VietNamNet Bridge – The World Cup dream of Vietnamese football has been realised by the national futsal team, a stunning achievement making home fans proud and taking international observers from surprise to admiration.

Vietnamese players burst out into happiness after securing an official place in the Futsal World Cup.

However, a lot of work remains for the team so that the upcoming trip to Colombia this September will not be a mere sight-seeing journey.

Vietnam hosted the AFC Futsal Championship for the first time in 2005. It was also the debut of the sport in the country, and it came as little surprise that Vietnam was disqualified in the preliminary stage. In the next five tournaments, Vietnam reached the AFC finals just once (in 2010), while failing to break through the qualification round in four other editions (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2012).

The team’s poor international performance at that time made them little known to local fans. Information about domestic futsal competitions could only be found in the brief sport news category, with several clubs like Thai Son Bac and Thai Son Nam.

Vietnamese futsal has begun to draw more attention from domestic media as well as football lovers since the national team, as the host team, brilliantly made it through to the quarterfinals of the 2014 AFC Championship.

In 2015, Vietnamese futsal continued to hit additional milestones as Thai Son Nam excelled beyond expectation, winning the overall bronze medal at the AFC Futsal Clubs Championship in Iran. The same year, the Vietnamese futsal team officially booked a ticket to the 2016 AFC Championship Finals after finishing among the top four at the AFF Futsal Championship in Bangkok, Thailand, which also functioned as the qualification tournament for the 2016 AFC finals.

From a little known sport, futsal has now become a focus across the country. Local fans, who are used to watching football matches on grass, have been keeping a close eye on futsal players “burning themselves” on indoor pitch.

After the stunning victory against Japan’s futsal team, Vietnamese futsal flooded newspapers in Vietnam as well as social networks. The historic feat of a small team invested in by Tran Anh Tu and coached by Spanish Bruno Garcia is even more impressive considering Vietnam’s indoor football stems from an amateur background, and has only been organized as a professional sport for just over a decade.

Vietnamese futsal players always demonstrated the fighting spirit of warriors in each of their matches at the 2016 AFC Championship. Despite showing progress day by day, Vietnamese futsal is still far off from the remaining four World Cup teams of the Asian zone - Thailand, Australia, Uzbekistan and Iran. However, futsal has developed very quickly and gradually overcome the other sports to which attention was paid in the past. The national futsal team coursed through the group-stage qualification of the 2016 AFC Futsal Championship with two wins and one loss before beating Japan 2-1 in a tense penalty shootout after a 4-4 draw in the quarterfinals to secure an official 2016 World Cup slot, granted to each of the four semifinalists and the winner of play-off matches among the four losers of the quarterfinals.

After this incredible feat, Vietnamese futsal is sure to find a place in the hearts of local fans, and it is time the sport received adequate investment and attention. Despite being an indoor event, the futsal players’ victory still has a huge meaning and value contributing to promoting Vietnam to international friends and functioning as a lesson of experience for their football colleagues in fulfilling their long-standing dreams.

Small-field football (futsal) is not a small game. If success can be found in futsal, we can better prepare for a bigger game – large-field football – in which there still remains numerous limitations for both the national team and the country’s top-tier league, the V-League.

Nhan Dan