Dong Nai - CAHN: The Missed Red Card and the Unnamed Responsibility of the VAR Team

In football, some incidents are seen by the crowd before the referee sees them. On the afternoon of September 20, in the match between Dong Nai and Cong An Ha Noi, Nguyen Dinh Bac received the ball on the right flank, turned, and the ball had already left his feet long before. Huynh Tan Sinh rushed in from behind. First time. Then a second time. The ball was no longer there, but the Dong Nai centre-back's leg still found the calf of the opposing striker.

In the stands, the roar rose in two beats and died very quickly. Referee Le Vu Linh produced a yellow card. In the same match, Le Van Son threw an elbow towards Dinh Bac. Not a single red card was shown in two situations that anyone in the highest row could tell were deliberate.

People count goals. I collect the times they fell and got back up.

A season only a few rounds old

To understand why September 20 cannot be treated as a small matter, it has to be placed inside the sequence of events in the 2026-2027 V-League. In round two, Doan Van Hau (Cong An Ha Noi) went into a challenge that broke the leg of Doan Ngoc Tan (The Cong Viettel). In the same round, foreign player Ezequiel Santos Da Silva (Nam Dinh) stamped on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang (SHB Da Nang). Two incidents, two victims, and two stretches of playing time that may have been taken out of the rest of their seasons.

By the time Dong Nai met Cong An Ha Noi, the script had not repeated itself as injury. It repeated itself as contempt for the law.

After this run of incidents, representatives of the tournament organisers, VPF and VFF met directly with the VFF Referees Board. The meeting revolved around one phrase repeated over and over: "apply the law correctly". In the context of running a professional league, that phrase is far more concrete than it appears. It means no missed fouls, and no missed cards.

What stands out is that this time the meeting was not aimed at the players. It was aimed at the men holding the whistle.

The forgotten red card and the question of classification

Speaking to reporters after the match, former VFF Vice President for technical affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Board, Duong Vu Lam, was blunt: "Referee Le Vu Linh missed a card in that incident. Huynh Tan Sinh kicked the man instead of the ball far too obviously, yet received no red card." Lam also raised a telling comparison: if the Disciplinary Committee decides to punish retroactively and suspend Tan Sinh for the offence, then referee Le Vu Linh must face an equivalent sanction.

The crux of the story does not lie in the courage to produce a card. It lies in how the act is classified. Under Law 12, a player who uses excessive force against an opponent when the ball is no longer in contention falls into the category of violent conduct, and the mandatory sanction is a direct red card. Conversely, a careless or reckless challenge while two players contest the ball belongs to the category requiring a caution.

The line between those two categories decides the entire chain of responsibility that follows. If the referee classified Huynh Tan Sinh's kick as violent conduct, he was obliged to send the player off, and the VAR team had the power to intervene when a direct red card was missed. If the referee classified it as a reckless challenge, a caution sufficed, and the VAR team was bound by its own protocol once the incident had been dealt with by a card.

In other words, the error sits in a very small box on the match report: the incident was logged as an offence requiring a caution, rather than as violent conduct.

I once wrote something true in my own way, then learned it was wrong in the world's way. And across many years of watching domestic football, I have come to see that the biggest arguments in the V-League rarely erupt because teams play differently. They erupt because the law is applied differently.

What Duong Vu Lam raised therefore carries more weight than a complaint. The VAR team in the Dong Nai versus Cong An Ha Noi match consisted of Vo Hoai Thuong and Nguyen Thanh Son. Lam split the question into two branches. One: if the VAR team advised the on-field referee that a red card was required but was overruled, then the VAR team did its job. Two: if the VAR team did not advise, then the VAR officials must also face sanctions.

This is a model worth learning from: it does not pre-empt the disciplinary body, but it lays out two paths in advance and demands that each path lead to a name.

Based on my experience covering matches, most "kicking the man instead of the ball" incidents in the V-League share one feature: they happen outside the on-field referee's line of sight. The ball has gone elsewhere, the referee is turning towards it, and the kick comes from behind his back. That is precisely the kind of situation video assistance was created to handle.

The VFF Disciplinary Committee has the power to act after the match using video footage. This mechanism, usually called retrospective punishment, is the safety valve of every professional league. But it has a structural limit: retrospective punishment can fix the sanction, it cannot fix the match. Three points still stand on the scoreboard, and Dinh Bac's calf still had to absorb two kicks during a period when the match should have had one fewer Dong Nai player on the pitch.

That leads to a more uncomfortable question. If, in a league where every match has dozens of cameras, a player still feels confident enough to kick an opponent off the ball twice in a row, what motive is being cultivated inside him? A suspension of a few matches can be an acceptable cost for a team that needs points.

So a missed red card is rarely the fault of one man. It is the fault of a four-eyed process: one on-field referee, two VAR officials in a closed room, and between them a protocol about classification.

If a four-eyed process all looks and nobody speaks, suspending one referee solves nothing. The next match will still have an incident behind somebody's back.

The counter-intuitive angle

There is one thing rarely mentioned in debates about refereeing discipline in Vietnam. Nobody publishes the sanctions handed down to referees. Duong Vu Lam admits this too, and suggests an indirect way to check: simply follow the list of referees appointed for the following rounds. If a referee who worked the previous round does not appear in the immediately following rounds, there is a strong chance he is under sanction.

This is the real bottleneck. A disciplinary system that publishes nothing deters no one, protects no one, and clears no one. It merely shifts the discontent from the pitch to a set of numbers on an appointments board.

Doubt used to be a companion. Now it is the shadow I have learned to draw along.

There is one more layer few people mention. Over many years working with Vietnamese women's football, I have sat in stands with no camera at all other than the one in my own hands. There, a similar challenge is never replayed, never examined frame by frame, and there is no VAR room to ask. If the discipline of Vietnamese football is only tightened where there are enough cameras, then it is being tightened because someone is watching, not because there is a law.

Closing

The value of a player is not on the price tag, but in what they dare to demand back. For Nguyen Dinh Bac, what he dared to demand back on September 20 was simply an intact calf.

In the longest night, I learned to hear the breathing of an empty stand. That stand did not scream for a red card. It is only waiting to see whether, this time, the grown-ups will actually name each other.