The Touchline Winger Has Vanished: A V.League Season Seen from an Empty Corridor

Minute 84, on the away team's bench, a player wearing number 17 sits still. Both hands rest on his knees, his eyes fixed on the left flank, where eleven months earlier he was still the fastest man in the league. The referee blows a short whistle. He does not react. No one calls him. On the pitch the ball still rolls toward that flank, but the man receiving it is a young midfielder drifting inside, closing the angle, then passing back toward the middle. The stands go quiet. I sit in the commentary area, my hand on the desk, and write down one line: the left flank is empty, not for lack of players, but because no one stands there anymore. I have followed Vietnamese football for sixteen years, from afternoons spent in stadium corridors, listening to coaches talk to one another once the cameras were off. This season, what they whisper about is not the title race, nor the relegation battle. They talk about a position that is disappearing. The pitch breathes through the whistle, through the studs, through the silence after a broken play, and inside that breath one rhythm is fading: the rhythm of the touchline winger. Throughout the second half of the annual season, I kept records of every match in an unusual way. I did not count goals. I counted how often the ball was carried to the touchline and then crossed into the box with the natural foot. That number shrank round by round. In the early rounds, each match averaged roughly fourteen to sixteen crosses from wide. By the closing stretch, it had fallen below ten, and in some matches to six. Not because teams passed less. They passed more. But the ball no longer went wide; it went inside, into the central corridor, where inverted wingers wait. Let me be clear from the start: I am not against change. I only record what is being lost, because people tend to remember only what survives on the scoreboard. The inverted winger, who receives wide but immediately turns toward goal, has become the standard at almost every Vietnamese club. It is a reasonable tactical solution. But its cost, I believe, has not been counted properly. First, look at the numbers. Over the past three seasons, the share of goals originating from the outer half of the pitch, the zone hugging the touchline, has fallen sharply in Southeast Asian top divisions, V.League included. Meanwhile, the share of goals from central and half-space incursions has risen. This reflects a shift in thinking: instead of stretching the opponent's defence horizontally, teams now try to drive straight through the middle with players capable of shooting from distance. The shift did not come from a single decision. It came from causes stacked upon one another. First, high pressing became the default. When a team pushes up to apply pressure, the space behind the opponent's back line becomes precious, and an inverted winger can exploit it with speed and finishing. Second, full-backs are increasingly trained to push high and supply width, replacing the traditional wide midfielder. Third, data analysis spread widely: clubs saw that a shot from the half-space carries a higher expected value than a cross from the touchline. The result is what I call the homogenisation of football. When every team hunts the same template of player, fast, on the opposite foot to the flank, preferring to shoot rather than cross, variety disappears. Opponents no longer prepare for two different scenarios. They prepare for one. I remember an evening in a stadium corridor, when a veteran coach told me: "It is hard to scout wingers now. None of the kids want to play wide anymore. They want to dribble inside, shoot from range, celebrate in front of the stands." That sentence kept me thinking for a long time. The issue is not only tactical. It is cultural. It is how a generation of players sees its own worth. But wait, I do not want to fall into the trap of nostalgia. The truth is that football always changes, and what is dismissed today as outdated can become a breakthrough tomorrow. The question lies elsewhere: are we discarding a tool that still has value simply because it is no longer fashionable? This is where I argue against the majority. People say the traditional winger is dead. I do not believe it. The data does not support that conclusion. Look at the most successful teams in leagues where defences sit deep and space is squeezed; precisely there, a genuine winger, one who holds width, crosses with the natural foot, and stretches the opposing back line, becomes the weapon that breaks the deadlock. Vietnamese football, with its particular physical profile and style, needs that kind of player even more. When opponents defend in numbers, when they seal the middle, a winger who holds width is the only way to open space. A precise cross from wide into the box remains one of the most dangerous deliveries in football. That has never changed. What changed is that we forgot how to use it. Then there is the transfer market, which I consider the silent force behind every tactical trend. Player agents, I have said this many times and will say it again, are the biggest hidden cost of modern football. They do not merely negotiate contracts. They shape taste. An inverted winger who scores is easier to sell than a pure winger, whose value does not lie in flashy numbers. Goals sell shirts. Crosses do not. And so the market rewards spectacle, not balance. This is the blind spot of collective memory. We remember goals, but we forget the passes that led to them. We remember the scorer, but we forget the man who stretched the defence to create the space for that goal. The scoreboard records the result, but it does not record the process. And within that process, there are players who spent entire careers running toward the touchline, not to be remembered, but only so their team could win. Number 14 does not run toward the goal. It runs toward those who still remember. I once stayed behind after a match, when the ground had emptied, and rewatched the footage four times just to understand one small thing: why a winger, having received the ball by the touchline, hesitated for half a second before deciding. That half second appears in no statistical table. But it explains everything. The player was wavering between an old instinct, to cross, and a new demand, to drift inside. In that instant, an entire generation stands between two paths. My notes do not hold onto players. They hold the moments when those players forget that someone is watching. That hesitation is a signal. It shows the transition is not complete, that there remain players carrying the memory of an older way of playing. And in football, memory is not a burden. Sometimes it is an advantage. A team that can use both approaches, the spectacle of the inverted winger and the patience of the touchline runner, is far harder to counter than a team that knows only one way. I think about this whenever the season enters its closing stretch, when the pressure of the title race and the fear of relegation weigh on every pass. In those tense matches, when opponents drop deep, when space is squeezed so tight that even a shot from range feels hopeless, people remember the wingers. But by then it is usually too late. Those men are sitting on the bench, or left the league long ago. This is the tragedy of the zero: no goals, no assists, no name called. But look closely, and that zero is not empty. It is full of runs without the ball, of stretching the defence, of creating space for others to score. The scoreboard cannot count those things. But the match can. Back to the bench in minute 84. That player in number 17, I will not name him, because he is one of hundreds like him, and naming one would inadvertently forget the rest. He sits there, and the match ends without him. The scoreboard will record the result of that game, but it will never record the silence he left on the left flank. I did not write this piece to mourn a lost position. I wrote it to pose a question for next season. If every team plays the same way, if every winger drifts inside, then what will create the difference? The answer, I believe, is not in chasing the trend. It lies in understanding that football is a game of space, and every space has value, including the one people have forgotten outside the touchline. The match ends, the pitch still breathes. And I am still sitting there, listening.