The Tet Night at My Dinh and the Scars Nobody Sees

On the first night of the Lunar New Year of the Tiger, My Dinh Stadium had not a single empty seat. I sat in the twelfth row of stand B, holding a notebook whose spine had worn thin, and when the final whistle blew, an entire forest of people rose to their feet — yet no one could scream it into words. Three goals against a national team that had haunted Vietnamese football for so many years. Nguyen Tien Linh headed one in, Nguyen Quang Hai struck from distance, and the stands burst like a broken dike. But what I remember most is not a goal. It is a boy of about ten sitting in front of me, wearing a red shirt far too big for him, crying without understanding why he was crying. People score goals with their feet, but I write with my scars. And that night, amid the fireworks and the roaring, I began to think about the scars that victory cannot erase. I am fifty-four now. I have covered eight Olympic Games, eight World Cups, and I have walked the roads of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France like a wanderer among numbers and highways. I started at a local radio station in 2026, when a tape recorder weighed more than my whole bag of equipment, and people still called football by its simple name: the match. Thirty-eight years at the edge of the pitch have taught me one thing — a nation's memory of football does not live in the scoreboard. It lives in the way people fall silent after the whistle. The stadium is empty, but the applause still lingers somewhere in memory. On that first night of the Lunar New Year, Vietnam hosted China in the third round of AFC qualification for the 2026 World Cup. I had sat in the stands at My Dinh more times than I can count, from meaningless friendlies to nights when all of Hanoi could not sleep. But this was the first time, after more than two decades of waiting, that Vietnamese football reached the final round of World Cup qualification. That was a milestone that I, as a twenty-year-old boy in Binh Duong, had never dared to dream of. We had traveled a long road, and that road began on nights when football was only the crackle of a radio, in tournaments where spectators sat on concrete terraces, and with players who wore flip-flops to training. I remember 2026, when I was a reporter for a local sports site. In the match between Becamex Binh Duong and HAGL in the V.League, a nineteen-year-old player named Nguyen Xuan Tung came on from the bench and scored the only goal in the ninety-third minute. He wore number sixteen. After the match, in a cramped press room, he stammered: “I only heard my heart beating, and then the ball found my foot on its own.” I did not write about tactics. I wrote about a boy who grew up in an industrial zone where his parents were workers, and about a goal that was like a promise to a small rented room. The piece ran fifteen hundred words, without a single column of statistics. The next night, he called me: “Uncle, I read it and saw myself in it.” From that night on, I dropped the habit of opening with a scoreline. Every piece I write begins with a person, not a match. To find the human voice in the sound of the ball — I have lived with that idea for nearly a decade. Because when people talk about Vietnamese football, they talk about victories and defeats, about coaches and stars. But what makes a football culture is not a trophy cabinet, it is the way a country learns to hurt. On that first night of the Lunar New Year, I saw a country learn to rejoice. And that, in a very reckless way of memory, frightened me. The third round of 2026 World Cup qualification was a journey I called “ten naked matches.” Vietnam shared a group with Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Oman and China. Six teams, ten matches, and a road everyone knew in advance would not be lined with roses. Coach Park Hang-seo at the time was a Korean man with a face that rarely betrayed emotion. He had come to Vietnam in 2026 and had created something I do not know what to call properly: a collective. Not a team of stars, but a mass of people who understood one another to the point of pain. People talked a great deal about his tactics. Three at the back, five in midfield, quick counter-attacks. I am not a man of formations. I am a man of moments. And the greatest moment of that whole campaign, for me, was not any goal against any opponent. It was the day Vietnam lost in Japan, and after the final whistle, the players took a lap around the pitch. Nguyen Quang Hai bowed his head. Do Hung Dung stood still like a milestone. Que Ngoc Hai patted each man on the shoulder. No one wept. But the whole stadium, and a whole nation watching on screens, understood that something had just broken. The German machine broke down, and I saw a generation cry without a sound. I wrote that line in 2026, when Germany were eliminated in the group stage of the World Cup in Russia. I wrote about their empty substitutes' bench when the referee blew the final whistle, about a dynasty stepping off the ladder of history without a single person applauding it away. But it was only when I sat at My Dinh on the first night of the Lunar New Year that I understood that sentence was not only true of Germany. It is true of every generation, everywhere, when a dream is just big enough for people to dare to believe in it. The ball rolls on the grass, but in truth it rolls through human fate. I said this to a young colleague in a coffee shop in Binh Duong, and he looked at me as if I had just spoken a foreign language. He said: “Uncle, football today is data. It is xG, it is passes, it is possession percentage.” I stayed silent. I understood him. He grew up in a world where everything is measured. But I grew up in a world where people believed their own eyes and their own hearts. It is not the difference of age. It is the difference of memory. When you watch a match through a spreadsheet, you see a match. When you watch it through memory, you see a generation. And my generation — the men and women who came through war, subsidy, renovation, and then watched Vietnamese football rise — that generation learned to love football with a love that has no numbers. We loved these teams because we owed them something. We owed them nights sitting before a black-and-white television, times crying alone in a room, times betting on a hope we would never dare admit our whole lives. At fifty-four, I understand that stadium floodlights illuminate a whole life. On that first night of the Lunar New Year, as My Dinh blazed, I saw in those lights not just three points from a match. I saw my own youth. I saw friends who are no longer here. I saw a country trying to learn to believe in itself, in one brief moment allowed to rejoice without needing to justify it. The truth is that people remember only victories. But I want to speak of the opposite. The three-one win over China on the first night of the Lunar New Year was an explosive moment. But Vietnamese football was not made by one moment. It was made by thousands of moments no one photographed, no one posted online, no one reported. It was made by mornings when young players pedaled ten kilometers to training. By village coaches who taught children for free. By mothers who sold lottery tickets so their sons could buy a pair of boots. I once attended an athletics championship in a provincial town. It was a different sport, but the story was identical. A sixteen-year-old female athlete won a medal, and when a reporter asked what she was thinking, she said: “I just hope I have enough money to buy a bus ticket home.” No one wrote about her. The next day's paper devoted four pages to a professional football match with twelve cars parked outside a hotel. That is the injustice of memory. People build statues for those who score, but forget those who made the pitch. When I raised this in an editorial meeting, I was called “outdated.” A young editor told me that readers today do not want fifteen-hundred-word pieces without statistics. They want a three-line summary, a chart, a closing line. I stayed silent. I understand the market. But I also understand that football, in itself, is a long story. If you tell it in three lines, you have not told the story. You have told the label of the story. My resistance is not a rejection of the digital. I accept data as a strange voice, a language I am not fluent in but respect. But I refuse to let data become the pillar of emotion. A match can be described by twenty numbers, but it is lived only by a single heartbeat. And a heartbeat, as I learned from young Nguyen Xuan Tung in 2026, never comes from a cell in a spreadsheet. What I want to say here is not a lament about age. It is an observation about collective memory. When we record a match in numbers, we preserve the result but lose the soul. And the soul, once lost, cannot be restored by any table of statistics. There is one thing people rarely mention when they speak of that first night of the Lunar New Year. It is the silence after the match. Not the silence of defeat, but the silence of too many emotions at once. I walked from the stand to the parking lot, and along the way I heard an old man say to his grandson: “Long ago, I dreamed of seeing this.” That was all he said. But in that sentence was a lifetime. I think about my generation. We were born in the years when the country was still poor, and we grew up with a wordless sense of losing. Football was where we sent that feeling, and football was also where we hoped it would dissolve. Each time the national team lost, we did not just lose a match. We lost once more that feeling of never being good enough. And each time the national team won, we did not just win a match. We won a small war against our own memory. That explains why people cry. That explains why a fifty-four-year-old man like me sat among tens of thousands and felt his eyes sting. We do not cry because of football. We cry because of ourselves. We cry because of a country that has been through too much, and this is the first time it has been allowed to rejoice fully, without anyone's permission. But here is where I want to say something few want to hear. The explosion of Vietnamese football — the way an entire country pours into the streets every time the national team wins, the way young players are worshipped like gods — all of that conceals a deeper wound. It is the wound of a football culture built on emotion but not on a system. I have seen this in many places. I saw it in athletics, where an Asian gold medalist still had to take extra work to survive. I saw it in cycling, where young riders sold their future to a foreign team for a single contract. And I see it most clearly in football, where a great player can be known by the whole country, but when he retires at thirty-three, he steps into a void no one cushions. The generation of players who made that first night of the Lunar New Year — many of them will never be prepared for life after the pitch. They will become coaches on salaries far below their peak, or they will open a small eatery, or they will vanish from collective memory like a name mentioned once and then forgotten. Vietnamese football, in its whirlwind of emotion, does not remember long enough to care for those who made it. People say the Vietnamese national team has been “transformed.” People say we are in a new era. People say Vietnamese youth football is finally getting attention. But in editorial meetings, when I propose writing about a retired player with no pension, they tell me no one reads that story. Machines that seemed invincible — Germany in 2026, and to some extent the Vietnamese faith in the immortality of emotion — break down in the same way. Not because they are weak. But because they are built on a foundation that cannot bear its own weight. The Germans lost before the match began — because they forgot fear. I wrote that line about the 2026 World Cup. And I think of Vietnamese football. The fear we need is not the fear of losing. It is the fear that we will forget. Forget the boys who pedaled ten kilometers. Forget the mothers who sold lottery tickets. Forget that one victory cannot erase a weak system. There is a moment I will never forget in my reporting career. It was 2026, in Kazan, when Germany were eliminated. I sat in the stands, and beside me was an older German journalist. He wrote nothing the whole match. When the referee blew the whistle, he closed his notebook, looked at me and said: “Memory is the cruelest thing.” I did not ask what he meant. I knew. Memory is the cruelest thing because it does not let us choose what to remember. It remembers both joy and pain, both victories and the defeats we thought had gone quietly to sleep. And a nation's memory of football is the same. It does not remember by the table of standings. It remembers by its scars. I do not know what the future of Vietnamese football will be. I have no prediction to sell. But I know one thing: that first night of the Lunar New Year will not be the final peak. There will be other nights, other matches, other generations. And if we remember only the explosive nights while forgetting the quiet days that built them, we will live again in a loop of emotion and emptiness. The stadium is empty, but the applause still lingers somewhere in memory. I write these lines when the season has passed, when My Dinh has gone dark, when the players of that night have returned to their ordinary lives. One is preparing for a new season. One is struggling with injury. One is quietly learning to be a coach. One is opening a coffee shop in Binh Duong, a few kilometers from my home. I went to visit that one. He made me an iced coffee, and we talked about football like two old friends. He did not remember much about the matches. But he remembered a morning training session, when the coach made the whole team run ten laps in the rain. He remembered the cold. He remembered the smell of the grass. He remembered the breathing of the teammate beside him. I think that is football. Not the goals. Not the victories. But the rainy mornings, and the people beside us on those mornings. And if there is one thing I want to leave to the next generation — those who will write about Vietnamese football when I have stopped writing — it is this: do not only count goals. Count the scars. Count the ones who bowed their heads in the tunnel. Count the nights a country learned to believe in itself. Because football, after all, is only a way for people to retell their own lives. And a life, as I learned at fifty-four, is never told by a scoreboard. We will win again. We will lose again. We will cry over things that tomorrow we cannot recall. That is the nature of football. That is the nature of memory. The only question left is not where the national team will go. The question is: when the lights go out, who among us will stay to remember, and to remember what?