Pressing isn't killing Vietnamese football – dogma is

When Vietnam left the 2026 Asian Cup with three straight defeats, many hurried to bury everything: Philippe Troussier, the concept of pressing, the dream of controlled football. I still remember a small detail from the Iraq match. In the 67th minute, Quang Hai had just won the ball in his own half, Do Hung Dung sprinted forward, Tuan Anh turned and opened the flank. Three passes, the whole team pushed up as one unit — then abruptly stopped, as if the system's plug had been pulled. Troussier sat motionless on the bench, taking notes. He didn't shout, didn't gesture. That moment, to me, said more than any conceded goal: Vietnamese football does not lack ideas; it lacks legs — and patience — to follow the idea to the end. Troussier was sacked in March 2026, immediately after a 1-0 loss to Indonesia in World Cup 2026 qualifying. Before that, the national team had endured a disappointing Asian Cup: a 4-2 loss to Japan, a 1-0 loss to Indonesia, a 3-2 loss to Iraq. The public was quick to conclude: high-pressing, possession-based football doesn't suit Vietnamese physicality. The appointment of Kim Sang-sik, a pragmatic South Korean coach, was seen as an admission of failure. But that reading skips a systemic question: if pressing doesn't suit Vietnamese players, why did Vietnam's U23 once reach the SEA Games 31 final playing pressing from the first whistle? Why are other Southeast Asian teams like Thailand and Indonesia still studying pressing under Japanese and Korean coaches? The problem may not be the philosophy, but the execution. First, pressing is not about running more — it's about running at the right moment. At the Asian Cup, Vietnam did not trail Indonesia in total distance covered, but the number of successful presses — regaining the ball within five seconds of losing it — was very low. Why? Because players pressed as individuals, not as a block. The striker charged forward, the midfielders hesitated, the defenders dropped deep. The distance between the three lines stretched to 40 metres. A true pressing block requires 25-30 metres at most. Beyond that threshold, the pressure is purely theatrical: one pass dissolves it. Second, Troussier's mistake was about the timeline, not the destination. A high-pressing philosophy needs three to four years to settle in; he had less than one with the senior team and a few months with the U23s. Park Hang-seo once changed Vietnam's football culture — but Park had five continuous years, a golden generation from the HAGL Academy, and unconditional media support. Troussier changed everything at once: he dropped key players, called up a wave of youngsters, and asked them to play football that had never existed in V-League. The best system doesn't create superstars; it creates perfect roles. But if the role is too unfamiliar, the crowd boos before the actor learns his lines. Third, the problem is the ecosystem, not any single person. V-League remains a league of long balls, duels, and slow tempo. A player pressed for 90 minutes at his club every week, then stepped into the national team and was asked to press twice as intensely for 90 minutes — the body cannot adapt in two weeks of training camp. Based on my experience following matches, I remember the game against Indonesia in My Dinh: at least eight times the Vietnamese backline passed back to the goalkeeper despite no pressure, as a survival reflex. That is not Troussier's fault, nor the players'. It is a football culture shaped by thousands of domestic league matches. Now let's run a thought experiment: change a single variable. What if Troussier had kept the spine that won the 2026 AFF Cup — Que Ngoc Hai, Duy Manh, Hoang Duc, Quang Hai — and still demanded high pressing? Maybe, but not certainly. That generation was wired for Park's counter-attacking style; reversing habits is harder than building a new cohort. So Troussier chose radical regeneration and paid the price. But blaming pressing for that is like blaming a doctor because a patient underdosed. Pressing doesn't kill football; it only changes how we look at art. Watching every Vietnam match under Troussier, I noticed a pattern: stamina collapsed after the 60th minute. In official matches, shots on target in the second half were only a third of the first half. The cause is not just poor fitness but poor energy management. Textbook high pressing is an energy equation: one tackle attempt costs more than one run. Troussier's team performed too many "useless" presses — pressing when the ball was already gone, pressing when teammates behind hadn't stepped up. They burned energy without creating real pressure. Kim Sang-sik has spoken about "choosing the moment to press" — that is not abandoning the philosophy; it is fitting it to the Vietnamese body. An empty stadium gives you data, but takes away what data cannot measure: noise. And the noise of expectation is what made Troussier pay. I could be wrong. The strongest counterargument: perhaps pressing simply doesn't suit Southeast Asian football, where players are shorter but strong in duels, and humidity makes sustained intensity impossible. Look at Thailand under Masatada Ishii — they didn't press relentlessly; they gave up the ball, defended zones, and advanced far in World Cup qualifying. Look at Indonesia under Shin Tae-yong — they press selectively, never pushing the whole block from the first minute. So the lesson may be: pressing is not dead, but dogmatic pressing is. Troussier wasn't wrong to choose pressing; he was wrong to impose it rigidly on an unprepared group, in a region where the weather does not forgive. Kim is doing the opposite — and if he succeeds, it will be because he built something "ugly" but fitting for Vietnamese bodies, not because he abandoned pressing. On another level, Troussier's failure is a lesson in expectation management. He arrived with the label "White Witch," the man who took Japan to the round of 16 at the 2026 World Cup. Fans expected a revolution. But his contract was tied to short-term goals: winning SEA Games 32, reaching the Asian Cup final, qualifying for the World Cup. When short-term goals clash with long-term philosophy, the philosophy always loses. That story repeats across Southeast Asia: any coach who tries to change a football culture in a two-year cycle pays the price. A transfer is a battle among three brains and one cheque. But a philosophical transformation is a battle between a vision and an entire system — and the system, as we just witnessed, almost always wins. Vietnamese football enters the Kim Sang-sik era with an open question: do we want to be beautiful in delusion or ugly with efficiency? Deschamps was not wrong back then — the public's view of ugliness was. If Kim earns Vietnam a spot at the Asian Cup or a deep AFF Cup run, fans will stop caring whether possession is 40 or 60 percent. They will care only about what data cannot measure: the feeling of winning. It is time to stop asking how good a player is, and start asking how well the system protects him. Pressing is not killing Vietnamese football — dogma is, one match at a time.