Elbows in Dong Nai and the Red Card That Never Came: V-League Meets Over Refereeing Discipline

On the small screen in an apartment in Nagoya, the elbow arrives before the ball. Le Van Son, a defender for Dong Nai, turns as Nguyen Dinh Bac of Cong An Ha Noi surges forward, and the point of contact lands on the striker's face and neck. I rewound the clip three times. By the third viewing I had muted the sound and was watching only the movement. There was still no way to explain that motion in the language of football.

The stadium in Dong Nai on September 20 had a crowd. There were drums, loudspeakers, and voices calling players' names the way they do at any ground in this country. Yet what I remember most is a silence. After the elbow, Dinh Bac folded and went down. The match rolled on. No whistle, no card, no teammate's arm quick enough to lift him back to his feet.

I watched this match from nearly four thousand kilometres away, through a stream with a delay of a few seconds. That distance has its advantages: I was not swept up by the roar, not led by the crowd. It also has a price: I could not hear the impact, could not see the eyes of the man who had been hit as he stood up. In Russia I learned to write about pain: not to judge, only to touch. Years later, in Nagoya, I keep that method, even when what needs touching is an act of violence.

Because the same match held another incident. Centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh twice kicked from behind, aiming at Dinh Bac's legs. Not once while contesting the ball. Twice. The ball was moving elsewhere, the play was moving elsewhere. In football there is a gentle-sounding phrase for that act: a cold kick. But the coldness is exactly what players fear, because it does not come from the rhythm of a duel. It comes from a decision.

The two incidents in Dong Nai did not happen in a vacuum. Round 2 of the 2026-2027 V-League had already produced two images with heavier consequences. Centre-back Doan Van Hau of Cong An Ha Noi lunged and broke the leg of midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan of The Cong Viettel. Foreign player Ezequiel Santos Da Silva of Nam Dinh stamped on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang of SHB Da Nang. Four incidents, three rounds, one list.

Let me be precise: these are events that happened, captured on camera and acknowledged by the parties involved. Placing them side by side is not an attempt to build an indictment against any single player or club. The point is tempo: the V-League has only just begun, and already four moments have forced people in this profession to stop, rewatch, and ask whether this season is sliding into the tracks of previous ones.

After that run of incidents, representatives of the tournament organisers, the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF) and the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) met directly with the VFF Referees Committee. According to domestic press reports, the meeting centred on one demand: referees must apply the laws correctly, uphold the discipline of the competition, and stop violent behaviour on the pitch.

"Applying the laws correctly" sounds like a firm phrase. In a meeting room, it usually means something much narrower. For a league that has just produced four controversial moments, it means no missed fouls, no missed cards. In other words, it is a quantitative target rather than a philosophy of officiating. And precisely for that reason, it collided immediately with the most concrete incident of the round.

In the match between Dong Nai and Cong An Ha Noi on September 20, referee Le Vu Linh issued only a yellow card to Huynh Tan Sinh for the challenge in which he ignored the ball to strike Dinh Bac. He did not produce a red, even though the situation was assessed as a cold kick delivered twice. Speaking to a Dan Tri reporter after the match, Duong Vu Lam, former VFF vice-president for technical affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Committee, was blunt: referee Le Vu Linh missed the card; Huynh Tan Sinh ignored the ball to strike his opponent far too blatantly, and still did not receive a red.

A little technical detail is needed here. Under the laws of the game, violent conduct unrelated to a challenge falls into the category of offences punished by an immediate sending-off. When the ball has left the contesting zone, when the player has no chance of winning it, and when a leg or an arm is directed at an opponent's body, it is no longer a defensive foul. It is an act. The yellow card does not belong in that box.

With Tan Sinh, the referee's difficulty lay not in seeing or not seeing. Both kicks were blatant, to use Duong Vu Lam's word. The difficulty lay in choosing a card in a match where the visiting side had a star attacker, where the home team was under pressure, and where a red card would change everything. A referee knows that before he reaches for his pocket. And sometimes that very knowledge makes the hand hesitate.

That is why the role of the VAR team became the focus of the debate. Within the framework of video assistance, VAR may intervene in the category of incidents involving direct red cards, including missed acts of violent conduct. The VAR team for the Dong Nai against Cong An Ha Noi match comprised Vo Hoai Thuong and Nguyen Thanh Son.

There are two possibilities. One is that the VAR team spotted the offence, advised, and referee Le Vu Linh overruled them. In that case the VAR team did its job, and the story rests on the final decision of the man with the whistle. The other is that the VAR team stayed silent. In that case a layer of control failed, and according to Duong Vu Lam the VAR officials should also face sanctions. Those two scenarios lead to entirely different conclusions about responsibility.

What is remarkable is that between those two scenarios there exists something outsiders do not need to speculate about: the audio recording of the exchange between the VAR team and the on-field referee. In professional football, that conversation is always stored. It shows who said what, who stayed quiet, and at which moment the decision was locked in. What is missing is not evidence. What is missing is the decision to release that evidence to the public. And when evidence is withheld, the gap is filled with rumour.

Duong Vu Lam pushed that logic a step further, towards symmetrical accountability. If Tan Sinh is punished retrospectively and suspended for this offence, then referee Le Vu Linh should have his whistle suspended in the same way. The argument sounds harsh, but it rests on a very old principle: a system is only credible when the same mistake is treated the same way, regardless of whether the person who made it is a player or a referee.

This is where things become uncomfortable. Disciplinary penalties for referees in Vietnam are usually not widely announced. But as the former head of the VFF Referees Committee himself revealed, there is another way to find out: the referee appointment lists for the following rounds. If an official is not assigned in the round immediately after the one just played, the likelihood is that he is serving a sanction.

That mechanism creates a rumour economy. It turns every debate about refereeing discipline into speculation, even when the speculation is well founded. And it protects no one: not the referee from suspicion, not the league from a sense of opacity, not the fans, who simply want to know that a wrong decision was dealt with.

From another angle, the story also lies in the target of those challenges. Nguyen Dinh Bac is a striker carrying heavy expectations in the V-League, a player opponents must plan for before kick-off. In football, when a team cannot mark a striker tactically, a cheaper method exists: take away his rhythm. Every kick to the calf or the heel is a small investment, repaid with fifteen minutes in which that striker no longer dares to turn at speed.

My experience of following matches has taught me that what viewers see is the challenge, while what players feel comes the next day. The impact of kicks like these is not measured in days spent in hospital, but in the number of times a striker pulls back at exactly the moment he needs to explode. That number appears in no table, yet opposing coaches understand it clearly, and so does anyone who follows a squad closely for a living.

In my own work I follow injuries and comebacks in depth. What I have learned over many years is that the hardest part of an injury is not the surgery. The hardest part is the second phase of a career: when the ligament has healed but the player still calculates every aerial duel, every turn to receive a long ball. Rushing a player back after a serious injury can ruin the second half of a career. And fear, unlike a leg, has no X-ray to compare against.

Apply that to the challenges of the past round and the scale of the problem changes. Doan Ngoc Tan broke his leg in a tackle. That is an injury that will redraw a player's route, from the first weeks in a hospital bed to the first day back training with the squad. The Cong Viettel lost a midfielder at the stage when the team needs stability most. But the greater loss belongs to the player, who will live with that memory longer than any contract.

And with Dinh Bac, the kicks from behind must be read through the professional standard of injury. The calf, the heel, the back of the shin are areas without a thick protective layer of muscle, and also the areas where cumulative damage forms quietly. A striker lives on his ability to accelerate, and that ability starts precisely in the muscle group someone chose to kick.

A hundred days of empty stadiums taught me to hear the ball breathe. I wrote that line in a season when the stands were closed, when every sound on the pitch became distinct: studs tearing grass, coaches shouting, the ball striking the surface. In matches like those, a reporter's ears are forced to replace his eyes. But there is one kind of sound I have never wanted to hear clearly: the sound of a kick landing on a man who does not have the ball.

Since leaving the stands for the keyboard, I have learned to place a microscope on small details. A bowed head, a foot that hesitates, a hand raised to cover a face. In Le Van Son's case, the detail I remember is the reflex of the player turning to look at the referee immediately after the elbow. That is not the reflex of a man who has just lost a duel. It is the reflex of a man who has just done something and is waiting to see whether he will be caught.

Another detail fewer people mention: after Tan Sinh's kick, the ball was still on the pitch and the match continued for a few seconds. Do not dismiss those few seconds. In that window, everything was already settled: the decision not to whistle, not to draw a card, to let the game police itself. Only when the ball stopped did the referee produce a yellow. A late decision is still a decision. But it tells players where the limit lies.

As for Dong Nai, the club's circumstances are not something I have enough information to dissect in depth. A home side coming under pressure from a more highly rated visitor is a story common to every league. What deserves discussion is the choice: when pressure rises, some teams defend deep, hold their shape, and accept a draw. Others choose to apply pressure on individual opponents, accepting cards in exchange for breaking the opponent's rhythm. Both are tactical choices, but only one of them is football.

It cannot be denied that the line between the two is thin, and because it is thin it needs to be drawn by a minimum instrument: the red card. A red card produced at the right moment does two things at once. It restores a numerical advantage to the offended team for the final fifteen minutes, and it sends a signal to every other match in the next round. A signal no meeting, however important, can replace.

As for the refereeing corps, there is a reality anyone who has followed the V-League for years knows: the number of officials capable of handling top-flight matches in a season is not plentiful. The same group works match after match, round after round, under pressure from coaching staff, from players and from the appointment list itself. When a referee makes a mistake and is suspended, his replacement is usually someone already tired. That is why an approach built solely on disciplinary instruments quickly drains the resource, without reducing the level of brutality on the pitch.

And this is where I want to pause and look squarely at our own reaction. The incidents that provoked the most outrage recently share one feature: the victims were players with names, with followers, with articles written about them. Dinh Bac and Ngoc Tan are names the media has reason to pursue. But violence on the pitch does not distinguish a first-team starter from a substitute at a lower-division club.

There are many matches in which brutal challenges go unmentioned, not because they did not happen, but because the player who was kicked is not famous enough. In women's football, where I spend most of my professional attention, an act of violence can persist for seasons without appearing on any front page, because the cost of reporting exceeds the readership that returns. The result is that public outrage is distributed by fame rather than by the danger of the act. That is a blind spot in the way sports journalism responds to violence.

Another blind spot is subtler, and it concerns the refereeing discipline story itself. When we sanction a referee, we handle the easiest and cheapest part of the problem. A suspension decided in a meeting costs no budget, requires no structural change, and threatens no club's or sponsor's interests. Meanwhile the expensive work remains untouched: expanding the refereeing corps, professionalising VAR, reducing fixture congestion, and building sanctions for clubs that repeatedly produce violent conduct.

Outrage has another trait: it remembers only what shocks, not what explains why something happened. A handful of elbows, cold kicks and stamps will enter the collective memory of V-League fans as a chain of scandals. The matches those collisions ruined will drift away, leaving no data and no retelling. A match only ends when people stop remembering it. And here, we are remembering the wrong thing.

In pieces about a team's defeats, I usually devote nearly a third of the space to describing the feeling of disappointment. I keep that habit even when writing about violence. Because if we stop at who was right and who was wrong, we will watch this cycle return next season, with different names and different legs.

What I hope for after that meeting is something very specific: the release of the audio exchange between the VAR team and the on-field referee from the incident in Dong Nai. Release it, and responsibility will divide itself. A league confident enough to let its audience hear how decisions are made will not need emergency meetings on discipline every time an elbow appears on screen.

Football does not need more meetings. It needs whistles that sound on time, and red cards drawn correctly, at the very second when the game can still protect itself. Every player is a universe; tactics are only an orbit. No discipline is strong enough to save a player from an elbow; only a whistle blown at the right rhythm can do that.