The Child Who Was Never Taught How to Tackle: The V-League and a Loop That Starts in Childhood

The Child Who Was Never Taught How to Tackle: The V-League and a Loop That Starts in Childhood

On a São Paulo morning I make coffee and open my laptop exactly when the ball starts rolling in a stadium half a world away. The clock reads nine fifteen. On the other side of the screen, it is raining. The V-League pitch takes the water in patches, and I notice I am sitting up straight, both hands wrapped around the mug, waiting for precisely the thing I do not want to see.

Dinh Bac receives the ball near the edge of the box. He turns, and the surface slides beneath his feet. A defender launches forward. He goes down. The referee blows. Then, ten minutes later, another man, the same script. I rewind twice — not to look for refereeing errors, but to look at the tackler's foot: it does not stretch to cut out the ball. It stretches to end the move before the move can begin.

The Portuguese commentary in my earphones is rushed. The picture on screen is silent.

I am twenty-six, living in Brazil, writing about football for Brazilian readers. But there is a whistle inside my chest that still sounds like a pitch in northern Vietnam, where I once sat on my grandfather's low plastic chair and listened to the radio describe a match I never got to see.

At twenty-six I write about sport in order to understand why people stay together. That sentence is true of every match I have ever covered. This morning it is true in a far more uncomfortable way.

The woman in row twelve

I once sat in a Vietnamese stand on a drizzly afternoon. Beside me was a woman who sold drinks, hair tied quickly, a cloth still in her hand from wiping glasses. She did not watch football with her eyes. She watched with her ears. From the sound of a foot striking wet grass she could tell that something in the move was wrong.

When a young player was cut down, she stood. She did not swear. She turned to me and asked a question I carried for years: "Why do they play like that, child?"

I could not answer. Back then I thought the question belonged to referees. Now, after five years working in football in Brazil, I think it belongs to the people who taught that boy how to play.

When the pitch is empty, houses become their own private stands. But when the pitch is full and nobody has taught the most basic thing, applause too becomes a noise that saves no one.

A season that opened with falls

What has happened in the V-League early this season is not scattered. It clusters. It thickens into a wave, like the first rains of the southern Vietnamese season: quick to arrive, slow to drain, leaving mud behind.

Van Hau received a four-match suspension after his challenge on Doan Ngoc Tan. Four matches means severity inside this league's disciplinary system. But in a single move, four matches says nothing about how a player learned to launch himself at an opponent when he was a twelve-year-old boy.

Not long after, Tan Sinh and Van Son were named for two separate take-downs of Dinh Bac. Two incidents, two situations, one target: the legs of a young forward on the rise. I watched both again. In both, the ball had already left the spot before the leg came down.

That is the difference between a bad tackle and a deliberate act. A bad tackle hits the ball and misses. A deliberate act hits the man and does not miss.

The matches were played in heavy rain, on poor surfaces, with a slippery ball and studs that would not hold. I know that feeling; I have played on pitches like that. Muddy grass slows every touch by half a beat, and when everyone is slow, the fastest man is the one who dives in first.

But here I have to stop and read carefully what a European expert said in an interview with Dan Tri. He places rain and pitch conditions in their proper spot: aggravating factors, not the thing that creates the problem.

Rain never taught anyone to cut down a colleague. Rain only makes it look like a cheap solution.

The European with no name

I need to be clear before going further: the person offering the analysis I am dissecting here is anonymous. Dan Tri introduced him as a European expert who has answered the outlet many times over the years. We know he is not a V-League coach, not a Vietnam Football Federation official, not an active player.

We do not know his name, where he has worked, whom he has trained, at what level.

For a journalist, that is a hole. I am not translating Dan Tri's piece. I am rewriting it as someone who has sat in many stands and asked the same question as that drinks seller. And when I read what this expert said, what stopped me was not his name but the subject he chose.

He did not talk about punishment. He talked about teaching.

He talked about tackling technique. About managing one-on-one duels. About the concept of respecting an opponent. About young Vietnamese coaches, many of whom enter the profession with nothing but personal playing experience or street-football experience.

He talked about training environments where adults sometimes encourage a child to play aggressively, to intimidate opponents as a competitive skill.

And he said that because a player who reaches the professional level carries habits formed very early, correcting them at V-League level is an extremely low-yield exercise.

That is a hard argument to hear — not for players, but for an entire system that has believed it can solve the problem with a hammer.

The skill nobody teaches

Here is what five years on this side of the world taught me: people teach a child to shoot, to find space, to finish with the outside of the boot. They teach him to keep the ball, to turn, to escape a press.

Very few teach him to tackle properly, because teaching tackling requires a decent surface, a teacher who understands it, and a session where nobody is rushing to get through the week's curriculum.

A proper tackle is a physics problem. It is about approach angle, leg distance, timing of the extension, which way you channel the opponent, and most importantly: choosing a direction in which the opponent can fall without his own bones taking the impact.

I once watched a session at a Brazilian youth academy. Nine-year-olds were not allowed to tackle by sliding. They were taught to block. They were taught to shepherd opponents to the touchline. They were shouted at for diving in on a ball a teammate already had covered.

That is what the European expert meant when he spoke about technique. Not flair. Those are different parts of the game.

And when technique is not taught, the child learns the process from somewhere else. From adults. From older boys on cinder pitches. From television. And every time he sees a heavy challenge go unpunished, he files it away as a definition.

That is where the expert is trying to pull our attention — even without a single data point to prove it.

The smell of mud

I will not use rain as poetry. On a Vietnamese pitch in the wet season, mud is not lyrical. Mud smells of iron, of old sweat trapped in fabric, of damp earth stuck to tape wrapped around a knee. The drinks seller folds her stool because water has reached the third step of the aisle.

In those conditions a player chooses the cheapest solution: put the leg in before the ball arrives. Because if the ball arrives and the leg has not, you get beaten. And in a league where being beaten can cost you a starting place, being beaten is worse than a card.

The blind spot sits here: if nobody taught it, there is nothing to punish.

Pressure and the price of a starting shirt

The European expert made one observation I consider the most important of the whole interview, even though he said it lightly: incidents spike early in the season, when many players are competing for a first-team place.

I lived with a player for three seasons. Early in a campaign he did not sleep enough. He read the team sheet like a lab result. Every session was a trial. When he came off the bench he ran twenty percent more than usual.

I tell this not to excuse anyone. I tell it to point at a structure.

If a league indirectly rewards aggression, it will never erase aggression by only lengthening bans.

A player fighting for a starting place does not calculate in ten-match suspensions. He calculates in three seconds. Three seconds inside the box. Three seconds in which he believes he cannot afford to lose.

The twelve-year-old is watching

There is a mechanism that developed football cultures treat as obvious and developing ones often overlook: downward transmission.

Professional players do not just play. They teach. Every move they make is a lecture, recorded, broadcast, repeated on cinder pitches and school grounds on Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings.

Young players always look up at their seniors. That is the most beautiful thing about a football culture and the most dangerous.

If a take-down in the V-League becomes normal, it becomes normal in the under-15 side of a district school. If a professional escapes punishment, the twelve-year-old does not remember the punishment. He remembers the outcome.

The loop does not exist for us to endure it, but for us to catch sight of ourselves in time.

I saw that loop once, and it taught me something no tactical report can ever say.

The blind spot of collective memory

In this story, the biggest blind spot is not the players, and not the referees.

It lives in memory.

We grew up in a football culture where the "warrior spirit" is celebrated. We have an entire vocabulary for it. Blood and fire. Unafraid of contact. Playing to the last breath. We retell great matches through the number of times our players were cut down and got back up, not through the number of accurate passes.

I do not want to deny that beauty. I have wept for it.

But a collective memory that equates physical courage with dignity has quietly paved the road for something else hiding behind it. Because when every collision is called "spirit," no collision is a fault anymore.

Here is the blind spot: we remember the wounds we had to absorb, and rarely the wounds we inflicted.

Punishment and what punishment cannot do

The expert offered a standard for judging a disciplinary system, and I think it is the key sentence for every debate to come: if dangerous incidents keep recurring despite disciplinary measures, then the effectiveness of the current penalties must be questioned.

He defined the purpose of a sanction in two parts: punishing what happened, and preventing what comes next.

The second part is the difficult one.

A penalty deters only when it is applied consistently. Not when it is applied heavily.

A player does not calculate using the league's average ban length. He calculates using what he has seen in the last three months. If three similar challenges bring three different bans, he does not learn a limit. He learns that the limit is random.

I once heard a Brazilian coach say something I wrote in my notebook: a consistent referee teaches a team better than a tactics manual.

Two names on one sheet of paper

In the Dan Tri interview, responsibility is placed on two names at once: the Vietnam Football Federation and the company that organises the league.

I read that detail and thought of something very practical: when responsibility is split between two parties, it is often halved and then it disappears.

One body holds the power to issue sanctions. One holds the power to change regulations and oversee league operations. Both are required for reforming coach licensing, for building a mandatory youth education programme, for designing consistent disciplinary standards.

In Brazil, where I live, disciplinary cases pass through a panel with published minutes. Sanctions are compared against precedent. I am not claiming Brazil gets everything right — there have been disciplinary scandals here that I have written against myself.

But there is one mechanism worth borrowing: when a sanction is placed beside earlier sanctions, someone is forced to explain the difference. And when people have to explain, they rarely dare to act arbitrarily.

What one morning can see

Back to the São Paulo morning. I rewound the second incident three times. On the third pass I noticed something I am not sure anyone has mentioned: after going down a second time, Dinh Bac stood up and looked toward his own bench. Not at the referee. At his own bench.

I do not know what he was looking for. Maybe advice. Maybe a nod. Maybe someone on the staff telling him he needed to play faster so he would stop getting cut down.

It is a small moment, and I think it is the key to this entire story.

A young player is taken down. He stands up. And what he needs is not a sanction aimed at someone else. What he needs is a man who was taught how to teach him to protect himself in a V-League match in the rainy season.

That is the missing piece. It cannot be added by a press conference.

What I believe, and what I am unsure of

I believe something I have tested in many places: a football culture cannot import technique. It can import curricula, experts, courses. But technique only travels through people, through those who stay long enough to teach it onward.

In this case, the teachers are young coaches. And what the European expert said about them — that many build coaching careers on playing experience and street football — is not a remark about character. It is a remark about licensing and training mechanisms.

I am also unsure about something else.

I am unsure whether placing the entire focus on youth education is enough, because the current generation of professionals is already a product of the old system. They are grown. They are playing. Their habits have hardened.

Here the expert may be right that correcting habits at professional level is low-yield. But if so, we must accept a hard truth: no solution produces results within one season.

And a football culture that lives on media pressure finds that very hard to accept.

What I want to see the next morning

I will not end this with a call for reform. That belongs to people with authority, and I think they know what they have to do.

I will only write down what I will check every Sunday morning, when I open my laptop in São Paulo and it may be raining again in Vietnam:

Whether a player fighting for a starting place pauses for half a beat before diving in — not because he fears a ban, but because a voice in his head reminds him there is another way to win the ball back.

Without that voice, every sanction is just paper. With that voice, it means someone, somewhere, in a youth session at seven in the morning, managed to teach one thing that an entire league never taught.

People chase the trophy, but what they are really chasing is a story about themselves. The V-League's story right now sits in a very small place: a child who was never taught how to tackle, and an adult waiting for someone to teach him again.