The Touchline Winger in the V.League Rain: How the Traditional Flank Was Retired Too Soon

At the seventy-eighth minute, the rain over Thien Truong stadium fell hard enough that the ball rolled noticeably slower, water pushing it toward the goal like an object that no longer belonged to anyone. A young player on the visiting side stood right beside the touchline, hands on hips, eyes fixed on the penalty area — where, according to the template of this season, he should have been to receive the ball. He did not go in. The ball was switched to the opposite flank, then back, then switched again. He kept running up and down along the chalk, like a postman waiting at a door that never opens. The rain slowly erased the touchline from the grass, erased the wet boot marks too, but it could not erase a tactical habit that has sunk deep into V.League football over the past few seasons: the ball no longer travels to the flank the way it used to. That night I sat for a long time after the final whistle, and what troubled me was not a result, but the image of a man standing inside his own match without being called by name. Since the start of the annual season, based on my experience covering matches at Hang Day, Thien Truong, Lach Tray and Hoa Xuan, there has been a quiet but steady change. Most of the leading clubs now attack from the same template: two wingers playing on their inverted side, meaning their stronger foot is opposite the flank they occupy, so they can cut inside and shoot with the stronger foot. Full-backs push very high, almost becoming wingers themselves, while the space behind them is covered by a holding midfielder dropping deep. The ball enters the box mainly through cut-backs from the inside channel, or through short central combinations, rather than the crosses from the byline that were common when I first started carrying a notebook. I do not make a habit of turning articles into spreadsheets, because football is not a ledger. But a few figures made me stop mid-sentence. The average number of crosses per match in the V.League has fallen sharply compared with roughly five seasons ago, while shots from outside the box have risen. Teams tend to hold the ball longer, circulate it shorter, and the PPDA index — the number of passes an opponent is allowed before your team makes a defensive action — has dropped to low levels among title contenders, showing they press far more aggressively. Those figures draw a consistent picture: V.League football is shifting inward, into the middle, into narrow spaces, and the pure touchline winger is being pushed toward the edge of that picture. I once stood outside the dressing-room door of a small club, waiting for weeks just to hear one answer. It was there that I learned that sometimes the most important thing lies with the person nobody mentions. The young player from that rainy night was one of those people. He is not the inverted-winger type. He is left-footed, plays on the left, and his entire youth career was built on a single but very difficult skill: beating his man right by the touchline, then crossing with his left foot to exactly the right spot. That is an old trade. And perhaps, precisely because it is old, it is now paying the price. The way academies train young players today partly explains it. Wingers are taught to cut inside very early, taught to finish with the opposite foot, taught to combine through the middle. The byline cross is treated as a fallback, something to use only when the team is stuck. This produces a quiet consequence: teams become alike. When every winger cuts inside, the opposing defence only needs to collapse toward the centre, narrow the gaps between centre-backs, and wait. The space outside is left empty, but few players still have the ability and the habit to exploit it. This is where I want to linger longer, because it runs against what most fans currently believe. There is a widespread notion that the traditional winger is obsolete, that modern football has no room for players who only know how to cross. I think that is a misunderstanding spread far too quickly. What is obsolete is not the skill of crossing, but the way it is used monotonously, without calculation. A good cross, delivered into the gap between defender and goalkeeper, remains one of the hardest weapons to defend in football. The problem is that clubs stopped investing in it, not that it lost its value. In Vietnamese football, we once had pure touchline wingers who left their mark with exactly that skill. Their moments did not need the complexity of a system, only an instant: the man standing low, the ball lifted in, and a whole stand holding its breath. That memory is still intact, even though stadiums rarely witness it now. I am not writing these lines out of nostalgia. I write because I believe a football nation is truly rich only when it keeps several ways of playing, not when every club chases a single tactical fashion. There is one thing I have observed and rarely seen mentioned: when a match becomes stuck, when the opponent sits deep, when the pitch is wet and the ball rolls heavy, the most effective solution is sometimes the simplest one. Push the ball wide, create a one-on-one, and cross it in. Teams that still keep a genuine touchline winger often have one more escape route in such matches. I am not romanticising the past; I am recording a grounded tactical observation: variety in attack creates unpredictability, and unpredictability is an asset for any team. On the other hand, I must also acknowledge the upside of the inverted trend. It lets attacking players join more phases, creates small combinations through the middle, and in a league where pitch quality and weather are not always ideal, keeping the ball close together reduces error. Inverted wingers also score more often, because they arrive in the box at the right moment. That is why the trend exists, and it is not wrong. What I object to is its absolutism: when a team has only one way of playing, it becomes easy to read. Back to the young player from that rainy night. After the match, I had a chance to talk with him in the corridor leading to the car park. His name is Khoa, twenty years old, from a coastal district in central Vietnam. He told me the coaching staff had asked him to change his game, to learn to cut inside, to learn to finish with his right foot. He laughed and said his right foot was only there to stop him falling over. It weighed on me. He does not lack effort. He is simply being asked to become someone else, while the thing he has — a rare touchline skill — is being undervalued. For three hundred days without applause, I heard the breathing of players more clearly in an empty stand. And in that breathing, I heard the anxiety of a generation being shaped by a single template. From zero, I learned that the dressing-room door only opens when you dare to wait in the rain. I waited many years to understand that football is built by both the goalscorers and the people who make the moment before the goal. The rain of that year washed away many things, but it did not wash away the memory of one summer — the summer I first realised that a cross delivered on time can be worth as much as a goal scored from the middle. I write about the ball, but I keep the rhythm with the hearts of the people who play it. And sometimes, keeping the rhythm means remembering those pushed to the margins by the current of the times. So which signal should we track in the period ahead? I think the answer lies in the youth academies. If, over the next few seasons, no pure touchline winger is promoted to the first team and given a real chance, that is a sign the game has chosen uniformity over variety. Conversely, if some club dares to hand a starting place to a player like Khoa, and he shines with his touchline skill, that will be an encouraging signal. Not because the past was better than the present, but because the future needs more than one road. Football opens its door to those who dare to wait in the rain — even when the whole world has turned inward.