Bandung Rain, Rondo Drills and the Problem of Playing Without Xuan Son: What Vietnam's Training Session Before Thailand Really Contains

18:30 on 27 September, at the Arcamanik stadium in Bandung, rain poured onto the pitch. Not a brief Southeast Asian shower that stops after a few minutes, but a steady, heavy downpour, enough to slow the ball on the surface and to turn every long pass into a test. In the frame that VnExpress reporter Duc Dong sent back from the scene, coach Kim Sang-sik stands in the middle of the pitch, shirt soaked, running with a group of players and directly joining a rondo drill. A beautiful image. An image that would tempt anyone to immediately write a piece praising the team's spirit. But after 45 years in this trade, I have learned one thing: beautiful images are usually the most deceptive thing for a reader, because they tell us about emotion and not about structure. And in a training session preparing for a match that the squad itself considers decisive for topping the group, what matters is not who got wet, but who was absent from the pitch and for what reason. I have followed Vietnamese football since the days I sat taking notes in the Chi Lang stand, and since 2026, when I formally signed on to follow SHB Da Nang during the period when sports journalism shifted onto digital platforms, I began to form a professional habit: at every training session I do not ask who played well, I ask who is missing. The absentee list is always more honest than the standout list. The standout list can be embellished by one nice touch in a light session; the absentee list cannot be faked, because injury is the one thing that does not lie. And in that training session under the Bandung rain, the absentee list told me a completely different story from the story of fighting spirit. The Vietnam national team entered this session after a win in the opening group match, played around 25-26 September against the Philippines. A win, but the author of the source article himself described it as an unconvincing victory. This is the most important detail in the entire input, and it matters more than the image of the coach running in the rain, because it speaks to the gap between result and process, a gap that in my trade people call the debt of luck. Teams that win while playing poorly usually have to pay that debt in the next match. This is not fate, it is a statistical tendency, and I have seen it repeat too many times in the V-League to ignore it. The context around this session must be placed correctly. Vietnam sits in a group containing Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan. According to the assessment stated in the source article, Vietnam and Thailand are rated above the other two teams. That means, in theory, this group is a two-horse race, and the Thailand match plays the role analysts call a six-pointer, a match whose result shifts the positions of the two direct rivals more than any other. Both Vietnam and Thailand won their openers. The format is compact, the density high, and the gap between the two group matches is only around 72 hours, right in the red zone of recovery physiology. One thing about the sourcing must be stated clearly at once. The competition is named in the source as the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026. The Southeast Asian national-team championship has historically been organised by the ASEAN Football Federation and branded commercially across eras, from the AFF Suzuki Cup to the AFF Mitsubishi Electric Cup and then the ASEAN Championship, not by FIFA. The presence of Pakistan in the group is also unusual, since Pakistan is not an ASEAN member but belongs to South Asia and appears in Southeast Asian events only as an invited guest. Add to that the venue name Acamanik, which is almost certainly Stadion Arcamanik in Bandung, and I am obliged to flag questions about the accuracy of the administrative details. These questions do not change the value of the personnel information, but they remind me that every conclusion drawn from format and standings must be held cautiously. Back to the pitch. The most notable thing in the 27 September session was not that the team trained in the rain, but how the team split into groups. The starting group from the Philippines match was given separate recovery work inside the stadium tunnel. The substitutes and second-half entrants, among them Hai Long, Minh Khoa, Dang Khoa and Tai Loc, trained out on the grass. This is a textbook modern-football protocol: after a match, the group that played the full 90 minutes enters a low-intensity recovery block, while the group with few minutes maintains ball feel and movement volume. In a schedule where two group matches are only three days apart, this is not a choice, it is a requirement. But the very way the groups were split is the clearest tactical signal of the whole session: Vietnam is preparing for Thailand with a load-management mindset, not with a mindset of building a new system. No formation, no pressing scheme, no build-up pattern is mentioned anywhere in the source. What is described is preparation, not a playing system. For a team whose style is already established, that is entirely normal. For a team that has just lost its reference striker, that is an empty space that needs filling. And here is the heaviest detail: Nguyen Xuan Son is absent through injury. In the modern football I follow, every team usually has one player who holds the role the trade calls the reference striker, the anchor of the whole attacking system, the one who draws long balls, holds possession with his frame and creates space for the second line. Losing that kind of player is not simply losing a name from the starting eleven. It is losing an entire deployment option. You cannot replace a reference striker by putting another player in exactly that position and expecting the system to run as before. You have to rewrite part of the script. The interesting thing about the Bandung session is that, in parallel with losing Xuan Son, the team is handling a very cautious return: Nguyen Hoang Duc. This player was not used against the Philippines, and in the rainy session he took part in the rondo alongside Tuan Tai. I read this detail on two levels. The first is medical: the coaching staff and medical team treat the Thailand match as the higher priority target, so they kept Hoang Duc intact for it instead of burning him in the easier fixture. The second is technical: coach Kim Sang-sik personally contesting the ball in the rondo with Hoang Duc is a deliberate act. A rondo is a keep-ball drill in confined space, developing one-touch play, movement and reactions under pressure. Putting a recently recovered player into a rondo, and standing opposite him yourself to test him, is a way of checking that player's reflexes and physical confidence under controlled conditions. In Israel, where I sat at the commentary desk of Voice of Israel radio and Channel 1 from 2026, I learned that the way a coach treats a returning player always says more about his character than about the player's fitness. The reckless coach pushes the player back a match early to save his own seat. The meticulous coach holds the player back a match to save the player's career. Hoang Duc sitting out the Philippines match and appearing only in the rondo in the following session places Kim Sang-sik in the second group. It is a small but reliable data point. This leads me to the central argument: Vietnam's match against Thailand is a personnel problem, not a tactical problem. The big question is not whether the team presses high or low, but who will carry the scoring burden when the reference striker is gone, and whether a returning creative midfielder will have enough minutes to orchestrate the play. In football, when you cannot solve the personnel problem, every tactical problem becomes mere theory. Look at the group training on the grass: Hai Long, Minh Khoa, Dang Khoa, Tai Loc. To me this is a very carefully readable list. The substitute group and the second-half entrant group is precisely the group the coaching staff is evaluating to find a new attacking option. The coach is not pushing the burden of replacing Xuan Son onto one individual. He is trying an approach that distributes responsibility, where several players share the scoring task. The advantage is that it is harder to read; the disadvantage is the lack of a clear finishing point. When a team has no clear finisher, attacking moves often stall at the edge of the box without a final touch. This is exactly the problem the unconvincing win over the Philippines exposed. I want to be explicit about that win, because it is the most underrated link in the whole story. A victory over a lower-rated opponent that the reporter on the ground himself calls unconvincing usually reflects one of two possibilities: either the team created fewer chances than expected, or the team allowed the opponent more chances than expected. Both are bad signals, but of a different nature. If it is the first, the problem lies up front, exactly where the team has lost Xuan Son. If it is the second, the problem lies at the back, and that is especially dangerous when the next opponent is Thailand, a side far more inclined to apply high pressure than the Philippines. In either case, the conclusion points one way: Vietnam currently has a result better than its process. And teams whose result exceeds their process usually have one of two outcomes. Either they are strong enough to lift the process up to the level of the result, or the result will fall down to the level of the process. The Thailand match will answer that question. Now I want to move into the part I consider most worth discussing, and also the part regional media usually skips because it has no pretty pictures. That is the matter of the pitch and the weather. The session took place at 18:30 in heavy rain. This may be a random event, or it may be a conditions-adaptation exercise. In Southeast Asian football, where tournaments are usually played in the rainy season, preparing for a wet pitch is no small matter. A wet surface makes the ball travel faster over grass but slower through puddles, makes long passes less accurate, makes set pieces more dangerous, and flattens the technical gap between two teams. If the Vietnam-Thailand match is also played in similar damp conditions, any technical advantage is compressed, and the randomness from set pieces rises. This is the kind of context that a team missing its reference striker must especially note, because such a team will depend more on situations that do not come from open play. I witnessed this at the 2026 World Cup in Russia, when I worked as a field reporter for the Iran-Morocco match in Saint Petersburg. In the first half of that match I misnamed the striker Karim Ansarifard three times. That embarrassment forced me to record my entire broadcast, spend two full weeks listening back, and open a private Viber group asking 12 Vietnamese colleagues to point out my pronunciation errors in every context. The result was a personal Arabic and Persian phonetic table I used for the rest of the tournament. The lesson was not about pronunciation. It was that the smallest environmental condition can break the largest process. The rain in Bandung is the same. It is a small variable in a large spreadsheet, but small variables often decide the final outcome. Now let us discuss coach Kim Sang-sik from a management angle, not a media angle. The source describes him with a pensive expression, and quotes him acknowledging that the team faces many difficulties. To many people, this is atmosphere. To me, it is data about the internal state. A coach admits difficulty at only two moments: when he wants to lower public expectations to reduce pressure on his players, or when he genuinely sees a problem he has not solved. In this case I lean towards the second, because the team has just lost its most important striker and is handling a returning key midfielder. Those are two very real problems, not a media ploy. What is admirable about Kim Sang-sik is where he chose to stand in the session. He did not stand on the sideline observing. He ran with the group and joined the rondo directly. In team management this behaviour has a name: sharing hardship. It cannot replace tactics, but it builds authority. For a team losing its anchor and entering the most important match of the group, the authority of the man at the top is the only asset money cannot buy. I have seen many Vietnamese teams at regional tournaments lose not because they lacked good players, but because the dressing room cracked before the ball rolled. On the evidence, this Bandung camp is stable. Even so, I want to stay cautious. No sign of conflict appears in the source, but the absence of conflict does not equal the presence of harmony. It is only the absence of data. In my trade people often confuse the two. I have made that mistake a few times and each time paid for it with an article I had to correct. Here the story needs to be turned over, because there is another, more counterintuitive reading of the whole session. That counterintuitive reading is this. Perhaps the whole story of the rain, the coach running with the players, the rondo beside Hoang Duc, is not a tactical signal at all. Perhaps it is simply the media image of an ordinary recovery session, retold in the familiar narrative structure of an adversity story: rain, a steadfast captain, an injured star, a decisive match. This structure is not wrong, but it easily creates an illusion of eventfulness. Every time a Southeast Asian national team enters a decisive match, we receive an article of the same shape: the team trains in the rain, the coach is troubled, a key player is injured. This is a narrative template more than a new fact. And the important thing lies in the consequence of reading it through that template. When media frames the story as a tragedy being overcome, expectation pressure rises automatically. Readers finish it waiting for a beautiful comeback. But real football does not run on emotional scripts. A team missing its reference striker and its creative midfielder for most of the match is more likely to play controlled but low-variance football, not to produce a work of drama. If fans are invited into an emotional story, they will struggle to accept a dull draw. This is the media trap that needs naming. There is one more point I must state plainly, even if it is uncomfortable. Part of the data in the source was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, specifically the standard standings table. This is a content-provenance caveat, and as tables become increasingly automated, readers have the right to demand that numbers be verified independently against a primary source. I am not saying the table is wrong. I am saying I cannot say it is right until I have checked it myself. And in my trade, honesty with readers begins with admitting what you have not verified. Unverified numbers should not be used as the foundation of a strong conclusion, however beautifully presented. One more variable is left blank, and it is the most important of all: Thailand's squad condition is not mentioned at all. My risk assessment so far is one-sided. I know what Vietnam has lost. I do not know what Thailand has lost. In analysis, a one-sided risk is always less reliable than a two-sided one. Any conclusion that Vietnam is at a disadvantage must be held cautiously, because it rests on data from one side. If Thailand has also lost a key player, Vietnam's disadvantage shrinks considerably. If Thailand arrives at full strength, the gap opens the other way. This is the information gap any analyst must admit rather than fill with guesswork. I want to add a word on a subject Southeast Asian football often avoids in pre-match pieces: naturalisation. Xuan Son is a naturalised player. In the source he is mentioned only as an injured key player, with no debate about his eligibility. I raise it not to question a specific player, but to point to a wider pattern. Many national teams in the region depend on naturalised players in key positions, and that tends to produce two consequences: first, added pressure on that player when the team fails; second, a structural hole when that player is absent for any reason. The Bandung session sits squarely in the second consequence. When you build part of a system around one person, you must accept that person is a variable that can disappear at any moment. At this point I want to consolidate the analytical layers before the final judgement. The first layer is the event layer: Vietnam trained at 18:30 on 27 September at the Arcamanik stadium in Bandung, in heavy rain, under the direct direction of Kim Sang-sik. This is high-confidence information requiring no inference. The second layer is the personnel layer: Xuan Son absent through injury, Hoang Duc managed carefully after recovery. This is also high-confidence, since it comes from direct observation at the session and from selection decisions in the previous match. The third layer is the tactical layer: this is the lowest-confidence layer, because the source provides no advanced metrics. No xG, no PPDA, no possession share, no passing numbers. Any inference about playing style can only be directional, not declarative. I say this seriously, because in today's football-analysis environment people often confuse having a hypothesis with having evidence. The fourth layer is the risk layer: Vietnam's biggest risk is an availability risk rather than a tactical one. The second risk is regression to the mean from a result better than the process. The third risk is a relapse for Hoang Duc if he is pushed back too soon. All three risks are observable through concrete data: the match-day squad list, Hoang Duc's minutes, and the player chosen to replace Xuan Son at centre-forward. So which internal signals should be tracked in the coming days? First, the decision at centre-forward. If Kim Sang-sik picks a player with a profile like Xuan Son, that is a direct replacement, keeping the structure. If he picks a forward who tends to drop deep, that is a false-nine approach, changing the structure towards fluidity. These two choices reflect two different philosophies, and both could be right for the current squad. Second, Hoang Duc's minutes. If he starts, the medical team has confirmed he is fit enough, and the midfield will be organised around his distribution. If he only comes off the bench, a midfield fallback is ready and Hoang Duc is merely an upgrade option. Third, Thailand's condition. When news from the Thai side is published, the risk picture will rebalance. Until then, I keep my assessment at medium, leaning cautious. Finally, there is one thing I want to send to the young people working in this trade as I once did. After 45 years watching this industry, I have realised that the most valuable asset of a beat reporter is not the ability to write fast, but patience with small details. A training session in the rain can be a pretty photograph, but it can also be a page of data if you are willing to read it closely. The right question is not how the team trained, but who was present, who was absent, who was held back, and what is being prepared behind the curtain of the pitch. For this particular case, I hold one simple belief: starting from 28 September, every article about Vietnam will no longer be about the Bandung rain. They will be about Kim Sang-sik's choice at centre-forward. That is the real chapter of the story. And as someone who has many times sat back to correct his own small errors, I know that the difference between a team that advances and a team that stops in the group stage sometimes lies in exactly the empty space a training session leaves behind.