Farewell to a monument

With great love and respect for Coach Mai Duc Chung, we may want him to say goodbye to the team not now, but at some point in the near future, maybe next year, maybe the year after, even though everyone knows that he is over 70 years old. As Coach Mai Duc Chung has shared several times in the past, he has always been in hotels, training grounds and stadiums more than at home for many years. The pressure of performance and stress has made his hair turn gray faster and more gray. He even said once that he had to take sedatives to sleep.

Besides football, coach Mai Duc Chung (second from left) also has a passion for fishing.

At the 2023 Women's World Cup, the world press is interested in another aspect. They are no strangers to 70-year-old coaches, but they are curious about a team participating in the tournament for the first time with so many surprises. And they describe General Chung exactly as we have seen: a gentle, enthusiastic person, with a lovely smile and sometimes also having fits of anger on the pitch and in the press conference room after his students do not do as he wants, like in the match when Vietnam lost to Portugal.

Looking back at all that he has done for Vietnamese women's football over the years, it can be believed that he is a top-notch coach, a monument in raising our women's football to unprecedented heights. He and his students won 6 out of 8 gold medals in women's football at the SEA Games, reached the semi-finals of the Asian Games (ASIAD) 2014, won the AFF Cup 2019, brought the team to the Women's World Cup for the first time, and turned that team into a leading force in Southeast Asia. His entire life has been spent with the best generations of Vietnamese women's football players and the impact of those victories has been huge, making fans and perhaps the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) itself look back and correctly assess the development of women's football; thereby investing more in women's football, improving the quality and improving the lives of female players. The World Cup is the pinnacle that Mr. Chung and the players have reached, and the legacy he leaves behind will put a lot of pressure on his successor.

A kind coach

But also very strict

In a conversation with me in Auckland (New Zealand) when the team competed in the 2023 World Cup, he said that his greatest passion outside of football was fishing. His coaching philosophy also revolved around that story, when he only put talent last in the 5 elements of life, after "luck", "destiny", "feng shui" and "virtue". He said that in his football career, luck accounted for 60% and football matches were like fishing. There were matches where after a while, the fish bit the bait, but there were also times when he sat for a whole session without catching any fish. Throughout his coaching career, he "fished" like that in regional "ponds", continental "lakes" and "oceans" of the world, collecting countless achievements and the respect of fans, becoming a cool coach who brought Vietnamese women's football to a peak that would not be easy to repeat in the future.

Goodbye to the monument of Vietnamese football.

Source link: https://thanhnien.vn/tam-biet-mot-tuong-dai-185231102231618176.htm