The team's coaching staff always pays attention to this resource.

Mr. Troussier added: “For the players called up to the national team, I choose them according to many different criteria. Group 1, I respect experienced players, with status who have played for the national team before. V.League is not organized much and continuously.

There are two groups of players in coach Philippe Troussier's selection plan.

I decided to select experienced players, defined as having more than 10 official appearances for the national team. I frankly shared that based on their current form, many of them do not deserve to be in the Vietnam national team. But with up to 34 players in the national team, I wanted to create a more comprehensive comparison of the players' abilities.

Group 2 is those who have never or rarely worn the Vietnamese national team jersey before, I closely follow their performance at the club. Of course, performance at the club does not necessarily guarantee my criteria for the national team. The following testing week will evaluate whether the players can integrate. They also need to show a sense of responsibility, strength, desire, and meet the criteria I set out"./.