V.League Annual Season: Pressing Rhythm and the Forgotten Touchline Winger

The rain started at six in the morning. The training ground sits at the foot of a dyke, water pooled in small hollows on the grass, and behind the B40 wire fence there was only one man. He ran down the touchline, set the ball, crossed. Jogged back, set the ball, crossed. I counted more than two hundred crosses before the dressing-room door opened and the coaching staff called him in. Nobody had asked him to do extra work. That afternoon he came on in the 68th minute. Four touches, all on the left flank, all of them passes backwards. His team won 1-0 with a header from a corner. Nobody on the terraces mentioned his name. In the post-match bulletin, people talked about the scorer and about the VAR room. I wrote one line in my notebook: the pure touchline winger is being digested by the very league that produced him, and almost nobody has noticed. V.League 1 in its annual-season format has 14 clubs playing a double round-robin, 26 rounds in total. From the 2026-24 season the competition moved from a calendar-year schedule to a cross-year one: it kicks off in autumn and finishes in early summer. VAR has been in operation since the 2026 season. That shift is usually discussed in terms of broadcast rights, FIFA Days and the need to align with Asian competitions. The part people discuss less is temperature. Under the old format, the run-in fell in August and September, hot but past the peak. Under the new one, the decisive stretch falls in April, May and June. In Ha Noi, Hai Phong or Nam Dinh, those are weeks when temperatures pass 38 degrees Celsius and humidity touches 80 percent. In the south, that is when the rainy season begins, and matches at Thong Nhat or Go Dau become genuine physical examinations, where every sprint has to be paid for. Vietnamese football has always been organised around two climatic poles. Reversing the calendar pushed the most important stretch of the season onto the exact junction of those two poles, and that changes how a team has to be built. Based on my experience watching matches from the touchline across many seasons, most analytical sheets that reach newsrooms get the order of priorities in this league wrong. We measure distance covered, we measure sprint counts, we measure high pressing actions, and we present all of it as a gauge of effort. A large distance covered can be the mark of a team that runs well, or of a team that runs out of position and has to run to catch up. A midfielder who covers eleven kilometres, seven of which are spent chasing a ball that has already passed him, contributes nothing to the defensive structure. Ineffective running still produces handsome numbers, and in V.League we have consumed handsome numbers for years. What actually decides things in this competition is heat tolerance and recovery capacity. A pressing block can hold high intensity for roughly 60 to 65 minutes in 36-degree heat with heavy humidity, even with players who have a good physical base. After that point, the gaps between the lines open in a way the naked eye reads more clearly than any data sheet. Goals conceded from the 75th minute onwards do not come from pure tactical error. They come from legs that can no longer execute what the head still reads correctly. That is why the champion under the new format tends to be the club with more than eleven usable players. By May, the league no longer rewards the strongest eleven. It rewards the deepest squad, the best medical department, and the club that books a flight half a day early instead of arriving right before kick-off. And this is where the story of that winger comes back. In modern coaching, wingers are taught to drift inside, to occupy the half-space, to create numerical superiority in central areas. That is correct in a league where opponents press high and you need to break the first line with passes through it. V.League does not work that way. Most teams here defend with a mid or low block, crowd five or six players in front of the penalty area, and give you the ball on the outside. To open a block like that, you have to stretch it horizontally. A winger who hugs the line forces the opposing full-back to choose: follow him wide, or stay and protect the zone. Every moment of hesitation costs the defensive block part of its structure. A winger who drifts inside does not create that hesitation. He helps the block keep its shape, and in the weather of the closing stretch, a defensive block that keeps its shape is the hardest thing in the world to break. So why do clubs still choose inverted wingers? Because the structure rewards it. Inverted wingers score more, are rated higher, have a better chance of moving abroad, and are easier to fit into a pressing scheme in training sessions where time is short. Academies teach it too, because young coaches learn from European curricula and apply them literally. By the time a player reaches the first team at 19, he has spent three years not practising how to beat a man on the outside. Nguyen Quang Hai is a genuinely inverted player, and with him it works because he can produce the final pass that most domestic players cannot. But a Nguyen Quang Hai is only valuable when there are people around him who hold the width of the pitch. At national-team level, Nguyen Xuan Son once did that job differently: stretching defences with physical strength and by forcing centre-backs to follow him. In the second leg of the 2026 ASEAN Cup final at Rajamangala on 5 January 2026, he scored twice and then left the pitch on a stretcher. Vietnam won 3-2, won 5-3 on aggregate, and took the trophy. But the image left behind was clear: when the only source of pressure disappeared, the team had to live on set pieces. Both Bangkok goals came from open play. So did the winner. Yet across the campaign, most goals for many V.League clubs come from corners, from long throw-ins and from free kicks at the edge of the box. When the ability to create from open play is narrowed by a crowded defence, set pieces become the shortest path. But set pieces are a skill you can buy with training hours rather than transfer money, and that says a great deal about the structure of the league. Nguyen Tien Linh is the example of the box striker who lives on open play around the area. Nguyen Van Toan is the wide player who still keeps his speed over short distances. Both represent what this league can still produce, and both are increasingly rare cases. The outside view of V.League tends to revolve around foreign strikers and refereeing disputes. Those are easy subjects to write. I do not believe they are the real internal signal. I have sat in press rooms after matches in which a visiting coach blamed the referee, while the footage showed his midfield had lost the capacity to run back from the 70th minute. The problem lay elsewhere, and it is discussed less because it generates no headlines. There was a period when the league stopped altogether. For three hundred days without applause, I heard the breathing of players more clearly on empty terraces. The 2026 season was cancelled midway after an outbreak, and what remained afterwards was a generation of players who lost an entire year of competition at the most important age. The rain that year washed away many things, but it did not wash away the memory of a summer. The players born in 2026 and 2026, today 24 and 25 years old, are the product of a football culture that lost two consecutive seasons. That means that on the flanks of many current clubs, we are looking at a gap that should never have existed. What is notable is that the league has still recorded real progress. The VAR system works more steadily, the number of fully televised matches has risen, and a few clubs have set up their own sports science departments instead of outsourcing on short contracts. But that progress is uneven, and in a league where the resource gap between the top and bottom groups remains wide, evenness is what decides how competitive the whole system is. So which signals deserve attention over the rest of the annual season? The registered matchday squad will say more than the starting eleven. A team that can rotate seven positions without its structure collapsing is a team still running in June. Successful dribbles on the two flanks are worth counting too, because they show whether a side can still stretch opponents horizontally or has surrendered to playing through the middle. And watch what happens in the recovery room after the final whistle. In a league with this density of fixtures and this climate, most of the distance between two teams is created in the 48 hours after the final whistle, not in the 90 minutes before it. I write about the ball, but I keep the rhythm with the hearts of the people who play it. The winger who hit more than two hundred crosses in the rain that morning is still waiting for his chance on the bench. If a V.League coach dares to give him twenty-six rounds in his natural position, I want to be sitting at the touchline to see what happens to the opposing defence. That is the rhythm I keep. Beat Keeper.