Que Ngoc Hai and his teammates have a chance to rewrite history.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in 6 confrontations withChinaAt the national team level, the Vietnamese team always lost to their opponents. We scored 3 goals but conceded 20 goals, including 3 losses without scoring a goal.

Statistics favor the home team

Specifically, in two matches in the 1998 World Cup qualifiers, the Vietnamese team lost to China with the scores of 4-0 away and 1-3 at home. Le Huynh Duc's goal against the visiting team China after overcoming coach Li Tie, who was then a left-back, caused a stir in the Southeast Asian betting world at that time.

Coach Park Hang-seo and his team are poised to rewrite the history of the confrontation between the two football powers. Photo: VFF.

Under the guidance of coach Alfred Riedl in the 2000 Asian Cup qualifiers, we continued to lose with a score of 0-2. The next time the two teams met was in the 2011 Asian Cup qualifiers, where the Chinese team won both matches with scores of 6-1 and 2-1. In the most recent match between the two teams in June 2012, the Chinese team also won with a score of 3-0. That shows that winning against the Chinese team has never been an easy thing for our team.

Rewriting history

But we still have the basis to rewrite history. Because in the most recent encounter, U22 Vietnam of Coach Park defeated U22 China under the leadership of Coach Guus Hiddink with a score of 2-0 right on the away field. Many players of both teams present in that match will be present in the next match.

Looking at the players who scored for the Vietnamese team against China during the above mentioned period, they were Le Huynh Duc (in 1997, in the 1998 World Cup qualifiers), Nguyen Vu Phong (in 2009) and Le Cong Vinh (in 2010), in the 2011 Asian Cup qualifiers. Obviously, Cong Phuong, Van Toan, Tien Linh, Quang Hai are players with similar qualities to succeed their senior players.

In terms of general performance, Chinese football has not been as strong as before. The fact that a series of Chinese giants have stopped investing in football fields has caused the quality of the Chinese Football Championship to decline. Most recently, the Evergrande Real Estate Group, an investor in the Guangzhou Football Club, has had 8 national team players go bankrupt.

This has caused the Chinese national team’s recent performance to no longer be among the top in Asia. Recently, the Chinese national team has dropped the most places on the FIFA rankings, falling 4 places from 71st to 75th in the world. This is an extremely disappointing result for coach Li Tie’s team, despite having added 4 naturalized players.

The Chinese football team just had a friendly match with Syria in Sharjah (UAE) which ended in a 1-1 draw. It is worth mentioning that Syria did not field their starting lineup to play against China because many of their key players had not yet arrived in Sharjah (UAE) but still scored the first goal.

I have been in the UAE to prepare for the Vietnamese team for a month to get used to the field and weather. But recently the Chinese Football Association (CFA) has requested to change the match time between the Vietnamese football team. According to the original plan approved by AFC, the match between the Vietnamese team and China will take place at 7:00 p.m. (UAE time, 10:00 p.m. Vietnam time) on October 7.

However, CFA recently requested to change to 9pm (UAE time, 0am on October 8, Vietnam time) due to concerns about the hot weather in UAE, and early matches will affect the players' physical strength. CFA's proposal was approved by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). But it also revealed CFA's anxiety before the match against Coach Park Hang-seo and his team, something they had not paid much attention to before. The chance for Que Ngoc Hai and his teammates to score points is greater than ever.