The 2026 Season in Hai Phong: When Nobody Wrote Down the Names of the Scorers

The oilcloth notebook lay at the bottom of a wooden drawer in a house on Tran Nguyen Han Street, Hai Phong. The paper had yellowed, the lower edge was blotched with rainwater, and the damp smell still clung to it as if the last match of the autumn of 2026 had only just ended. The first page held a single scrawled line: “Lach Tray pitch, afternoon of 16 October.” The second page listed eleven names in blue ink gone pale. On the third page the writer stopped, leaving a blank longer than a half. I sat down on the step, turned back to the beginning, and understood that I was holding almost the entire surviving record of a northern season.

Two years after national reunification, Vietnamese football had no single national competition. The north played within the A-grade system and various sector cups, where clubs carried the names of agencies, factories and army units. Players drew wages at worker or soldier grades, trained in the afternoon after their shifts, played on packed earth, and the leather ball grew heavier whenever the rain came. The Army club, The Cong, was the benchmark of northern football through the 1970s. Hai Phong Port held a place of its own: it played on the strength of dock workers, physical and unadorned, tied to the sea wind that blew straight into the Lach Tray stands.

In 2026 no body kept football statistics. No complete league table, no scorers’ list, no standard match report. Information lived in the memory of spectators, in a few lines of the sports press, in a coach’s notebook — and most of it is gone. Only in 2026 did a national championship under the A1 system begin, opening the way to more systematic record-keeping. The stretch between 2026 and that marker is a blur.

Uncle Tu’s notebook recorded one home match of Hai Phong Port. Eleven names, no positions. In the margin, three hurried lines: “Luc, long shot, 1-0”; “Hoi saved a penalty”; “Rain, crowd left early.” That was all. No minutes, no assists, no distance covered. The man keeping the book, probably a team officer, wrote down the only thing his unit needed for its report: the result.

Reading closely, I recognised a familiar structure. What gets recorded is what can be counted — goals, scorelines, dates. What gets skipped is what resists counting — a retreating block, a goalkeeper shouting his back line into shape, a player finishing the match on a swollen knee. Substitutions were effectively unavailable then; once you were on, you played to the end unless something broke. And still the page only had room for the scorer’s name.

Tran Van Luc, the central midfielder on the list, is remembered by exactly one line: the long shot. Nobody wrote how far he ran, or how he screened the ball for a teammate in the eightieth minute. Pham Van Hoi, the goalkeeper, is remembered by two words: “saved a penalty.” A whole career, two words.

I tracked down a few people who had stood in the stands that day. None recalled the exact score. All of them remembered the sound of boots — studs biting into wet turf, the ball thudding against the post, the long whistle at the end. People may forget your name, but they can never forget the sound of your boots on the pitch.

From my own experience watching matches, the hardest part of re-reading an old season is not the missing data. It is that the data which survives has already shaped how we remember. Keep a book of goals and memory circles the goals. Keep a book of dock workers and memory circles the dock workers.

There is a comfortable explanation for the blank pages: Vietnamese football in 2026 was small, not worth recording. I don’t believe it. That same year, units still minuted meetings, kept work logs, filed records for every shipment through the port. People record very carefully when they judge something worth keeping. Football simply was not yet on that list.

What kept me sitting there longer is this: the absence does not belong to 2026 alone.

Today’s game measures almost everything — passes, distance run, shot power — yet still aims its cameras at the scorer. More data, no more people seen. The forgotten of 2026 and the forgotten of this season stand in the same place: just behind the goal. The abandoned notebook and today’s packed dashboard end up choosing the same thing to keep.

Moscow has snow, Hai Phong has sea wind. Football brings both into one story — and in that story, whoever keeps the book only ever has time for the surface. I go to the stadium not to see who scores, but to see who stands up after a missed shot.

If someone one day goes looking for the 2026 season, what they need is not a fuller table. They need to know that after the blank on the third page of the notebook, eleven men played the match to the end.