At 1:00 a.m. Beijing time on October 8, the Chinese men's football team will usher in a showdown with Vietnam in the 12-team tournament. Before the match, former international soccer player Li Yi gave an in-depth analysis of the game. He pointed out that this match may be the closest to victory for the national soccer team, but the reality may not be as easy as imagined.
Li Yi emphasized: "This is the third game of the group stage, and from the perspective of the overall group ranking and strength comparison, this game should be the most likely to win for us. But I have to say, don't be blindly optimistic just because you're playing against Vietnam, the speed of development of Vietnamese soccer is actually very rapid. In fact, the Vietnam national team is dominated by players born in '97, who have achieved excellent results in the U23 tournament in previous years, and the tacit understanding between them is incomparable to ours."
"The Vietnam national team still maintains the tactical style of small, fast and agile, playing very resolute defensive counter-attacks and having quite good individual footwork. In my opinion, this game so far, although we occupy a certain advantage, but it is far from being as simple as imagined." Li Yi further analyzed, "There is also a biggest disadvantage is that we do not have home field advantage. In fact, the home field advantage is very obvious to the home team. Also, the climate in West Asia is very hot, which is why the match was delayed by 2 hours. Even though the conditions were fair for both sides, Vietnam had a slight advantage in terms of acclimatization."
Afterwards, Li Yi made a suggestion for the national soccer team: "In this game, the outside media and fans think we must win, but I want to say that we have to win strategically. First of all, we have to do a good job of defense and make sure we don't concede a goal. Once you concede a goal, the game becomes very difficult. If we don't concede a goal, even if we play until the 80th minute, if we seize one chance, we can win 1-0. So the key to the game is defense. The warm-up match between the national soccer team and Syria two days ago was closed, so we can't know its gold content, only the coaching staff and the players themselves know clearly about their physical condition."
Finally, Li Yi said: "the national football team has been closed training for a month before this game, outside to see family and friends, this psychological and spiritual pressure may be more difficult to bear than the physical. The primary goal of this game is to score, whether it's one point or three points, and then consider how to win. One step at a time. Finally, good luck to the national team for their first win in the Round of 12."
