Vietnam U23 Depart for Nagoya: The Race to Assemble a Squad Before Facing Kuwait

00:15, September 13. Noi Bai Airport, the international terminal, nothing left but a few rows of yellow lights and the sound of luggage wheels rolling across the stone floor. I had been there since 22:00, standing in the corridor opposite the boarding gate, my notebook open at the page where I had written the departure time. Coach Dinh Hong Vinh and his players were leaving for Japan. Roughly five hours later, the members of Vietnam U23 set foot in Nagoya, ready to begin their Asiad 2026 campaign.

There are mornings when I record the footsteps of players as if writing an instrumental piece. Tonight that piece began at the airport, and its first note was the sound of engines.

After clearing procedures at Nagoya airport, Thanh Nhan and his teammates moved to the hotel arranged by the organisers. The team is expected to hold its first session on the afternoon of September 13 — a light session in the truest sense of an eye-opener after a night flight: stretching, easy running, getting used to the pitch and the time zone.

But on that night's flight list, two names were still missing.

A squad assembled from three calendars

As of now, Vietnam U23 still do not have a full complement of players. Nguyen Quoc Toan (Quy Nhon) and Dang Tuan Phong (Hai Phong) will only be in Nagoya immediately before Vietnam U23's opening match at the Asiad.

The reason lies in the overlap between the domestic calendar and the national team's gathering schedule. LPBank V-League 2026/27 is still running. Clubs are entitled to keep their players until their own round of fixtures is finished, and that pushes the U23 coaching staff into a familiar problem: the squad is never complete from day one.

Earlier, after their club beat Hanoi FC 4-1 in round 2 of LPBank V-League 2026/27, six SLNA players joined up in time to fly to Japan with the rest of the squad. Besides Cao Van Binh, who showed good form between the posts, Quang Vinh made his mark with a brace inside just a few minutes. That win gave the young SLNA players extra confidence as they enter the Asiad 2026 journey.

At the Asiad, Dinh Hong Vinh's side are in Group C alongside Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Kuwait. According to the schedule, they meet Kuwait on September 15, the Philippines on September 18 and Uzbekistan on September 22.

Read those three dates by distance and you get two days between the first and second match, and four days between the second and third. Read them by recovery hours and the real arithmetic sits elsewhere — the Kuwait match on September 15 comes only about 48 hours after the night flight of September 13, and less than 72 hours after the team's first session on Japanese soil.

That is the tightest window of the whole tournament. And Vietnam U23 walk into it with a squad that has not yet closed.

Two hours of time difference and the cost nobody counts

Vietnam sits at UTC+7, Japan at UTC+9. A two-hour gap. Two hours sounds small, but for an athlete competing at fixed kick-off times it shifts the entire daily rhythm: meal times, sleep times, training times, and above all the hour at which the body peaks in reflex speed.

I have followed enough teams abroad to know one thing: the first day after a night flight is effectively erased from the training plan. The session on the afternoon of September 13 will not be a session in the professional sense. It is a data-collection session for the body — heart rate during easy running, hamstring tightness, balance response after crossing time zones.

With a team that has enough time, that data is recorded and filed away. With Vietnam U23 right now, it has to be used immediately, because the first match is only two days away.

Three layers of time inside one session

I work as a training-ground observer. The job taught me this: a training session is not an event, it is three layers of time stacked on top of each other.

The first layer is physical — where the player's body sits in its recovery cycle. The second is tactical — whether the shape matches the coaching staff's intentions. The third is psychological — whether the player believes in what he is doing.

For Vietnam U23 in Nagoya, those three layers are out of phase.

The SLNA group walks into the first session in the best physical state in the squad. They have just played a real match, won 4-1, felt competitive rhythm, felt what winning feels like. Cao Van Binh is in good form between the posts. Quang Vinh came on and scored twice inside a few minutes — the kind of mark any observer has to write down, because it shows a player hitting the exact peak of his feel for the game.

But the SLNA group lacks the second layer. They have not trained with the national team long enough to understand how the U23 side organises its defending, its pressing, its build-up from the back. Competitive rhythm is an asset, but club rhythm does not automatically become national-team rhythm.

The rest — those who joined up earlier — have the second layer but lack the first. They understand the ideas, but have not had a real match to push their bodies to the threshold of strain.

And the two names, Nguyen Quoc Toan and Dang Tuan Phong: they arrive in Nagoya right before the opening match. For them, all three layers are open.

Dinh Hong Vinh's problem is therefore not choosing who plays. It is matching whose rhythm with whose, and within how many hours.

Why the Kuwait match matters more than it looks

Kuwait on September 15 is the opener. An opening match at a tournament held in a single location always carries a property that ordinary metrics cannot measure: it decides the psychological state going into the other two games.

Here I have to say something plainly about how football data is read today. xG — the model that estimates expected goals from shot position and shot type — has been overused. It is useful for judging the quality of chances, but it cannot explain a substitution decision in the 60th minute, cannot explain why a defender chooses to drop instead of step up, and cannot explain refereeing standards at a continental tournament. For an Asiad opener, xG is close to meaningless, because the team has no sample large enough to model.

What matters here is structure. Kuwait are an opponent Vietnam U23 can actively control if the midfield holds its distances. The Philippines on September 18 are an opponent of aerial balls and physicality. Uzbekistan on September 22 are an opponent of a different class, one where Vietnam U23 will most likely have to play an organised defensive counter-attacking game.

Those three opponents demand three different skill sets. In seven days. With a squad that has not yet closed.

The trap of the phrase 'a full squad'

There is a line of reading I see constantly on forums: Vietnam U23 are at a disadvantage because the squad is not complete, because key players had to play in the V-League right up to the departure date, because two players arrived late.

That reading is not wrong. But it ranks the priorities incorrectly.

In tournament football, what decides is not the number of bodies present, but the degree of synchronisation between the lines. A squad of 23 that trains together for three weeks without anyone having real competitive rhythm will be slower than a squad of 20 that has just finished a round of domestic fixtures.

The evidence is on this very flight. Six SLNA players boarded after a 4-1 win, in which Quang Vinh scored a brace inside a few minutes and Cao Van Binh held good form in goal. They carry something no training session can manufacture: confidence with a basis.

Conversely, a player who only trains and does not play for three weeks loses his sense of space — the sense of distance to an opponent, of the moment to release a pass, of how fast a real ball travels. That is a kind of feel that tactical drills cannot simulate.

In other words: the V-League running in parallel with the Asiad is a disadvantage in terms of managing people, but an advantage in terms of maintaining match rhythm. Vietnam U23's problem is that those two sources of benefit — competitive rhythm and tactical synchronisation — do not arrive at the same time.

The calendar structure and the rotation problem

Three dates: September 15, September 18, September 22.

Match one is about two days after the flight. Match two is three days after match one. Match three is four days after match two.

A three-day rest is the minimum threshold for a player who has gone the full 90 minutes to recover enough for another high-intensity match. For players coming off a long flight and a time-zone shift, that threshold is pushed higher.

For the late arrivals — Nguyen Quoc Toan and Dang Tuan Phong — that threshold is close to being erased.

That pushes the coaching staff into a structural decision: should the Kuwait match be used as a rhythm-measuring game, giving the bulk of the minutes to the group that joined up early, then sending on the newcomers in the second half once the shape of the game is set? Or should they gamble on starting the best names to take three points, accepting the risk in matches two and three?

There is no absolutely correct answer. But there is a principle in seven-day, three-match tournament football: you cannot win all three matches with the same line-up. You can only win three matches with three different approaches inside the same tactical frame.

That frame, for Vietnam U23, is most likely a flexible 4-2-3-1. A two-man midfield lets the team shift from possession to defensive counter-attacking without changing personnel. That is why the structure is common at tournaments: it tolerates disruption in personnel.

If that is right, the most important position for Vietnam U23 in Nagoya is not the striker, but the two central midfielders. They are the rhythm keepers, and the ones who decide whether a team moves from having enough players to being in sync.

I am not looking for a hero, I am looking for a man who keeps the right rhythm in chaos.

What the naked eye at the airport does not see

There is an implicit assumption in how the media reports these trips: a national team that leaves the airport with a full complement is a strong national team. A national team that leaves the airport with two names missing is a national team in trouble.

That assumption sounds reasonable, but it inverts the causality.

In modern football, a call-up list is not a photograph of strength, it is a photograph of a moment. A squad with 20 players from day one may be a squad with no one starting in the domestic league. A squad with two late arrivals may be a squad with players who are starting, scoring, being used.

The cases of Nguyen Quoc Toan (Quy Nhon) and Dang Tuan Phong (Hai Phong) sit on the second side. They arrive late because their clubs need them. That is positive information being read as negative information.

Their real risk is not peak fitness, it is time to learn the system. A player who arrives before the opening match has about two sessions to understand how his teammates move. Two sessions are enough to know where to stand when the team loses the ball. They are not enough to know where to stand when the team counter-attacks and the midfield is stretched.

For Vietnam U23, that gap is precisely what the coaching staff must cover with structure rather than with words of encouragement.

Cao Van Binh and the most undervalued position

There is an observation I have held for years: goalkeepers' distribution is being sanctified.

Metrics on a keeper's completed passes, on how much he participates in build-up — they are visually appealing, but they measure a small part of a goalkeeper's job. The larger part lies in basic reflexes, in reading situations, in the split-second decision to come out or stay.

Meanwhile, the transfer market still pays high prices for keepers with a handsome distribution profile, and less for keepers with strong basic reflexes but limited build-up involvement. That balance is skewed.

For Vietnam U23 at the Asiad, the value of a keeper in good form — as with Cao Van Binh — lies somewhere quite different. At a three-matches-in-seven-days tournament, behind a back line that has not yet closed, the goalkeeper carries the heaviest psychological load. Every aerial ball, every set piece, every time the lines ahead lose possession, he is the last man holding the rhythm for the whole team.

A keeper in good form saves more than a goal. He buys back calm for the ten men in front of him. That is a kind of value that appears in no public data model.

The training ground does not lie. It only waits for someone who knows how to listen.

What is really being tested in Nagoya

Three matches, seven days, three opponents of different styles.

Kuwait tests the ability to organise an attack against a deep-lying opponent. The Philippines test the ability to defend crosses and endure physically. Uzbekistan test the ability to defend with discipline and take the few chances that come.

Under ideal conditions, those three matches need three weeks of preparation. Vietnam U23 have roughly two days of training on Japanese soil before the first match.

That is why I believe Dinh Hong Vinh's biggest test at Asiad 2026 is not the Uzbekistan match. It is how he manages the first 48 hours — from the moment the plane lands in Nagoya to the moment the ball rolls against Kuwait.

Those 48 hours contain: a light session on the afternoon of September 13, a tactical session, a team meeting, a pitch familiarisation, and waiting for the final two names. Within those 48 hours, the staff must decide the starting line-up, allocate minutes for the late arrivals, and set load thresholds for the second match.

No data helps here. No model predicts whether a player who has just flown five hours and crossed a time zone will strike the ball well in the 60th minute.

Only observation. And observation needs someone standing long enough in the right place.

In the stadium tunnel, the noise cuts out. Only the heartbeat of the match remains.

Looking ahead

Six SLNA players boarded with a 4-1 win in their pocket. Cao Van Binh holds good form between the posts. Quang Vinh scored a brace inside a few minutes. Nguyen Quoc Toan and Dang Tuan Phong will be in Nagoya immediately before the opening match. Vietnam U23 are in Group C with Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Kuwait, meeting Kuwait on September 15, the Philippines on September 18 and Uzbekistan on September 22.

That list is full of gaps, and every gap is a question about rhythm.

What I will be watching is not who starts against Kuwait. What I will be watching is who comes on in the 60th minute against the Philippines — the match Vietnam U23 will have to play on whatever fitness remains after two straight games. The way a team handles the second half of its second match says more about it than any opener.

And the answer to where Vietnam U23 go at Asiad 2026 may well lie in the substitution list of the 60th minute against the Philippines on September 18, rather than in the scoreline of the opening match.