The Off-the-Ball Kick in Đồng Nai: V-League and the Lesson of a Forgotten Card

In the frame from the camera behind the goal, the moment lasts less than two seconds. Nguyen Dinh Bac pushes the ball past Huynh Tan Sinh, and the ball is gone. But Tan Sinh's leg does not follow the ball. It follows Dinh Bac. I watched that footage seven times, not to find a fault, but to find a rhythm. The rhythm of an off-the-ball kick is entirely different from the rhythm of a challenge. In a challenge, the player's body reacts to the ball. In an off-the-ball kick, the body reacts to memory: it remembers being beaten, and it answers back. That is why, in the match between Dong Nai and Cong An Ha Noi on September 20, the situation did not live in the ball but in the silence after the ball had left the foot. Referee Le Vu Linh stood a few metres away. He produced a yellow card. The stands did not react fiercely. That is the detail that kept me sitting longer than the footage itself: the silence of a crowd too accustomed to this kind of collision. When the stadium is empty, I hear clearly the applause of years gone by — but in Dong Nai that day the stadium was not empty, and what I heard clearly was a different kind of silence. To see the shape of the problem, the incidents must be placed side by side. Not long before Dong Nai against CAHN, in Round 2 of the 2026-2027 V-League, centre-back Doan Van Hau of Cong An Ha Noi went into a tackle that broke the leg of midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan of The Cong Viettel. In the same round, foreign player Ezeqiuel Santos Da Silva of Nam Dinh stamped on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang of SHB Da Nang. Two incidents, two marks left on an opponent's body, and both visible to the naked eye. Then came September 20, and the match between Dong Nai and Cong An Ha Noi delivered two more. Defender Le Van Son of Dong Nai threw an elbow at Nguyen Dinh Bac. Shortly afterwards, centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh repeatedly tackled from behind, aiming at the legs of that same striker. In a match like that, Dinh Bac became the target, and the ball was merely decoration. The institutional response followed. Representatives of the tournament organising committee, the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) and the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) met directly with the VFF Referees Committee. The subject of the meeting: requiring referees to apply the laws correctly, to preserve the discipline of the tournament, and to prevent violent conduct on the pitch. The phrase "apply the laws correctly" in this context is understood to mean not allowing missed fouls or missed cards. And that is precisely what happened in Dong Nai. In that match, in the situation where Tan Sinh played the man rather than the ball against Dinh Bac, referee Le Vu Linh used only a yellow card. He did not use a red card, even though Tan Sinh kicked Dinh Bac off the ball twice. Duong Vu Lam, former VFF vice-president for professional affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Committee, told a Dan Tri reporter after the match: "Referee Le Vu Linh missed a card in relation to this incident. Huynh Tan Sinh played the man far too blatantly, but was not sent off." I stop at the word "blatantly". In football, violent conduct comes in two forms. The first hides inside a challenge, when both players go for the ball, when legs collide in a moment where no one can be certain who was at fault. The second is displayed for all to see: the ball is gone, the man is past, and the kick still arrives. It is the second form that is the true test of a system of laws, because it checks whether the rule truly exists or exists only on paper. When a player kicks the same opponent off the ball twice, he is not sending a message to the victim. He is sending a message to the whole league: the price to be paid is lower than the benefit to be gained. Duong Vu Lam went a step further. He said: "If Tan Sinh is to be retrospectively punished and suspended for this offence, then referee Le Vu Linh should have his whistle suspended in the same way. In addition, the responsibility of the VAR team must be clarified." He set out two possibilities. First, the VAR team comprising Mr Vo Hoai Thuong and Mr Nguyen Thanh Son advised the on-field referee but were overruled — in that case, the VAR team fulfilled its duty. Second, the VAR team did not advise referee Le Vu Linh that a red card should be used for the offence of playing the man rather than the ball — in that case, the VAR officials must also be sanctioned. What is notable lies elsewhere: specific disciplinary rulings for referees are usually not widely announced. Duong Vu Lam offered a way of knowing: watch the list of referees in the following rounds. If those involved are not appointed in the immediately subsequent round, the likelihood is that they are under sanction. For someone whose work involves rewatching footage, as mine does, that mechanism leaves a gap. A red card is not only a punishment for an individual. It is a public signal sent to the whole league, a reminder that limits still exist. When that signal is absent, it does not disappear. It simply changes recipient: the defender standing in front of a striker quicker than himself. There, a yellow card is a silent contract — you are permitted one off-the-ball kick, provided it is discreet enough. The pitch is not merely a place where the ball rolls, but a place where dreams land. Yet dreams come in two kinds, and in Dong Nai, the kind that landed there belonged to a young striker chosen as a target. Over more than forty years in front of screens and in the stands, I have grown used to recording the matches nobody remembers. In 2026, when the domestic season was suspended because of the pandemic, I spent nine months rewatching all fourteen National Cup finals from 2026 to 2026. A pattern emerged: in matches with a goal in stoppage time, Vietnamese players always celebrated with three actions repeated almost identically. The body of a footballer remembers the rituals of joy very clearly. I wondered whether that body remembers the rituals of violence in a similar way — and if so, where it learns them. That is the question this recent sequence of events raises, though in a different direction from what the usual debates address. Most of the debate revolves around referees. Whether a referee missed a card, whether VAR advised, who had their whistle suspended, who did not. These are necessary questions, but they belong to the branches. A referee records the match; he does not write it. If one red card is missed, the cause lies in observation. If ten red cards are missed in a month, the cause lies elsewhere. The second blind spot is subtler. Collective memory of on-pitch violence is always stored in the form of exceptions. We remember the broken leg of Doan Ngoc Tan, the stamp on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang, because injuries leave traces — scans, casts, months out of action. But an off-the-ball kick leaves no trace at all. No injury, no scan, no statistic. It leaves only one thing no statistic can measure: habit. And habit is the most dangerous kind of memory on a football pitch. It does not need to be repeated to exist. It passes from one player to another through a single glance in the eightieth minute, after a challenge nobody whistled for. I once heard a substitute striker say that he could not remember the feeling of touching the ball during his twelve minutes on the pitch; he only remembered breathing like a hunted animal. That is the feeling of the man being targeted. No statistic records it, and no card is reserved for it. It is simply part of the match, added to the player's experience, and occasionally surfacing in an interview after a career is over. The meeting between the VFF, VPF, the tournament organisers and the VFF Referees Committee carried a clear demand: apply the laws correctly. That demand is right, and necessary. But if "apply the laws correctly" only means that red cards are produced at the right moment, then we are fixing one part of the problem and calling it the whole. Because the law can only intervene in the moment. It cannot intervene in habit. The poetry of Vietnamese football lies elsewhere — in the roar of the stands like a choir, in the way a goalkeeper dives against his own prediction, in late goals and embraces that come off schedule. On-pitch violence is not the counterpart of that poetry. It sits right beside it, in the same time zone, on the same pitch. To protect what is beautiful, one must first be able to name what is ugly — not with anger, but with a system that lets no off-the-ball kick pass without a name attached. If you ask me what will change after these days, I think the answer does not lie in the number of red cards produced on the pitch. It lies in whether the league dares to publish the disciplinary rulings handed to referees — because discipline cannot be built on decisions taken in silence. And if the signal continues to be sent only by absence from the appointment list, then the only people who will truly understand the message are those waiting at the edge of the penalty area, sleeves rolled up, eyes fixed on the back of an opponent's shirt.