The Bandung Rain, Xuan Son's Void and a Test of Identity Before Thailand

I spent two Manchester winters learning that football is never won by training in the rain. But I also spent twenty years on the touchline learning that a training session in the rain usually sends a clearer signal than any press conference. On the evening of September 27, at Stadion Arcamanik in Bandung, coach Kim Sang-sik trained in the rain with his players. He jogged gently on the outside lane with his staff, wet feet, wet shoulders, his face still carrying the pensive look local reporters had noted repeatedly in the preceding days. One photograph is enough for many people to write a moving story. For me, that image is a data point, not an emotion. And data points need to be read correctly. People say Vietnam trained in the rain to prepare for Thailand. That sounds simple, but it contains three things that, read carefully, look quite different: first, a team that trains at a fixed time regardless of weather is a team with a rhythm. Second, a coach who goes out in the rain himself is a coach trying to compensate for something his team lacks emotionally. Third, a team training ahead of its most important group match yet having to fall back on basic drills is a team with a squad problem, not a tactical one. I am not saying this to diminish Vietnam. I am saying this because I have followed too many crisis teams not to know that the sign of a crisis never lies in a red card or a scoreline. It lies in the training session. When a team is running smoothly, the coach usually stands outside and observes. When a team is wobbling, the coach steps in. Kim Sang-sik stepped in. That is information. If you re-read everything recorded about that session, you will find one detail overlooked more than the rain itself. It is the split of the squad. The starters from the opening match were sent into the tunnel for light recovery work. The rest — those who came off the bench or played the second half of the previous game, including Hai Long, Minh Khoa, Dang Khoa and Tai Loc — trained on the pitch. This is not a minor detail. This is the whole story. In modern football, how a coach divides training groups within three days of a match speaks more precisely than any formation on a whiteboard. A recovery group in the tunnel signals a compressed schedule. A main group outdoors signals a rotation plan being tested. When a coach is forced to push his substitutes into the main group while preparing for a group-deciding fixture, he is not doing it out of curiosity. He is doing it out of necessity. And that necessity has a name: Xuan Son. I don't need to retell how Xuan Son's injury was reported. I want to talk about what few are willing to say: Vietnam built its attacking identity around a reference striker, and that reference striker is now gone. In professional football, this is called the "reference striker" — a centre-forward who holds the ball, acts as a wall, draws opposing centre-backs, and above all allows the whole team to play at a controlled rhythm. Losing such a player is not like losing a defender. Losing a reference striker is losing an entire attacking spine. When the attacking spine disappears, there are two responses. The first is to find a clone, hoping Hai Long or someone else can do seventy percent of what Xuan Son did. The second is to change the structure entirely, moving to a more fluid model where scoring responsibility is spread across lines, and where a creative midfielder like Hoang Duc becomes the centre. The rondo that coach Kim joined alongside Hoang Duc and Tuan Tai tells me he is choosing the second path. I should pause here, because many will wonder why I read so much into one keep-ball drill. A rondo is the most basic exercise in professional football: a group of players passing in a confined space while one or two in the middle try to intercept. It is not attractive. It is not tactics. It is the anatomy of football. But precisely because it is basic, it says a lot. When a coach personally steps into a rondo against a midfielder returning from injury, he is not merely teaching passing. He is testing reflexes. He is testing confidence. He is testing whether that player dares to turn in tight spaces after weeks of avoiding contact. And he is sending a message to the whole squad: we will play through short, controlled passes, and I will be the first to do it. That is a tactical signal, but I must admit it is a weak one. One drill does not make a philosophy. I have sat in press rooms after sessions where a team did rondos for two hours, only to hit long balls from the back three days later. Football is not won by what you train. It is won by what you dare to do when you are backed into a corner. But I still read the signal, because in a squad that has lost its reference striker, a rondo is the right drill to prepare a midfield that must carry more. What caught my attention even more was the decision to keep Hoang Duc out of the matchday squad against the Philippines. At elite level, a coach leaving his most creative midfielder out of the opening match of an international tournament is not normal. It only happens for a very specific reason. That reason could be an injury not fully healed, fitness short of ninety minutes, or a longer-term strategic calculation. In Hoang Duc's case, I think it is both. And here is what I want to state clearly, because it matters more than any tactical speculation in this piece: by keeping Hoang Duc intact for the Thailand match, coach Kim has implicitly declared that he treats the Thailand match as the more important one. That is a statement without words. It does not appear in any newspaper. It appears in the team sheet. I once mispronounced the name Nacer Chadli three times on live television during the France–Belgium semi-final in 2026, and viewers called in to complain. But that did not make me wrong about myself. I still hold that a coach does not need to say aloud what he is thinking. He only needs to pick the right lineup. The team sheet is the most honest manifesto any coach can write. Kim Sang-sik wrote his by leaving Hoang Duc out. Now let us talk about the Philippines match, because it is the thorn few want to touch. Vietnam won. That is true. But even those who wrote about that win had to admit it was unconvincing. I have no xG, no PPDA, no possession data to reach a measurable conclusion. I only have a qualitative observation: a team rated above its opponent in quality did not create as much as expected. If that observation is right, it is a warning. In football statistics there is a concept I like very much, called the "sustainability of results." A team that wins because its process is good can be trusted. A team that wins because the result arrives before the process tends to be pulled back by the law of regression to the mean — which explains why many teams open tournaments brilliantly and collapse in the knockouts. Vietnam is on the second side of that possibility. With its most important attacking player gone, that law has an even better chance of showing up. I still remember Sunderland losing to Charlton in the League One playoff in 2026. I live-tweeted mid-match that relegation was "a chance to cut out a financial tumour," a veteran journalist pushed back hard, and I spent four thousand words proving that going down is a way of going up. But the lesson I took was not that relegation always leads upward. The lesson was that a team that wins on results rather than process will sooner or later pay the price. This brings me to where any analysis of the Thailand match should begin, rather than end. On paper, Vietnam and Thailand are the two strongest teams in the group. Their meeting could decide first place. It is a textbook "six-pointer" — a match whose result does not merely add three points to the winner but takes something more important from the loser: control of their own fate. But that "six-pointer" label only holds if both teams enter with comparable availability. And here is where I want to offer a view contrary to the majority. The majority thinks this match is a chance for Vietnam to prove its mettle. I think the opposite. This match is a chance for Thailand and Vietnam to test together which side truly owns a more sustainable football foundation, rather than which side has a better individual. And when you lose a reference striker, when you must manage the fitness of your number-one creator, when the schedule gives you only about seventy-two hours to recover, you cannot play the way you played before. You are forced to play a way you have not trained enough. That is why I believe Kim Sang-sik will choose a controlled, quick-transition game rather than a frenzied high press. A team that has lost its striker and must be cautious with a returning midfielder cannot commit its whole shape high up the pitch. That contradicts the basic principle of sports risk management. You never go all-in for one prize when the very structure of your team is unsettled. I know some will say that in a big tournament you must take risks. I agree. But there are two kinds of risk. Smart risk is when you know what you stand to gain and lose. Cheap risk is when you only want to prove you are not afraid. International football is full of teams that took the second kind of risk, and almost all of them went home early. What makes me believe in Kim Sang-sik is that he brought Hoang Duc into a mid-session rondo rather than starting him. That is the behaviour of a professional, not someone courting public opinion. If he wanted to court opinion, he would have started Hoang Duc against the Philippines and called it "ambition." He did not. That is a professional plus that is rarely recorded in the press. One more thing I want to say plainly, even knowing it may cost me goodwill. I have read many pieces about this period of the national team, and most of them choose to call this tournament the "FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026." I am not sure that is the official name, because the Southeast Asian national-team championship has historically been organised by the AFF under various commercial names, not by FIFA. Misnaming a tournament is not a small mistake. It is a sign that we are reading football out of habit, copying headlines rather than verifying sources. I say this not to nitpick a few words. I say it because I work as a host of major events, and I have stood before thousands of people reading out the name of a tournament I had not checked carefully. Being wrong on a detail does not mean being wrong in your thinking, but it creates something more dangerous: false confidence. When you get used to misnaming a tournament, you will easily get used to drawing big conclusions without checking small facts. Football is a drama of mistakes — I just help make it more watchable. For the same reason, when I heard the group includes Pakistan, I had to stop and ask more. Pakistan is not an ASEAN member. It belongs to the South Asian zone of the Asian confederation. A team like that appearing in a Southeast Asian group could be a sign of a new format, an invitational event, or a change I have not caught up with. I do not conclude. I only say that a serious sports writer should not wave away absurd details so easily. Waving away absurd details is exactly the habit that has made many Vietnamese football analyses meaningless. People remember scorelines. They forget tournament names. They remember goals. They forget the assist. And in the end, after a few years, an entire football generation is remembered through distorted facts. I mispronounced three times on live television, but that does not make me wrong about myself. I still believe that in sport, pursuing precision down to the smallest detail is an ethical act, not the hobby of a fussy person. People remember me for three mispronunciations; I choose to remember myself for three decades on the pitch. Back to Bandung. What did that rain mean for the match? If the Thailand match is played in similar wet conditions, one thing is certain: the technical gap between the two teams will be flattened. A wet ball bounces differently, travels differently, is received differently. A team with a slight technical edge loses part of its advantage. A team that plays with disciplined structure keeps its advantage. And in wet conditions, set pieces become more important than usual, because an unintended free kick can become a chance when the goalkeeper's hands are wet. I have raised this in many pieces about English football: English winter football differs from English autumn football not because the players change, but because the ball is wet. In Southeast Asia, rain is a more constant factor than any tactical system. The physics of football is not a romantic detail. It is a variable. And Kim Sang-sik, the man who sent his team out to train in the rain, seems to understand that. So if you are a team that has lost its reference striker, managing the fitness of a creative midfielder, playing in wet conditions, with a schedule that gives you seventy-two hours, what do you do? I would say three things. First, you accept a slower tempo. Not because you want to play slowly, but because you must. Your squad is not deep enough to press high for ninety minutes. You will pick certain moments to swarm and others to keep the ball and let the opponent warm their legs with wasteful passes. This is a mature strategy, and it is not remembered by the press because it produces no highlights. Second, you will choose fewer but higher-quality vertical passes. This is precisely why the rondo matters. In a midfield that has lost its wall-like striker, every vertical pass is more dangerous than usual, because losing the ball means a counter-attack. A rondo teaches players to decide quickly in tight spaces. That is the hardest skill to learn, and it is never learned in one session. But a session still has to start somewhere. Third, you will accept that this match could be a draw. I know this sounds unattractive to fans who want a dazzling win over the arch-rival. But in international football, knowing when not to lose matters as much as knowing when to win. A mature team does not gamble an entire tournament on one group match just because of national pride. That is why I believe in Kim Sang-sik not because he makes promises, but because he makes none. The 4-2-4 is not a formation; it is a test of who dares to dream. But in football, the dreamer who does not calculate wakes up early. On that empty Etihad night, I suddenly heard my own applause most clearly. I write this because during the freeze of the pandemic I learned something I will never forget: football does not need spectators to function, but it needs spectators to have meaning. And a team does not need to win to have dignity, but it needs a foundation — a foundation that the Bandung rain on September 27 may have exposed for those willing to look. I do not know whether Vietnam will beat Thailand. Nobody does. But I know one thing few may notice: this team is entering its decisive match without its striker, with a creative midfielder recovering, in a compressed tournament, under tropical rain. And that is exactly the context in which a team's identity is forged, not the context in which it is decorated. If you think I am wrong, look at Sunderland: sometimes failure is the most beautiful motivation. But if I am right, then what we are about to see is not a win or a loss. It is the answer to a much bigger question: Is Vietnamese football mature enough yet to play without one outstanding individual carrying it? That question cannot be answered by one match. But it certainly starts being asked from a training session in the rain in Bandung, when a man named Kim Sang-sik quietly stepped into the rondo circle and did what very few coaches in this region dare to do: he played football with his players, in the rain, without saying a word about tactics. Football is a drama of mistakes, and I only help make it more watchable. Vietnam's mistake may be losing Xuan Son at the most important moment. But football history does not remember those who lost something. It remembers those who did something with what remained in their hands. And in Kim Sang-sik's hands right now are a grey sky, a wet pitch, and a group of substitutes waiting to be called. Perhaps the Bandung rain will dry within hours. But the moment a coach stepped into a rondo with his players in the rain — that moment does not dry so quickly. It settles. It becomes a memory. And in football, memory is all we have to compare different generations of the same footballing nation. I will watch the Thailand match with the eyes of an observer, not a fan. I will not watch the scoreline. I will watch how Vietnam moves without Xuan Son. I will watch at which minute Hoang Duc enters and how he dribbles. I will watch who holds the ball in the final minutes, when the whole team begins to tire. Those are the details that, ten years from now, when we look back, will tell us more than any scoreline. And if Vietnam wins that match without Xuan Son, I will not call it luck. I will call it a moment of maturity. Because the hardest thing in sport is not winning when you have everything. The hardest thing is winning when you lack what you thought you could not live without. Have you ever tried standing in the rain and passing with wet feet? I have. The ball does not go where you want. But precisely because it does not go where you want, you learn to adjust. Football is a study in adjustment. And Vietnam under Kim Sang-sik — with an injured striker, a recovering midfielder, a compressed schedule, a tropical downpour, and a tournament whose very name remains unverified — is the most vivid classroom I have witnessed in years. I will take notes on every minute. Not to comment. But so that later, when Vietnamese football looks back on this stretch, we have an honest record of the moment that football nation was forced to learn how to live without its hero.