The Towel and the Third Game: Nguyen Thuy Linh and Nguyen Hai Dang at Asiad 20

Between the first and second games, Nguyen Thuy Linh sat down on the changeover chair just behind the sideline. She took the towel and wiped her face. She wiped slowly, forehead downward, then folded the towel along its old crease and set it neatly on the armrest of the chair. The scoreboard above still showed 10-21. The umpire called her name a second time. Behind me, a group of Japanese fans clapped a steady rhythm, their applause running like a sewing machine through heavy cloth.

On the next court, two nets away, Nguyen Hai Dang had just closed his first game at 16-21. He walked one lap around the court before returning to his chair, eyes fixed on the tip of his shoes. He did not throw his racket. He did not tip his head back toward the ceiling. Just one lap, slow, in the exact cadence of someone counting how many points he had lost and where.

I was sitting in the press area, taking notes in pencil because my tablet had died early that morning. That day the page held four lines. One line was the score. The other three were the things a scoreboard never displays: the sound of a shuttle meeting the racket face at the decisive points, the breathing of the person sitting below the court, and the two-second silence after every shuttle falls to the floor.

Twenty minutes later, both courts were done. Nguyen Thuy Linh lost to Chen Yu Fei 1-2, with games of 10-21, 24-22 and 12-21. Nguyen Hai Dang lost to Kunlavut Vitidsarn 0-2, with games of 16-21 and 14-21. Vietnam closed the competition day of September 26 at Asiad 20 with no singles player remaining in the draw.

That is everything the score could tell. The rest, I write here.

An afternoon in Aichi-Nagoya

On the competition day of September 26 at Asiad 20, the men's and women's badminton singles entered the third round. Under a single-elimination format, the third round is the narrowest door a mid-tier player must walk through: win, and you enter the quarterfinals and the group of names the media read out loud; lose, and the journey ends at exactly the point where every results summary reads the same.

Nguyen Thuy Linh, Vietnam's number one women's singles player, reached the third round after beating Thalita Ramadhani Wiryawan. Her next opponent was Chen Yu Fei, the Chinese player then ranked world number four. Nguyen Hai Dang, the team's men's singles representative, reached the third round with a 21-6, 21-6 win over Odilzhon Abdurakhmanov, then met Kunlavut Vitidsarn, a Thai player inside the elite tier of Asian men's badminton.

One thing must be said immediately about the structure of that day. This was a continental multi-sport event, where badminton is only one of many medal channels and where the pressure does not come from the Badminton World Federation ranking system but from the medal table of an entire national delegation. That creates a very particular kind of pressure: it is not measured in points accumulated across a season, it is measured by whether your name is read aloud at the closing summary.

I began sitting in badminton stands in the 1990s, when training halls in Hai Phong still lacked standard mats and people still had to tension nets with steel wire tied to two iron posts. Thirty-two years of watching Vietnamese badminton move through these continental Games taught me something rather cold: badminton does not permit luck earned through spirit. A shuttle weighs five grams, crosses the net at roughly six metres, and does not know which country you represent.

Game one, game two, and the price of game three

Watching Nguyen Thuy Linh's match from the press tribune, what made me take notes was not the final score but the order of the three games. A player who loses 10-21 in the first game, then wins 24-22 in the second, then loses 12-21 in the third, is telling a completely different story from the story of simply being weaker.

The 10-21 first game was not exactly a collapse. It was a sign of not yet having found the rhythm. Against a world number four, the window to read the shuttle is usually very short, and if you cannot read it within the first ten points, you pay with the entire game. In games like that, Chen Yu Fei rarely needs anything elaborate. She pushes the shuttle deep into both corners, holds an even tempo, and waits for the opponent to make the error herself. That style makes a younger opponent feel as though they are hitting a wall that has been fitted with a motor.

The second game is the one worth discussing. Nguyen Thuy Linh won it 24-22, which means she had to save at least one game point, and it also means she had to keep her hand steady at exactly the moments everyone knows are hardest to hold steady. This is an important technical marker: a player capable of pushing a game into the deuce zone and winning there is not a player lacking nerve. The problem lies elsewhere.

The problem lies in the third game, and in the number 12-21.

In a three-game match, the third game is not the first game plus two. It is a different state. In the third game, what gets depleted first is not strength but the accuracy of decisions. A player after two tense games loses roughly half a step on cross-court shuttles, and half a step is enough to turn a smash into a desperate scoop and a lost point. An opponent at world number four level does not need to play better in the third game. They only need to play exactly as they did in the first, and let the other side pay the bill for the two games just played.

Reading the sequence 10-21, 24-22, 12-21 this way, I see a player whose ceiling is high enough to touch the elite group for about one game, but who does not yet have the physical reserve and consistency to sustain that level for forty minutes. The gap between Vietnamese badminton and the world's top group is not in the smash. A smash can be trained. It is in the ability to repeat a good rally for the two hundredth time, when the legs are tired and the head is full.

Two courts, two different altitudes

Nguyen Hai Dang had a day that reads in two very clear parts.

The first part was the 21-6, 21-6 win over Odilzhon Abdurakhmanov. That score says a great deal about the basic professionalism of a national team player. Against a lower-ranked opponent, a properly trained player must win cleanly, win quickly, and win without burning too much fuel. Letting an opponent reach fifteen points in that situation signals a lapse in focus; letting them take only six points per game signals seriousness. Hai Dang did exactly that part of the job, and I credit it before saying anything about the next match.

The second part was the match against Kunlavut Vitidsarn, a straight-games loss at 16-21 and 14-21. I have sat long enough in Asian arenas to know one thing: some defeats look closer than they were, and some look further. The 16-21, 14-21 kind belongs to the second category. A player who loses in two straight games but always keeps the margin under ten points is usually a player locked at exactly one level: they have enough technique not to be blown away, but not enough weaponry to force a turning point.

Kunlavut Vitidsarn belongs to the group of players who live on defensive retrieval and patience. That kind of opponent is annoying in a very specific way: they do not knock you out of the hall, they make you walk out of your own plan. Every time Hai Dang built a good attacking rally, the shuttle came back. After three or four such exchanges, the attacking player starts choosing harder options, and the error rate climbs. A seven-point margin in the first game and a seven-point margin in the second, with a nearly identical distribution, show that Hai Dang did not collapse. He simply never found a door.

Setting the two courts side by side, I see two different altitudes existing within one afternoon. Nguyen Thuy Linh reached the edge of the elite women's group, enough to take one game. Nguyen Hai Dang reached the lower edge of the elite men's group, enough not to be crushed but not enough to create a game with a turning point. Both stood in the third round, but they stood there in completely different ways.

The third round is a door, not a wall

In a single-elimination format, the third round has a characteristic few outsiders notice: it is the round where seeds begin to meet real opponents. The first two rounds are usually enough for top players to warm up; the third round is where a draw begins to reveal itself. For a Vietnamese player reaching this stage, meeting Chen Yu Fei or Kunlavut Vitidsarn in the third round is not the unfairness of a draw. It is the consequence of seeding positions in the world rankings.

What is worth noting is that both Vietnamese players cleared the first two rounds. For a badminton nation like Vietnam, having two representatives in the men's and women's singles both reaching the third round at a continental Games reflects current capability accurately. It was not luck. But it was also not a leap.

Looking at the delegation's overall results, Vietnamese badminton at Asiad 20 brought home no medals in team events. That detail carries more weight than any commentary about fighting spirit. A badminton nation whose strength exists only in individual singles is a nation with narrow depth. At continental level, strong delegations such as China, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand can place multiple players in the same draw and, more importantly, can compete in men's doubles, women's doubles and mixed doubles. Vietnam appears almost exclusively in the singles branches.

This is nothing new. It is a structure that has existed for years, and it has its reasons.

The ecosystem behind the baseline

I have always believed that to understand a badminton nation, you must look at the training hall, not the scoreboard. A scoreboard shows results; a training hall shows causes.

In leading Asian badminton nations, a national singles player trains alongside a sparring group of equal or higher standard. They can play five internal matches in a week, each with umpires, with scoreboard pressure, with analysts filming every rally. When they step onto the international stage, they are already accustomed to the feeling of having to play a tense third game. For them, the third game is a weekly event.

For a Vietnamese player, the number of matches of comparable quality across a season is far lower. That is why scores like 24-22 are not strange, while third games ending with large margins are very familiar. Vietnamese players usually have enough quality to push a match into the deuce zone, because their basic technique is good. What is missing is the number of times they get to live inside that zone.

I have asked many fans in domestic arenas the same question: why are you here. The most common answer is not medals. They come because they want to see a young person hit a beautiful shuttle. That is a good emotional foundation. But it has not yet been converted into a system. Emotion does not produce sparring partners on its own, does not produce strength-and-conditioning rooms, does not produce international competition calendars.

This is where I want to say something plainly that few in the profession like to say: Vietnamese badminton does not lack good people. We lack a sufficient number of good people training with each other.

The blind spot sits in the first game

After the match ended, the popular narrative was this: a Vietnamese player took a game off the world number four. That narrative is not wrong, but it places the emphasis in the wrong spot.

I believe our blind spot sits in the 10-21 of the first game, not in the 12-21 of the third. The third game is a consequence. The first game is the cause.

A player who walks onto court against the world number four and loses the opening game 10-21 is showing something about preparation, not about talent. In the first ten points of a major match, people do not win with technique, they win with a plan. You need to know where you will serve in the first three points, which corner you will push your opponent toward, which situations you are willing to concede in exchange for position. If you walk on court without a plan, you play on instinct, and instinct is always slower than an opponent who has studied you.

The narrative of "taking a game" also carries a more dangerous side effect: it turns a losing result into a kind of achievement. One game won against the world number four has emotional value, but it does not change your seeding, does not change your quarterfinal slot, and does not change anything in your competitive record. If we keep celebrating games like that, we will gradually forget the real reference threshold.

And this is where I want to ask a difficult question: is the world number four the right measuring stick for Vietnamese badminton.

I do not think so. The world number four is a mountain, and climbing near the summit does not tell you what altitude you are standing at. The right measure for a badminton nation is the group of players ranked roughly fifteenth to thirtieth in the world. That is the group just good enough for us to beat with proper preparation, and just difficult enough to expose every hole. If Nguyen Thuy Linh and Nguyen Hai Dang beat that group consistently, Vietnamese badminton will have moved to another tier. Winning one game against the world number four only tells us we have a smash strong enough to appear on television.

The second blind spot sits in how we use the word "spirit". In many commentaries, spirit is used as cheap currency to pay for defeats whose real causes we prefer not to name. Spirit matters, but spirit does not fix a faulty serve at 18-19. Fixing that serve requires ten thousand repetitions under the pressure of someone standing across the net. That is a system's job, not willpower's.

The third blind spot is that we look at the Asian Games as a destination. For leading Asian badminton nations, the continental Games are a checkpoint inside a longer cycle, important but not everything. For us, it is often viewed as a final opportunity. That view produces two opposite effects: it inflates public expectation, and it reduces our ability to assess results objectively. A player who walks on court thinking "I must win here" usually plays worse than a player who walks on court thinking "I have known this opponent for three months".

There is one fortunate thing: neither of our players on September 26 let defeat turn into an emotional performance. Nguyen Thuy Linh folded her towel before leaving the chair. Nguyen Hai Dang walked one lap around the court. That is the way of people who have grown used to losing in the third round and who know they will have to come back to this same court again.

A letter to the six a.m. training session

An empty arena, yet I hear the applause of an entire era clearly. I have kept that sentence since the days when the arena closed because of the pandemic, when the whole city stayed home and only the ventilation fans moved in an empty space. On September 26 in Aichi-Nagoya, the stands were not empty. People applauded a great deal. But what I heard most clearly was not that applause.

What I heard most clearly was the sound of a shuttle touching the floor at 13-19 in the third game. It is small. It is light. And it is all that remains after a competition day.

They told me to write about badminton. I only write about the people standing behind the shuttle. Nguyen Thuy Linh sat folding a towel. Nguyen Hai Dang walked one lap around the court. Two young people, two scoreboards, two defeats in the same round. Read only the results, and you will call it an unsuccessful day. Read more carefully, and you will find a women's singles player who touched the edge of the four strongest players on the planet for twenty minutes, and a men's singles player who kept the margin under ten points across two games against one of the most stubborn defensive specialists in Asian badminton.

If you are someone who trains in badminton, standing in a hall at six in the morning when the mats are still cold and the nets have not been re-tensioned, then I want to send you this from Aichi-Nagoya: the distance between you and the best player in your draw is not in the smash. It is in the number of times you are willing to play a third game with tired legs while still holding to the plan. That is the only thing that accumulates. And it is also the only thing a scoreboard, however bright, can never display.

Empty arena or full, the writer still has to sit down after the match ends. I folded the pencil-written page, slipped it into my coat pocket, and walked out of the hall through the side exit. Outside, the Aichi sky had gone dark. In my pocket were four lines of notes, and one of them was the score.

The other three, I am saving for next time.