The Mid-Season Slowdown: V.League Is Learning to Defend With Its Head

A Tuesday afternoon training session. I stood in the corner of the B stand at Hang Day Stadium, behind the goal, where the grass had gone yellow under the April sun. A central midfielder from the home side stood still near the centre circle, hands on hips, watching the coach draw arrows on a tactics board. Ten minutes earlier he had run a three-man pressing drill and then stopped halfway, no longer chasing the ball. The assistant coach did not shout. He simply raised a hand, signalling them to drop back. The whole team dropped back. No one complained, no one asked. I wrote a line in my notebook: "This team no longer presses with the whole line." It is a small detail, but it is the heartbeat of an entire season. A season opens with a heartbeat in the press room, before the first whistle. Thirty years following teams from training pitches to dressing rooms has taught me that the biggest changes in a season rarely show up in the table first. They show up in sessions like this one, in the way a player stops running, in the way an assistant raises his hand. That is why I still arrive at the ground at five in the afternoon, even when the match is three days away. V.League 1 is in its mid-season phase, the point where the table begins to split into groups but has not yet settled. Fourteen teams, twenty-six rounds, and a congested calendar that forces each side to play almost every three days across several months. That pressure does not sit on the title contenders, who have the squad depth to rotate. It sits on the mid-table and the bottom group, where one defeat can drag a team into danger and one win can lift it into the top half. What has caught my attention this season is not the number of goals, but the way teams defend. In the last three matches involving the title-chasing group, the PPDA index, the number of opponent passes allowed before each defensive action, has risen noticeably. The lower the number, the more aggressively a team presses; the higher it goes, the deeper the team sits and waits. That shift does not come from a single tactical decision. It comes from fitness, from the fixture list, and from a generation of players entering the final stretch of their careers. I have followed V.League since the days when the competition carried a different name, when teams mostly played long balls and contested duels. Vietnamese football back then did not have much data to discuss pressing. But since 2026, when Vietnam's U23 side reached the final of the Asian championship in Changzhou, the way people think about fitness and match intensity changed. People began to talk about running more, pressing earlier, and turning the home ground into a trap. This season, that trap is being dismantled, slowly. To understand why PPDA is rising, I need to look at the legs, not the tactics board. A high-pressing team needs three things: a fitness base, the ability to repeat sprints over and over within a match, and a structure that closes the gaps the moment the ball is lost. Miss one of the three and the system collapses. This season, V.League is missing all three at most clubs. The first is fitness. A central midfielder in V.League covers roughly ten to twelve kilometres per match on average, of which eight hundred to one thousand two hundred metres come at high speed. Those numbers are not high by European standards, but the climate is different. Playing at thirty-three degrees Celsius with humidity above eighty per cent makes every sprint cost more energy. A side that presses continuously in the first half typically loses thirty to forty per cent of its intensity in the second. That is a technical reason, not a mental one. The second is repeat sprint ability. Pressing is not one run. It is ten runs in ten minutes, then rest, then run again. Vietnamese players have a strong technical base and impressive close control in tight spaces, but their endurance base is uneven. At youth academies, the volume of physical work remains below what modern football demands. The result is that when players reach the first team, they have to learn it from scratch, while the fixture list gives them no time. The third is structure. A pressing team needs its midfield and defence to move as one block. If a full-back pushes high and the midfielder does not drop, space opens on the flank. In V.League, many teams play with a back four but have no true holding midfielder screening in front. When they lose the ball, they must choose: drop everyone, or expose space. Most choose to drop. Those three factors combine to create a season in which high pressing has become a luxury item. The teams that can sustain it are the ones with squad depth, a favourable fixture list, and a few young players capable of running continuously. The rest are learning a different way to defend: a low block, discipline, and waiting for the opponent's mistake. What is interesting is that this way of defending is not inferior at all. In many matches, low-block teams still take points off stronger sides. They do not need to control the ball. They need to control space. A deep four, two covering central midfielders, and two wide forwards ready to counter quickly can neutralise a pressing team if that team lacks patience. I watched one such match early in the season. The home side had nearly sixty-five per cent possession and more than fifteen shots, but scored only once. The away side sat deep, defended with all ten outfield players, and scored the winning goal in the eighty-eighth minute from a three-pass counter. After the match, the away coach told me: "We do not run a lot. We run at the right time." It sounds simple, but it is an entire philosophy. This shift also reflects a reality about personnel. Many V.League clubs depend on a group of players already in their thirties. They are the best, the most tactically aware, but they can no longer press continuously. The club must choose: play in a way that suits them, or replace them with younger players who are not yet ready. Most choose the first, because immediate results matter more. That is why I say the story of this season lies in the legs. A team can hide many things: tactics, intentions, even injuries. But it cannot hide whether its players can run. After the first half, I only need to watch how they walk out of the tunnel to know. The numbers supporting this view are limited, because V.League does not publish full data the way the major leagues do. But what I record myself is enough to show the trend. In the matches I have watched in person, the number of sprints by teams in the second half falls by roughly twenty per cent compared with the first. That is a large gap. It speaks not only to fitness, but to how teams allocate their resources. There is one detail I always remember. Russia in 2026 was so cold that I remembered every breath of the stands for four years afterwards. That day, I sat in a training ground near Moscow, watching Vietnam's young players train in the biting cold. They ran, stopped, ran, stopped. No one complained. A young goalkeeper sat alone in a corner, wiping his gloves clean with his own hands. I understood that behind the saves seen on television lies a volume of work no statistics table can fully record. The same is true of an entire season. What fans see are goals, points, and bright moments. What I see are training sessions, drop-backs, and players sitting on the bench catching their breath after twenty minutes on the pitch. Fans remember goals; I remember the eyes of a substitute when the final whistle blows. So when I talk about PPDA rising, I am not talking about decline. I am talking about adaptation. V.League teams are learning to play in a way that matches their resources. They cannot run like European sides, and they know it. Instead of copying a system that does not fit, they build one based on what they have: discipline, organisation, and the ability to punish mistakes. Gegenpressing is not a strange new wind; it is a wind fermented over seasons of quiet running. V.League has not fermented enough yet. But it is fermenting. There is another layer I want to make clear. When a team shifts from high pressing to a low block, it does not only change how it defends. It changes how it attacks. A low block needs players who can hold the ball under pressure and deliver accurate long passes. That is a different skill from pressing. Many V.League teams do not yet have such players. The result is that they defend well but attack poorly, and matches become deadlocked. I have sat through quite a few matches in which both teams chose a low block. The ball drifted around midfield, neither side dared push up, and the crowd began to whistle from the sixtieth minute. That is the downside of adaptation. When every team optimises for not losing, football loses the most compelling part of itself. But I am not pessimistic. Football always corrects itself. When low blocks become common, the value of players who can break them rises. Clubs will find ways to buy or develop such players. And when they have enough, the balance will shift back. That is the law of football, and V.League is not outside it. There is one misunderstanding I hear often in the stands and online. People say V.League teams defend because they cannot attack, because coaches lack ambition, because Vietnamese football is regressing. I do not think so. The truth is that a low block is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of maturity. A team that knows it cannot press for ninety minutes but still tries is a naive team. A team that knows its strengths and weaknesses and chooses a fitting approach is a mature team. Many V.League coaches understand this better than we think. They do not sit deep out of fear. They sit deep out of calculation. Of course, that maturity has limits. If the entire league sits deep, the quality of matches falls. Fans pay to watch football, not to watch eleven men stand and wait. That is a price to be paid. But I believe that in a few seasons, as the young generation grows and academies improve their physical work, the balance will shift. Pressing will return, but this time on a more sustainable foundation. What worries me more is another trap: dependence on foreign players. Many V.League teams build their style around two or three overseas players. When they are injured or leave, the whole system collapses. That is why I always look at the bench before the starting eleven. A truly strong team is one that does not depend on a single individual. Transfers are separations written in advance; only the tears have no script. This season I have witnessed several such separations. A young player promoted to the first team, playing well for a few matches, then sold to another club. A veteran whose contract expired, with no one calling. Those stories do not make the papers, but they shape an entire season. And there is one more thing I want to stress, because it is often overlooked. When people talk about fitness, they usually think of running more. But fitness in modern football is not only running. It is the ability to recover between matches, to keep concentration in the second half, and to make the right decision when tired. A player can run twelve kilometres and still make a mistake in the eightieth minute. Another runs nine kilometres and makes none. Who is more useful? That is why I do not trust statistics that only count distance. Running a lot is not necessarily good. Running to the right place at the right time is what matters. I have seen too many players run endlessly without ever being where they need to be. Distance covered can look good on a report, but it does not win matches. At sixty-eight, I have learned to watch a match without only watching the ball. I watch the players without the ball. I watch how they move, how they point, how they look at each other. That is where the match is truly decided. The ball is only the final result of decisions made beforehand. So what is the next signal I will track? I will look at three things. First, the number of times teams change their defensive structure within a match. If they switch from a high block to a low block mid-half, that is a sign of a fitness problem. Second, the minutes given to players under twenty-three. If that number rises, teams are preparing for the future. Third, how teams react when they fall behind. If they still keep a low block, they have given up on the match. An empty stadium does not stop the ball rolling; it only makes the applause arrive one beat behind the heart. V.League this season may not be spectacular, but it is changing. And real change, as always, starts in the legs, not in the table.