Why is Nghe An's Lam River declining?

(Baonghean.vn) -After the early season victories, Song Lam Nghe An is slowing down with 3 consecutive losses and 1 draw. Although they are still temporarily leading the V-League, everyone knows that the Nghe An team is very unstable and the championship goal seems very far away if they do not make timely adjustments.

This season, SLNA introduced captain Trong Hoang to replace his senior Huy Hoang after the "flailing" incident in Thanh Hoa. As a young player with good physical strength and skills, many people believe that Trong Hoang will succeed the position of his senior with the same name. However, after 11 times wearing the captain's armband in the first leg of V-League, Trong Hoang has not left much of an impression. He still shows off his strength, runs hard, shoots hard and has scored some important goals, but Hoang has hardly shown any leadership qualities. Every time he is on the field, Trong Hoang does not have (or does not dare to) the ability to shout, urge and direct the players in the team like his senior Huy Hoang before.

Remember, in previous seasons, whenever the home team was frozen or at a disadvantage, Huy Hoang stood out, rolled up his shirt and shouted at the players to try to attack and defend in harmony. At that time, the entire SLNA squad obediently followed. Trong Hoang could not do that, in many matches the players in the team played like they were sleepwalking, especially the young players lacking experience, but Trong Hoang did not make any moves to command his juniors on the field. Without the authority to make the players in the team fear him, Trong Hoang also did not have the necessary hot-tempered moments to intimidate the opponent and create a winning mentality for the home team. Many times, coach Huu Thang affirmed his trust and tried to protect his captain, however, what Hoang did in the role of leader on the field was not really much. If they want to win the V-League, the SLNA coaching staff needs to quickly find a real leader on the field, something that all the big names in the V-League have done.

In many matches, Coach Huu Thang and the coaching staff showed a lack of precision and timeliness in adjusting personnel and playing style.

In the first matches of the season, SLNA played with a defense consisting entirely of young players such as Manh Hung, Van Hoan, Son Ha, Dinh Hoang, etc., the star Huy Hoang has passed the other side of the slope and was left on the bench. When playing at Vinh Stadium, against weaker opponents, that defense stood firm, but when facing big foreign strikers who can sweep and press the ball in the air, SLNA's defense was completely defeated and lost miserably. The ability of these young players is indisputable, but in a fierce environment like V-League with strikers who have reached a level of cunning, SLNA's defense is indeed too weak. In the second leg, SLNA needs to find a leader in the defense like Huy Hoang before or must reach the level of Dinh Luat, Phuoc Tu, Quoc Long, etc. if they do not want to see the scene of attack working and defense destroying like in the recent series of matches.

In the forward line, on the day before the opening of V-League, Song Lam Nghe An promptly brought in star player Cong Vinh from Bau Kien's team. This addition helped the Nghe team maintain its position at the top of the table. Except for the time Vinh suffered from an intestinal infection and could not score, in the remaining matches, every time he took the field, Cong Vinh performed well as a leader in his attack. In the last 2 matches against Da Nang and Dong Nai, Cong Vinh scored 3 goals, in all 3 matches at the beginning of the season, the player wearing the number 89 shirt scored impressively.

As excellent as Cong Vinh is, his foreign partners are just as bad. It seemed that names like Kavin and Plaza were really the lifeblood of Song Lam Nghe An this season, but the philosophy of "delicious, nutritious, cheap" is making the Nghe team pay the price. In the past few matches, Plaza played like a person who had lost his soul. Whenever he had the ball, this foreign player only knew how to dribble, causing opportunities to be sadly missed. The individual personalities combined with the weakness and lack of luck in the finishing moves of Plaza and Kavin are the basic reasons why Song Lam Nghe An could not have a single win in the past 4 matches. It is the lack of luck of the foreign players that has caused the Nghe team to lose its own strength. Sometimes fans feel like SLNA is accepting 2 Westerners in attack,... If in the second phase of the season, the foreign players still play listlessly like this, who knows how far Song Lam Nghe An will fall.

Plaza's individualism in recent matches is one of the reasons why SLNA has declined.

One thing that is easily seen in the recent series of 3 losses and 1 draw of SLNA is the ability of the coaching staff to direct tactics. Many times, Coach Huu Thang made inappropriate and untimely personnel adjustments on the field. In some matches, Trong Hoang was exhausted but was still not replaced, or like the recent match with Da Nang, when SLNA was leading but the coaching staff did not direct the players to maintain the pace of the match. Towards the end of the match, we did not have any experienced players on the field to defend against cunning strikers like Merlo and Quoc Anh. In the match against Dong Nai at Vinh Stadium in round 11, although SLNA was leading the score, when Coach Tran Binh Su brought the trump card Henry onto the field, Coach Huu Thang did not make any changes, so the players Son Ha and Manh Hung were both fumbling in front of the goal and it was inevitable that the home team would share points. At the end of this match, coach Tran Binh Su loudly affirmed that the match that day he played with the 2nd team and Song Lam Nghe An was "also normal",...

Long-term is the way to know a good horse, after the first leg of V-League, although SLNA is still leading the table, it seems that the Nghe An team is shaking. If there are no timely changes in personnel and playing style, I am afraid that in the second leg of the season, the championship candidate Song Lam Nghe An will continue to decline without brakes.

Nguyen Khoa