Vietnam Women's Volleyball: The Real Gap Lies in the Plays No One Replays

On the nearly empty stands of an arena in Tokyo, I once sat and counted a rally that lasted nineteen touches. No spike was hard enough to make the whole hall stand up. The point came from a dig by the libero — the one nobody remembers by name after the match. When the stadium falls silent, you hear the heartbeat of the game clearly. That night I thought about the Vietnamese women's volleyball matches I had watched on a screen, and I realised something: we tend to cheer at exactly the moments when the Japanese fall quiet.

That is how I began following Vietnamese women's volleyball with a different ruler. Not the scoreboard, but what happens between two rounds of applause.

Over the past five years or so, Vietnamese women's volleyball has changed faster than in any period I have witnessed. The national team has earned strong results in the regional arena, appeared in Asian competitions, and produced a generation of players who, for the first time, play professionally abroad. Names like Tran Thi Thanh Thuy and Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen have now crossed national borders; they appear in the news feeds of international tournaments.

In Japan, where I live and work, women's volleyball is an industry organised almost perfectly. The V.League runs on a dense schedule, every club has its own data-analysis department, and every player is judged by metrics that Vietnamese fans rarely hear named. This contrast makes me constantly place the two volleyball cultures side by side — not to rank who is better, but to understand where we stand.

I do not mean to say the Japanese do everything better. There are things Vietnamese volleyball does markedly better — creativity in attack, the ability to improvise in unexpected situations, and a feel for the ball that only those who play a great deal possess.

This year's transfer window makes the picture even clearer. When Vietnamese players sign with foreign clubs, the public usually cares only about the value of the contract. But what matters lies elsewhere: those players will have to relearn from scratch a skill they are rarely asked for at home — serve reception under constant pressure.

There is something interesting about these contracts. When a Vietnamese player moves to Japan or Korea, the host club usually expects her scoring ability. But in the Asian volleyball system, the value of a foreign player lies not in the points she scores, but in whether she can hold the rhythm of the whole team through long rallies. This is a criterion that public statistics never capture, yet every coach understands it.

For more than a year, I have recorded every Vietnamese women's volleyball match I could watch, alongside V.League and international matches, for comparison. My method is simple: for each rally, I note the number of touches, which team won the point, and what situation produced it. This kind of note-taking cannot replace official data, but it gives me something the statistical sheet does not: the rhythm of the match.

The first thing I noticed was the share of points coming from counter-attack. In the Vietnamese women's matches I watched, most points fell into two situations: a direct service winner, or an attack following a perfect serve reception. When the serve reception was imperfect, the team almost lost control entirely. In the V.League, this ratio is very different. Japanese teams win points even when the serve reception is only average, because they have a counter-attack transition system drilled to the point of being automatic.

The difference does not lie in the hardest spike. It lies in the third and fourth spike of a rally — the ones that only happen once a team has survived the first two touches. Vietnamese fans love rallies that end quickly. But elite volleyball is decided in long rallies, where character is measured by patience rather than power.

I once tried to count the average number of touches in a scoring rally. In the Vietnamese women's matches I watched, the average usually fell around three to four. In the V.League, it was clearly higher — many rallies stretched to six or seven touches or more. This gap sounds small, but it speaks to something large: Japanese teams can maintain their structure across many beats of the ball, while Vietnamese teams usually hold their structure for only one or two.

Why is that so? In my view, the answer lies almost entirely in the backcourt.

In Vietnam, a good serve receiver is usually praised for spectacular digs. But elite serve reception is not about spectacle — it is about delivering the ball to the right spot for the setter without needing to move much. Japanese players are trained to dig with their feet before their hands, to keep a low centre of gravity, and to turn every dig into a playable ball. In Vietnam, this skill is often taught late and valued less than attacking.

Another link is the role of the libero. In the V.League, the libero is a specialised position, trained from a young age and given a voice in the backcourt defence. In many Vietnamese teams, the libero is still seen as a backup option for the main receiver. When the libero is not given command of the backcourt, the defensive system loses its organiser.

And perhaps the most important link is training culture. In Japan, digging drills are repeated to the point of boredom. A single session can spend forty minutes just digging balls spiked from the same angle. That repetition builds reflex. In Vietnam, I see sessions that spend more time on attacking, because that is the part fans want to see and the part that most easily creates excitement.

None of this means Vietnamese women's volleyball is weak in the backcourt. There are liberos and defensive outside hitters from Vietnam whom I rate as equal to the regional standard. The problem is not the individual, but the system. A good player inside an incomplete system will always have to compensate more than her Japanese counterpart — and that compensation, over time, becomes injury and exhaustion.

This is where I recall something I once wrote. A crack does not break the wall; it teaches us to see through it. The gap between Vietnamese and Japanese volleyball is not a flat wall we can measure by height or spike power. It is a crack running through the development system, through the way we teach the skills no one wants to watch.

There is a notable paradox. While Vietnamese women's volleyball is trying to reach out to the continent, the international game itself is shifting in favour of defensive play. Modern volleyball increasingly emphasises prolonging rallies, because teams all spike almost equally hard. When everyone spikes hard, the winner is the one who digs better. This means the shortest path for Vietnam to close the gap is not to find taller players, but to teach the backcourt better.

And this is where I must say plainly something many will not like.

The most common belief among Vietnamese fans — that we lose because we lack height and power — is a belief the data does not support. I have watched shorter women's teams still win, because they dug better, set faster, and converted counter-attacks more efficiently. Height helps at the net, but it does nothing for a rally that begins in the backcourt.

In Japan, some V.League teams have an average height that is not superior to the strongest Vietnamese teams. But they win because every player knows exactly where she must be in every situation. That is the result of thousands of hours of systematic training, not of genetics.

I do not deny the role of physique. I only say our order of priorities is reversed. We invest in attack because it produces highlights, then feel disappointed when highlights do not bring victories. A team cannot win on talent alone; it wins by trusting one another. And that trust is built from the digs no one replays.

There is one small detail I keep in my notebook. In a match I watched, the Vietnamese team led in the first set, then lost the second after a run of long rallies. What stood out was not the result, but how the team reacted: after each long rally lost, the players looked at each other less, spoke to each other less. They did not lose their skill. They lost their belief in one another in the moment. In the Japanese teams I watched, after a long rally lost, the captain would usually clap and call each player by name. It is a small detail, impossible to measure, yet it decides the set.

Vietnamese women's volleyball is at a point where every choice has a price. Invest in attack and you win the audience, but it is hard to reach the summit. Invest in the backcourt and you win results, but you must accept years no one sees. I believe the generation of players now going abroad will bring back more than experience: a different understanding of the value of quiet touches. Those who write about sport do not tell the match; they tell the people before the ball is served. And sometimes, that person is only a libero, standing in the corner of the court, waiting for a ball no one thought would come.