Kim Sang Sik and the Seven Days Before the ASEAN Cup: A Gap Measured by Training Sessions Without Him

The last time I sat in the stands at a national team training session was in early August. Kim Sang Sik stood at the centre of the pitch, hands on hips, eyes fixed on a transition drill he had made the players repeat for the eleventh time. He did not shout. He simply stopped, called a player over, pointed at the space behind the midfield line, and made them run it again. Eleven times. A South Korean coach, a Hanoi afternoon hot enough that the turf gave off a smell of rubber, and a drill against quick transitions that, to me at the time, looked no different from any other transition drill.

Then the news arrived.

Kim Sang Sik's father passed away, aged 84. He returned to South Korea. The Vietnam Football Federation issued a short statement in which its president offered condolences and encouraged him to go home and handle the funeral. He was expected to spend about a week mourning before returning to Vietnam. The ASEAN Cup 2026 kicks off on September 24 and ends on October 5. Vietnam has been drawn in Group A alongside Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan.

One week. Seven days. For most readers, that is a number not worth pausing over. For me, it is a gap that needs to be measured — and I want to measure it in the most precise unit this profession allows: the number of training sessions, the number of tactical drills, and the number of times a head coach must be present for an idea to travel from his head into a player's feet.

Data is only topsoil; I dig deeper for the groundwater.

Context: where one week sits on the timeline

To understand what this week means, you have to place it in the right position. Kim Sang Sik took the Vietnam head coach's chair in May 2026, and over more than a year in charge he has worked simultaneously with the U23 side and the senior national team. It is the kind of arrangement observers call a "double load" — building a generation in transition while protecting results for the senior team in regional and continental competitions.

For a foreign coach, holding stability across two tournament cycles and two generations of players is not a given. I have watched many foreign coaches arrive in Vietnam and leave after a single failed campaign. What sets Kim Sang Sik apart, based on what I recorded during my reporting sessions, is that he does not try to stage a revolution. He patches one spot at a time. He fixes one gap at a time. He re-teaches a drill until the player understands where he went wrong.

And now, with the ASEAN Cup 2026 only weeks away, he has to be away from the training pitch for about seven days.

I do not want to turn this into a tactical tragedy. The loss of an 84-year-old father is a human loss, not a tactical one. But in my profession, when a personal event intersects with a professional milestone, I have a duty to ask both questions at once: how much does it hurt the family, and what does it leave on the pitch? Those two questions do not exclude each other.

The preparation rhythm of a regional national team

Southeast Asian football runs on a very particular logic. National teams here do not get hundreds of days of camp like European sides. They are compressed into short windows between club fixtures, and when a major tournament arrives, the entire technical preparation has to be squeezed into a tight span.

I spent years following youth teams, and the first season that destroyed my faith in raw numbers was 2026, when I covered U19 Viettel. A young striker scored 12 goals in 18 matches at the U19 National Championship, and I built a tracking table of six secondary metrics instead of writing a praise piece. The result: most of those goals came against bottom-table sides. My critical piece annoyed readers, but the following season the player started less and less and then disappeared from the youth football map.

I retell that old story to make one point: in youth football, and in senior national team football too, time is not evenly distributed. An empty week in mid-July is entirely different from a week before a tournament. And this week sits at the tail end of the preparation cycle — the place where every idea should already be ripe, every formation should already be frozen, every contingency should already be lodged in players' heads to the point where no one needs to remind them.

If the seven days fell in July, the damage would be negligible. Falling in this stretch, it touches the thinnest layer of the entire cycle.

What a week can and cannot do

Let's be specific.

A head coach in the pre-tournament phase does not just stand outside and name drills. He does things an assistant cannot fully replace. He reshapes the priority order inside players' heads: how to handle Thailand, how to keep the ball against the Philippines, whether focus can be allowed to slip against Pakistan. He decides who starts and who must accept the bench. He transmits the hardest thing to express — certainty. And he is the only person with the authority to say "no" to a player who wants to play differently.

Those are tasks that require presence.

On the other hand, most of the fitness, load and session structure has been planned in advance. The analytics team, the assistants, the fitness coaches — they all know what they have to do over those seven days. A national team is not a group of players waiting for orders. The machine keeps running.

So I am not saying these seven days will ruin Vietnam's ASEAN Cup. I am saying they leave a smear in exactly the window where a head coach needs the sharpest lines.

There is one detail in his process that caught my attention earlier, and it becomes more notable in this situation: the way he uses transition drills. In the session I watched in early August, there was a segment simulating a turnover in midfield, and the demand placed on the defensive line was to switch from attacking to defensive shape in a very short time. He ran that segment over and over. Not because the players did not understand. Because he wanted it to become reflex.

Reflex is not built in one session. It is built across many consecutive sessions, because if you interrupt the sequence, the brain reverts to old habits. And this is precisely the kind of drill that suffers most when a week is cut out of the chain.

One match does not make a talent, but it illuminates exactly where to dig.

Who holds the pitch during those seven days

What the Federation's statement does not spell out is the delegation structure during those seven days. This is the first grey zone, and I need to say plainly that I lack the data.

In most professional federations, when a head coach is absent for a sudden personal reason, day-to-day training authority goes to an assistant under a previously agreed division of labour. The way the Vietnam Football Federation handled this — the president personally encouraging him to go home — suggests the situation was coordinated rather than a unilateral departure. But the quality of the sessions during those seven days is something the article cannot tell me.

Here I have to admit the limits of statistics. We can count sessions, minutes, days. We cannot count what percentage of a tactical idea soaked into a player's head during a session where the man who conceived the idea was absent. That unknown sits behind the meeting-room door, and no spreadsheet measures it.

And this is where I think about a dimension few discuss.

A foreign coach living far from his family, pouring most of his time into the job — Vietnamese media has noted he works at high intensity, guiding both the U23 side and the senior team through many regional and continental tournaments. When his father died, people saw a son who lost his father. But there is another way to see it: a man who poured his entire professional prime into Vietnamese football, and now has to go home to face something football cannot compensate for.

Players feel things like that. They are young men, many of them also living far from home. A head coach returning after his father's funeral, with the same lesson plan, the same transition drill repeated to the eleventh time — it creates something metrics cannot capture: respect.

Reading Group A beyond the names of opponents

Vietnam's Group A has been announced: Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan.

The common reading is: Vietnam can get through the group, Thailand is the main rival, the Philippines and Pakistan are chances to collect points. That reading is not wrong, but it stops at the topsoil.

Put a few things side by side.

Vietnam enters the tournament with a squad mostly playing domestically. Thailand has a league system that draws more investment and more players competing abroad. The Philippines and Pakistan sit lower overall. That is the resource picture, and it does not change just because a coach is absent for seven days.

What this absence can change is the priority order in the preparation work.

With a group containing three opponents at three different levels, a head coach is forced to allocate focus unevenly. The Thailand match needs a carefully honed plan. The other two need certainty and rotation capacity. If the seven absent days fall exactly in the phase of honing the plan for the most important match, then the loss is not in fitness but in tactical intelligence.

This is the kind of damage a scoreline does not display. It only surfaces when the team faces a situation it was not drilled for, and players have to decide for themselves instead of reacting according to a script repeated many times.

I have been wrong before for underestimating a team that was weak on metrics. At the 2026 World Cup, I was sceptical of Morocco because their possession hovered at low levels and they created few chances. After re-watching all their matches, I realised their number of fast transitions was far above the tournament baseline, and I wrote a series of pieces rebutting myself, proposing a new metric set including key passes, space created and transition speed.

That memory keeps me cautious about any simple conclusion regarding Group A. A squad drilled into good reflexes can hide personnel weaknesses. A squad not drilled can drop personnel advantages. And reflex, as I said, is what breaks when the training chain is cut.

A counter-intuitive angle: sympathy can be a shield that blurs judgement

Here I want to turn in a direction I rarely see written about.

In this period, Vietnamese public opinion will grant Kim Sang Sik enormous sympathy. That is right and necessary. A man who lost his father, going home to mourn, deserves to be treated that way. No one should turn a family's grief into a tactical matter.

But sympathy, viewed as a media phenomenon, has a side effect I need to name: it creates an evaluation-exemption zone for a few weeks. If Vietnam opens the ASEAN Cup with a flat performance, the first reaction of most fans will be to defend the coach. If Vietnam wins, the story will be told as a victory of the spirit. In both directions, the professional truth risks being obscured.

I say this not to doubt anyone's kindness. I say it because I have been in this profession long enough to know that when an entire community agrees on a story, people usually stop asking technical questions. The analyst's duty is to keep that question alive, respectfully, until the data returns.

And the data will return. Around early October, when the tournament closes, we will know whether those seven days left a mark. The way we know is not through the scoreline. The scoreline is only topsoil. We know through whether the team reacted correctly at decisive moments, through whether the defensive line switched shape as cleanly as what I saw at that early-August session.

There is another possibility I cannot rule out, and honesty compels me to say it does not make me pessimistic. Much sports psychology research suggests that after a major loss, some coaches return to work with above-normal focus. Work becomes a shelter. For a man with the disciplined, perfectionist temperament I have observed in Kim Sang Sik, the chance that he returns and throws himself into sessions at higher intensity is entirely real.

That is why I refuse to deliver a verdict. Seven days can be a smear. Seven days can also be a recharge in a way no one could plan.

The biggest risk is not on the training pitch

When I map the risk for this situation, there are three layers.

The first is professional risk. This is the most visible and also the most exaggerated. A one-week absence in the pre-tournament cycle is manageable, provided the assistant machinery runs smoothly and the head coach returns on schedule. Vietnam still has roughly ten days from the point he is expected back to the opening match, counting from the one-week mark. Ten days is not much, but it is not a dead void.

The second is administrative risk. Every international tournament has submission deadlines and related procedures. If mourning extends beyond expectation due to custom or family reasons, there could be a need to adjust paperwork. This is a low-probability scenario, but my profession has taught me that low-probability things still need to be written down.

The third — and in my view the most important — is psychological risk inside the tournament itself. A head coach makes dozens of decisions in a match, many of them within seconds. A substitution at minute 70, keeping on a tired player, pushing the defensive line high or dropping it — those choices depend on clarity. And clarity, during a period of mourning, is something no one can guarantee.

I do not have enough data to speak about specific psychological effects on an individual. I can only say that this is the only variable in this situation with no reasonable contingency plan. You cannot delegate a substitution.

Belief only has value when it passes the qualifying round of evidence.

Professional transmission: a small thing, but readable

There is a layer of meaning I think is worth recording, even though it does not directly relate to the scoreline.

The way the Vietnam Football Federation handled this situation is a signal about the working environment. In international football, there is no shortage of cases where a coach faces a family crisis and is pressured to stay in the chair because of the fixture list. Conversely, there are federations that treat supporting a coach in a hard moment as an investment in a long-term relationship.

The federation president personally encouraging Kim Sang Sik to go home and handle the funeral belongs to the second group. In the short term, it produces no points. In the medium and long term, it affects how future foreign coaches assess Vietnam as a destination.

I know this sounds distant from the story of a family in mourning. But football runs on small signals like this, accumulating over years. A federation that knows how to deal with people will attract better people, in every position, not just the coach's chair.

From another angle, this story will have a second life in South Korea. Korean media may report on a coach working in Southeast Asia returning for his father's funeral. If that happens, it adds another emotional layer to the story, and also another invisible layer of pressure on him: he must come back and succeed, because people at home are watching.

What I will be watching

I am not writing this to predict whether Vietnam will win or lose the ASEAN Cup. I do not know. The squad is not finalised, form is not visible, and the head coach's seven-day absence is just one variable among dozens.

What I will watch is not the scoreline. I will watch the shape of the defensive line in the first twenty minutes of the opening match. I will watch how the team switches from attacking to defensive shape when it loses the ball in midfield — the moment I saw repeated eleven times on an August afternoon. If it is still clean, then those seven days have passed without leaving much of a mark. If it is messy, then we know there are things that can only be transmitted from one person to another when that person stands at the centre of the pitch.

And I will watch one more thing, something no data table records. The way Kim Sang Sik walks onto the pitch in his first match after returning.

When the pitch is empty, I listen to the data. It lies more than I once thought.

I learned this from more than a decade of following youth football, and it holds true in senior football too. Numbers cannot tell the difference between a session with the head coach at the centre of the pitch and one without him. Numbers also cannot tell the difference between a coach returning with a scrambled mind and one returning with compressed resolve. Only what happens on the pitch answers that, and it will answer by late September.

In a sense, Vietnam's ASEAN Cup 2026 begins now, not on September 24. It begins with a flight to South Korea, with a week without him on the training pitch, and with how a group of twenty-odd men reacts to the absence of the man who leads them. A group that can grow in seven days like that is usually one that was built properly long before.

And if that is true, then these seven days — painful for one family — are a test no training session could ever have scheduled.

I will not conclude. I will wait for the ball to roll.

I am not looking for a gem; I sift the sand again to understand the stratigraphy of youth football.

And sometimes, to understand a national team, I have to sift the sand in exactly the same way — starting from a short federation statement, moving through each layer of context, and stopping where the evidence permits, not where emotion wants me to stop.