Vietnam Football 2023: Winning the U23 Southeast Asian Championship and joy in New Zealand

At the beginning of 2023, Vietnamese football was not really happy when it suffered a painful defeat against Thailand in the AFF Cup final on January 16.

vô địch của U23 Việt Nam ở giải Đông Nam Á

Vietnam Football 2023: U23 Vietnam won the championship in the Southeast Asian tournament. (Source: Vietnamnet)

This failure caused the beautiful and very successful relationship between Coach Park Hang Seo and Vietnamese football to have an incomplete farewell. It is worth mentioning that in two consecutive AFF Cups, the Vietnamese team of the Korean coach stopped before the Thai team.

After the above failure, at the tournament which is quite important for Vietnamese sports , SEA Games 32, Vietnamese football once again received bitter fruit when U22 Vietnam stopped at the semi-finals against U22 Indonesia.

The inability to defend the gold medal at the largest regional sports event was expected when U22 Vietnam brought to Cambodia not the strongest squad, but the defeat in the semi-finals against U22 Indonesia was extremely painful.

Painful defeat was what fans said about U22 Vietnam at that time, because the team of new head coach Troussier played with one more player for 30 minutes of the second half but was still defeated by the opponent with a score of 3-2.

Not long after, Vietnamese football once again suffered another defeat when it stopped in the group stage of the 2023 Asian Games in China. This was not surprising when in fact the squad participating in the largest sports event in the continent was mainly for learning purposes.

Unlike male players, women's football had a year considered a great success and made a strong impression on the international stage with a brave performance in their first appearance at the 2023 Women's World Cup, despite being in a very difficult group.

Failure and stopping at the group stage was inevitable when the opponents included the defending champion USA, runner-up Netherlands and Portugal, but what the girls of Vietnamese football showed on New Zealand-Australia (the 2 host countries) made everyone proud.

In addition, the Vietnamese women's team also had a beautiful farewell with coach Mai Duc Chung when they successfully defended the SEA Games gold medal for the fourth consecutive time, raising the number of times standing on the highest podium to 8, a record of the Southeast Asian Games.

Bóng đá Việt Nam năm 2023: Vô địch U23 Đông Nam Á và niềm vui trên đất New Zealand - Australia

Huynh Nhu, Vietnamese women's team players and coach Mai Duc Chung. (Source: FBCN)

2023 is not only a year of joy for the girls, the U23 Vietnam players with coach Hoang Anh Tuan as captain also managed to redeem themselves by winning the U23 Southeast Asian Championship after defeating U23 Indonesia on penalties in the final match.

At the younger level, U20 Vietnam, also under the guidance of coach Hoang Anh Tuan, played well at the U20 Asian Cup despite being in the same group with representatives from stronger football backgrounds such as Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia...

Only a little bit of luck prevented U20 Vietnam from stopping at the group stage despite having the same number of points as the two leading teams.

At the club level, despite failing to make it out of the AFC Champions League group stage, the performance of Vietnam's representative in this competition, Hanoi FC, is also considered a bright spot worth appreciating.

Two victories, including defeating defending champions Urawa Red Diamonds, led to the Japanese representative being eliminated from the group stage.

Bright spots from the Vietnamese women's team, the U23 Southeast Asian championship, or some new young talents discovered under coach Troussier in the Vietnamese team's jersey help the country's King sport in 2023 to be less gloomy.

And these bright spots also add a little hope to Vietnamese football in the new year 2024 when participating in the Asian Cup, World Cup qualifiers or the U23 Asian Cup.

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