Tan An Stadium Lost Power, and Long An's Attack Lost Its Spark Too

The news that came out of Tan An was not a goal. It was a cut cable. Before kickoff, someone slipped into the stadium's floodlight area and sliced through the power line. No floodlights. The match between Long An and Thep Can Tho had to shift its kickoff from 16:00 to 15:30, racing against the sun to finish before dusk fell. People retell this as a cheerful anecdote, a "countryside football" story to laugh off. I read it late at night in Marseille, and what I saw was not laughter. I saw a stadium confessing that it cannot secure its own light. And on the pitch, two teams could not secure a goal either. Two power cuts, one at the floodlights, one in the attack.

This was the second round of the season. Long An entered it after a defeat on opening day against CLB Cong An Nhan Dan. Thep Can Tho fared no better, losing 0-3 to Hung Yen in the opener. Two teams, both on zero points, both carrying the same fear: without points today, pressure would start gnawing from the dressing room out to the stands. Tan An is Long An's home ground, a name once etched into Vietnam's top flight, now fumbling to rediscover itself in a lower tier. When a club is relegated, what falls away is not just its ranking. What falls away is floodlights bright enough, pitches flat enough, and tickets plentiful enough to pay the electricity bill.

And then came the cable thief.

Across thirteen years spent on the edges of football grounds, from packed European stands to stadiums I could only watch through a flickering screen, I have learned one thing: the light at a stadium is not merely infrastructure. It is a declaration of status. When a stadium can light itself no matter when the sun sets, that club is telling the whole league it belongs where the money is. When a stadium has to rely on an early kickoff to beat the daylight, that club is telling a different story. The cut cable is only the consequence of a truth that has existed for a long time: resources are so thin that a scrap thief can disrupt an entire professional match.

In Europe, people argue about VAR, about congested calendars, about whether an inverted winger destroys the balance of the game. In a Vietnamese corner of the pitch that afternoon, the bigger story than tactics was a story about a cut wire. The gap between the two football worlds does not lie in the quality of the players. It lies in this: on one side people worry about how to score more goals, on the other people worry about how to have lights to finish the match. This is something anyone who only watches V.League 1 on television will never touch.

The interesting thing is that when the lights went out, people were forced to look at something else. And that something else, at Tan An, turned out to be more worth talking about than the cut cable itself.

The match ended 0-0. But to understand why that zero is frightening, you have to look at the numbers behind it. Thep Can Tho held 52% possession, Long An 48%. Thep Can Tho took 11 shots, Long An 9. About 20 shots in total. Not a single goal. Two attacks that produced roughly twenty chances without breaching the net even once — this is the mark of a match decided by finishing, not by creation.

What stands out is that possession was nearly even and the shot count differed by only two. That means both teams built comparable control, both moved the ball into positions to shoot, but both lacked the final thing: a finisher. In modern football, people tend to blame the defensive system when a match ends goalless. Here, both defenses did their job, and both attacks failed to break the opposing block. This 0-0 was not a great defensive wall. It was two attacks breaking at the same time.

On Long An's side, the story centered on one name: Romario Alves. The foreign forward was the most active player in the home side's attack. He was the man every attacking move sought out. And he did not score. When a foreign player is the entire output of an attack, and that man still fails to convert chances, the attacking structure is fragile. No second option. No one to share the load. Every attacking path for Long An led to one striker, and that striker was locked down by Thep Can Tho's defensive block.

I have seen this lesson many times, at many different grounds. A mid-tier club with limited resources usually chooses the safest solution in recruitment: buy a foreign striker who can create something on his own and hope he carries the whole attack. This strategy can work short-term, before opponents figure it out. But it becomes a fatal flaw once the opponent understands that locking down one player locks down the entire attack. Thep Can Tho did exactly that that afternoon, and that was enough to take a point home.

Even more telling was the second-half adjustment. Both coaches made changes, but those changes made no difference. The ball kept rolling in a stalemate, both defensive blocks held firm, and no new attacking plan was sharp enough to create a clear chance. When both teams need to win but choose caution after the break, that is the sign of two benches unwilling to gamble. The fear of losing outweighed the hunger to win. And when fear outweighs hunger, football becomes a game of sideways passes, back passes, and minutes drifting by pointlessly.

There is a detail many overlook: Long An played at home but created no dominance. No territorial pressure. No superiority in chances. This points to two possibilities. First, the two squads are of similar strength right now. Second, Long An lacks the tools to break down a visitor that sits deep. In either case, the conclusion is the same: home advantage at Tan An exists on paper, not on grass.

And here I have to tell a story I have kept in my head for years. Back in April 2026, when Ligue 1 was cancelled mid-season because of the pandemic, two friends and I launched a podcast called "Football in an Empty Room". We analyzed data from 280 Ligue 1 matches after football returned and found that the home win rate dropped from 43% to 37%. What we called "home advantage" turned out to come mostly from the crowd, from the roar, from the invisible pressure a packed stand exerts on referees and opponents. When the stands are empty, that advantage all but vanishes.

At Tan An that afternoon, there were no lights, and I wondered how many people were in the stands. A lower-tier match, kickoff moved for technical reasons, on a weekday afternoon. Applause in a nearly empty stadium is the echo of fear, not of joy. With no crowd to apply pressure, no roar to add energy, the so-called home ground is just an address. Long An played at home, but that "home" was as silent as an empty room that afternoon.

This is the point I want to linger on, because it reaches beyond one specific match. Lower-tier football falls short of elite football not because its players are worse, but because it is stripped of the minimum conditions to become a compelling product: light, crowds, and attention. A match moved because a thief cut a cable is a match that never had a crowd big enough for anyone to want to protect it. The cable thief is not the cause. He is only the symptom.

Now comes the part where I must be honest with myself.

The counter-intuitive angle I want to put on the table is this: perhaps the power failure actually saved the match from becoming something worse. Imagine it had gone ahead at 16:00, under full floodlights, with a full crowd, and still ended 0-0 with twenty failed shots. Then people would have blamed the attacks, the tactics, the coaches. But because a cable was cut, all attention poured into the backstage story, and the match's technical quality was forgiven unconsciously. The cable thief, unwittingly, became a shield for the impotence of both attacks.

I could be wrong here. Perhaps the match would have been better with lights, perhaps darkness had no effect on the players' psychology, and perhaps I am assigning meaning to a random incident that it does not deserve. But right or wrong, the undeniable fact is: a professional match should not depend on whether a piece of cable was cut. If a stadium's light can be disabled by a scrap thief, that stadium is telling us it was never truly ready for elite football.

And there is one more thing, which I consider the most important. People often say a player needs to be placed in the right system to shine. Romario Alves is the opposite case. He was placed at the center of every attacking move, given every chance to score, and he scored none. That does not only speak about him. It speaks about a club that handed its fate to one man, and that man could not carry it. Modern football does not kill improvisation; it just locks improvisation inside a tactical cage. And when that cage is shut tight by a patient defensive block, improvisation, however beautiful, cannot escape to produce a goal.

Looking back at the whole story, what troubles me is not the 0-0. That is a predictable result between two teams at the bottom, both chasing their first points. What troubles me is the way the match unfolded. A match both teams needed to win, but neither dared to win. A match both attacks were given chances, but no one knew how to seize them. A match where even the light was not guaranteed.

For Long An, a point against Thep Can Tho fails to meet the goal of bouncing back after the opening defeat. This club played at home, and it needed more than a point to ease the worries piling up. For Thep Can Tho, an away point after a 0-3 opening loss is acceptable, even a small step toward stabilizing morale. The same point, but two different meanings. The same scoreline, but two different moods.

I do not want to end this piece with a soothing line like "after all, football is still a beautiful game". Because at Tan An that afternoon, football was not beautiful. It was dark, literally and figuratively. It was a match where the light was stolen, and the goals were stolen in another way. And what was stolen most of all, perhaps, was the attention of the fans, who could not be bothered to come to the ground, could not be bothered to turn on the TV, and could not be bothered to remember the names of two teams that played a match even the sun would not wait for.

Here is my prediction: if Vietnamese football keeps developing without fixing infrastructure at the lower tiers, more and more matches will be decided by factors off the pitch. A cut cable today, a flooded pitch tomorrow, a broken floodlight the day after. Each such incident is a reminder that professional football cannot be built on temporary foundations. And each such incident is also a missed chance to bring fans back to the ground.

Can a cable thief change the fate of an entire football nation? Of course not. But if cut cables become a recurring motif in sports bulletins, then it is no longer a story about a thief. It is a story about a system letting the smallest things shape the biggest ones. And football, whether in Marseille or in Tan An, deserves better than that.