Vietnam U23 and the Order to 'Tear the Net' of the Philippines: The Problem Is in the Boot, Not the Formation

Vietnam U23 and the Order to 'Tear the Net' of the Philippines: The Problem Is in the Boot, Not the Formation

The Training Session of September 16 in Nagoya

The training session on September 16 in Nagoya took place in rain. I stood at the edge of Minato Stadium, under the temporary shelter of the technical area, watching the pitch shift from green to a wet grey. The ball rolled heavier. Short ground passes began to bounce an extra beat — exactly the beat that forces a defender to bend lower and a forward to wait half a second longer before placing a shot.

That was when I noticed the finishing drills.

The coaching staff split the squad across two halves of the pitch. On one side were crossing situations from the flanks; on the other, triangular combinations ending in a one-touch shot. The sound of the ball hitting the net rang out steadily, but between those sounds came short, clipped "no's" from head coach Dinh Hong Vinh. He did not shout. He said one word, then pointed. The players nodded, stepped back, did it again. On one sequence, they repeated it four times.

The ball had not yet rolled in the Philippines match, but the rhythm of that session already told a great deal.

I stayed twenty extra minutes after the squad went into the dressing room. The rain kept falling. The pitch held water in small pools around the penalty area. A logistics staffer used a squeegee to push those pools out of the box. He worked slowly, carefully, as if preparing for a match far more important than what the group table currently suggested.

And in truth, he was.

Group C After the First Round of Matches

To read the September 18 match correctly, Group C has to be placed back in its proper position.

Uzbekistan U23 demolished the Philippines U23 5-1. That result shaped the entire group picture: Uzbekistan has 3 points and a +4 goal difference, sitting top as the clearest benchmark of attacking strength. In the other match, Vietnam U23 drew 1-1 with Kuwait U23. The two sides split a point each.

So after the opening round: Uzbekistan 3 points, Vietnam 1 point, Kuwait 1 point, Philippines 0 points with a -4 goal difference.

I have covered enough Asian youth tournaments to know that this kind of group is easy to misread. A team that wins 5-1 is usually assumed to be the number one contender, while a team that draws 1-1 is filed into the worried column. But youth football does not operate on the logic of a table after one round. It operates on the logic of creating chances and converting chances — two entirely different concepts, and the Kuwait match separated them clearly.

The most important thing for Vietnam U23 right now is not its position in the table. It is whether this team is creating enough chances.

According to what the team noted internally, Vietnam U23 created many chances against Kuwait but scored only once. The coaching staff spent most of the post-match analysis on exactly that phase: capitalizing on opportunities and finishing efficiency. Not defensive organisation, not build-up from the back.

That is a very specific signal.

People said girls don't understand tactics, so I brought an entire season as evidence.

I still remember why I started keeping notes this way. In 2026, when I wrote about the Lyon academy, a group of male supporters reacted sharply to my analysis. I did not argue. I spent more than three weeks re-watching the player's entire season, logging every metric, then republished under the headline "Statistics Have No Gender."

Since then, I have had one rule: when discussing a tactical problem, you must point to exactly where it lies. The Philippines match will show where Vietnam U23's problem lies — in chance creation, or in finishing.

And looking at the opening round, the answer already leans toward the second.

Conversion, Not Creation

This is the core point I want readers to grasp before the September 18 match.

Vietnam U23 enters the Philippines match with one clearly identified problem: the ability to convert chances into goals, not the ability to create them.

That distinction is not small. It determines how the team prepares, how the coach selects personnel, and how the match will unfold.

If a team cannot create chances, the problem is structural: it needs to change how it builds play, add bodies in midfield, adjust the positions of its attacking outlets. That is a problem measured in weeks, even months.

If a team creates chances but does not score, the problem is one of execution: it needs better decisions in the final moment, more composure inside the box, one correct touch. That is a problem that can be fixed in a few sessions, if people fix the right thing.

What happened in Nagoya suggests the coaching staff chose the right thing to fix. The crossing drills, the one-touch finishes, the repetition until it was right — all are execution drills, not structural ones. They did not change the system. They changed the quality of the final touch.

But there is a trap here that I have seen many times in my career covering teams.

The Philippines Will Not Play Like They Did Against Uzbekistan

A team that has just lost 1-5 has two ways to respond. The first is to keep playing as before, accept the risk, and hope the attack is good enough to compensate for the defence. The second is to drop deep, reduce space, and turn the match into a war of patience.

For the Philippines U23, after a 1-5 defeat to Uzbekistan, the second path is far more likely.

This needs to be said plainly: the opponent Vietnam U23 meets on September 18 will most likely not be the team that conceded five. They will be a side playing lower, with more bodies in the middle third, willing to break up play by any legal means.

That changes the problem.

Against Kuwait, Vietnam U23 created chances — meaning they could exploit space. Against a compact Philippines, there will not be much space to exploit. These are two completely different kinds of difficulty. One demands speed of decision-making. The other demands patience and the ability to break down a dense defensive block with options other than central combinations.

If Vietnam U23 carries only the lesson from the Kuwait match — that is, more finishing within the same attacking structure — they may hit a wall without understanding why. Chances will be fewer. Shots will be fewer. Goals, if they come, will come later.

Data is only a map; the real road is in the stands.

I say that for a very concrete reason: the data on Vietnam U23 at this tournament is extremely thin. No expected goals. No key passes. No pressing metrics. No possession statistics. What we have is the final result and a qualitative description: many chances created, one goal scored.

That is a very thin foundation for conclusions.

What I can state with confidence is that the conversion problem has been identified by the coaching staff as a priority. What I cannot state with confidence is whether this is a one-match aberration or a structural weakness. A single match is not enough to distinguish between the two.

That is precisely why I cap confidence at a medium level for most tactical claims in this piece. With a source base this thin, conclusions must be bounded.

A Wet Pitch and the Value of Second Balls

There is one variable few people notice, and it sits right under the players' feet.

The September 16 session in Nagoya took place in rain, on a waterlogged pitch. This is not merely a weather detail. It changes the equation of the match.

A wet pitch reduces the accuracy of short passes, especially multi-touch combinations near the box. Ground balls become slower, bounce higher, and are harder to control. In those conditions, the value of lower-touch options rises: long balls, aerial balls, crosses, and especially set pieces.

This may be part of why the coaching staff devoted so much time to aerial situations from the flanks. And it may also be the most practical route to breaking down a compact Philippines block.

If the rain continues on September 18, I expect Vietnam U23 to use more aerial balls, more set pieces, and fewer small central combinations. Young teams tend to play on reflex, and the reflex on a wet pitch is to get the ball up and forward faster.

That is not a novel tactical idea. It is an adaptation.

And in youth football, adaptability is often the deciding factor between two evenly matched teams.

The beat-keeper rarely appears on the big screen, but the whole match dances to his step.

Here, the problem does not lie with the attacking outlets.

A common mistake when analysing youth national team matches is to attribute every scoring problem to the forward line. If the strikers do not score, people blame the strikers. But conversion rate depends on a much longer chain: where the receiver is, when the ball arrives, whether the receiver has to handle it with his back to goal.

In many young teams, the person who determines chance quality is not the shooter. It is the passer.

If Vietnam U23 created many chances against Kuwait, someone did the right thing deeper on the pitch. The problem sits in the final phase, but the root of the final phase may sit in the quality of the second-to-last ball.

That is why I watched the middle third closely during training. There, the young Vietnamese players were asked to repeat situations delivering the ball into the box from both flanks. A good pass turns a hard chance into an easy one. A rushed pass turns an easy chance into a wasted move.

The Philippines match will answer this more clearly than any metric.

Reaction From the Stands

I always make time to listen to the stands before concluding, even when their song is off the beat from what I think.

In Asia, pressure on Vietnam's youth teams usually arrives from two opposite directions. One is high expectation: fans are used to Vietnamese youth sides going deep in continental tournaments. The other is impatience: when results do not come early, expectation quickly turns into criticism.

The phrasing "tear the net of the Philippines" in the instruction given to the team reflects exactly both directions. It is expectation and pressure at once. It encourages and sets a standard that, if unmet, becomes a burden.

For U23 players, that pressure is not small. They are young. Many have never played in a tournament this tense.

I have seen this before in France matches. When a team must win at all costs, young players tend to shoot earlier than usual, run faster than necessary, and skip the simple pass. They make mistakes not from a lack of skill, but from wanting the goal too much.

That is the real risk of the September 18 match.

The Counter-Intuitive Angle: The 'Tear the Net' Order Is a Double-Edged Knife

This is the section I want to spend the most time on, because it runs against common intuition.

The usual reading is this: when a team creates many chances but does not score, the solution is to demand more attack, more shots, more aggression in front of goal. The "tear the net" order fits exactly that logic.

But my experience covering matches suggests the opposite is often truer.

When the problem is conversion, intensifying the attack can worsen it, because it stimulates precisely the reflex that caused the problem in the first place: deciding early and rushing.

This is the paradox of young teams.

If a striker misses because of poor technique, more shooting practice helps. If a striker misses because of poor timing, demanding more shots will further damage his decision-making.

The right question is not "how do we shoot more." It is "how do we choose the right moment to shoot."

For Vietnam U23, the Kuwait match showed a worrying pattern: chances created but not scored. That pattern can repeat in two very different ways. The first is to keep creating, keep shooting, and eventually score — meaning the problem may self-correct over time. The second is to keep creating but grow more impatient, choosing harder options, and squandering the easy ones.

We do not yet have enough data to know which path this team is on.

This is also why I do not use expected goals figures — quite simply, none are available. Every conclusion in this section must be treated as a hypothesis at medium confidence.

One More Thing About the Philippines

There is another possibility I consider reasonable: the Philippines, after a 1-5 defeat, may have higher motivation to restore pride than the table suggests.

Teams that have just been beaten heavily often do not roll over in the next match. They play tighter, more disciplined, and usually cause more discomfort than predicted. That is a pattern I have seen repeat across many tournaments.

If Vietnam U23 enters the match assuming the Philippines will collapse as they did before, they may struggle psychologically when the score is still 0-0 after thirty minutes.

And in youth football, thirty goalless minutes can be the longest stretch in a player's career.

About Uzbekistan, the Final Group Opponent

One cannot discuss the Philippines match without addressing Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan's 5-1 win over the Philippines establishes them as the benchmark of Group C. A positive result against the Philippines is seen as the necessary springboard before the team enters its hardest match.

This creates a particular structure of pressure. Vietnam U23 does not just need to win. They need to win in a context where goal difference may become decisive.

That is why the "tear the net" order is not just a figure of speech. It reflects a practical calculation: goals may matter as much as points.

But this is exactly the point I want readers to weigh carefully. When a team needs many goals, it often loses the ability to score. That is a familiar paradox of football. The harder you try, the harder it becomes.

What I Will Be Watching

I will watch three things in the September 18 match.

First, the timing of the opening goal. If Vietnam U23 scores inside the first twenty minutes, the match structure opens up and the Philippines must push higher. If not, the match becomes a war of patience.

Second, the origin of the chances. If chances come mainly from aerial and set-piece situations, the coaching staff read the pitch and the opponent correctly. If chances come mainly from central combinations, it means the Philippines is leaving more space than expected.

Third, how many attacking players are involved in the final phases. This is the indicator of whether the team is genuinely playing more aggressively, or simply shooting more from unfavourable positions.

Closing

I write about football not to prove I am right, but to keep the rhythm of the story.

Vietnam U23 enters the Philippines match with a clearly identified problem and a solution being tested. They created chances against Kuwait. They did not score enough. The coaching staff responded by focusing on finishing.

That is a reasonable response. But reasonable does not always mean effective, especially in youth football, where psychology and timing matter as much as technique.

The real question is not whether Vietnam U23 can tear the net of the Philippines. The question is whether they can stay calm enough to choose the right moment to do it.

The ball has not rolled yet. But the rhythm has already begun.