The Missed Red Card in Dong Nai and the Grey Zone of VAR Responsibility

The Missed Red Card in Dong Nai and the Grey Zone of VAR Responsibility

The ball had already rolled away towards the touchline. Nguyen Dinh Bac turned his back and accelerated, and Le Van Son's elbow followed, meeting the shoulder and neck of the Cong An Ha Noi (CAHN) striker in the Dong Nai versus CAHN match on 20 September. I was close enough to hear the contact before the whistle. Minutes later, in the same game, centre-back Huynh Tan Sinh twice lunged into Dinh Bac's legs from behind, at moments when the ball was long gone. Three actions, two home players, one target.

Outsiders read the scoreboard; I read the pulse in the tunnel. A match can be decided by a corner, by pressing, by a stray pass from the opponent. The tunnel tells a different story: who can still walk, who has lost composure, who is looking for a way to frighten somebody. In Dong Nai that evening, the tunnel told of a team pushed into a corner that chose to defend through fear. On the pitch, that fear became an elbow and a set of studs.

Dinh Bac is a young, quick forward who dares to dribble into crowded places. Players like him are always greeted with tackles meant to "show him the league". Based on my experience watching matches from the technical area over several seasons, I log a fairly consistent rule: in the opening rounds, the price of a hard collision is usually lower than the price of a conceded goal. Clubs know it. Players know it too.

Four incidents, two rounds, one pattern

V-League 2026-2027 is only a few rounds old, and four incidents have already had people in the technical corridor talking off-microphone. In round 2, CAHN centre-back Doan Van Hau produced the challenge that broke the leg of midfielder Doan Ngoc Tan (The Cong Viettel). In the same round, Nam Dinh's foreign striker Ezequiel Santos Da Silva stamped on the stomach of Vo Huu Viet Hoang (SHB Da Nang). On 20 September, one single match produced two consecutive incidents aimed at Dinh Bac: Le Van Son's elbow and Huynh Tan Sinh's two off-the-ball stamps.

All four share a common denominator. A team that cannot control the game tries to control the opponent through pain. Dinh Bac became the target because he is CAHN's cheapest source of difference: he applies pressure without the ball, and drags an entire defensive line out of position with it.

Faced with the risk of on-field violence returning and damaging the league's image, representatives of the organising committee, VPF and VFF met the VFF Referees Committee directly. The meeting boiled down to one widely quoted line: referees must apply the laws correctly, uphold the competition's discipline, and stop violent conduct on the pitch.

"Applying the laws correctly" is a very safe phrase. It does not demand more cards or earlier cards. It only says that fouls must not be missed, and cards must not be missed. For anyone who works by reading positions and running distances, it is the easiest instruction to issue and the hardest to measure. A referee can be correct on every individual decision while sending the wrong message about the whole competition. Another referee can err once and, by that error, accidentally set the right price for the rest of the season.

In the specific case in Dong Nai, the story is much narrower. Referee Le Vu Linh used only a yellow card for Huynh Tan Sinh's off-the-ball challenge, even though the player stamped on Dinh Bac twice. No red card was shown. The VAR team, comprising Vo Hoai Thuong and Nguyen Thanh Son, left no intervention trace clear enough for outsiders to see.

One frame, two different questions

I rewatched the incident many times, in slow motion and at real speed. Two questions need separating.

The first concerns the type of offence. Under the Laws of the Game, violent conduct is punished with a direct red card, regardless of whether the ball is within playing distance. A player who throws an elbow when the ball has gone is playing the man, not the ball. The same applies to twice kicking an opponent's legs from behind in a dead phase. When the behaviour repeats inside one match, the referee has two tools: a direct red for violent conduct, or a second yellow for a repeat offence. Both roads lead off the pitch. The road referee Le Vu Linh chose led nowhere.

The second concerns VAR, and this is the part most often skipped in debates outside the stadium.

VAR can only intervene in four categories: goals, penalties, direct red cards and mistaken identity. An off-the-ball stamp falls squarely inside the direct red card category. Technically, then, the VAR team had both the right and the duty to review it. What VAR may not do is make the decision for the on-field referee. What it must do, if it spots an error, is invite the referee to the monitor.

That is where the gap opens. If VAR advised and referee Le Vu Linh overruled it, then VAR did its job and responsibility rests with the on-field referee. If VAR said nothing, then the team itself sits inside the circle of responsibility. Former VFF vice-president for professional affairs and former head of the VFF Referees Committee, Duong Vu Lam, put it plainly to Dan Tri after the match: "Referee Le Vu Linh missed a card on that incident. Huynh Tan Sinh's off-the-ball challenge was too blatant, yet there was no red card."

Lam went one step further, and that step is the point worth keeping: "If Tan Sinh is punished retroactively and suspended for this, then referee Le Vu Linh should have his whistle suspended in the same way. Beyond that, the responsibility of the VAR team must be clarified. If VAR advised the referee and the referee overruled it, then VAR fulfilled its task. Conversely, if VAR did not advise referee Le Vu Linh that a red card was required for that off-the-ball challenge, then the VAR officials must be dealt with too."

Read closely, those two sentences contain a symmetry worth holding onto. One frame, one moment, but the consequences are shared among three parties. Player Tan Sinh, if punished retroactively, loses a few matches. Referee Le Vu Linh, if suspended, loses a few rounds of appointments. The VAR team, if it failed to act, should face a corresponding measure.

The problem is that these consequences are not equally visible. Disciplinary sanctions against referees are rarely published. The only external measure is indirect: watch the appointment list for the following round. Duong Vu Lam hinted exactly at that method: "Just watch the referee appointments in the rounds after the one just played. If those referees are not assigned to the immediately following rounds, the likelihood is high that they are being disciplined."

This is what I call indirect data. An absent referee may be ill, may be rotated, may be on international duty. But when somebody is absent for exactly one round, right after a questioned decision, coincidence becomes a smaller probability than sanction. People inside the game read an appointment list the way others read a league table. There is no sentence written on it, yet the story is legible.

Having once been pushed to the margins, I understand the value of a seat in the corner. In my early years following the team, I had to prove I understood football with a precise running-distance figure. Now, reading an incident like the one in Dong Nai, I look one layer deeper: after the whistle, who makes the decision, and by which channel is that decision fed into the system. A red card at that moment would have left Dong Nai a man down for the rest of the match. A yellow card changed nothing, except to teach the whole league that the behaviour still has a use.

The price of violence is set in rounds three and four, not in round twenty. That is when clubs are still choosing how to play, when nobody is suspended yet, when new players do not know where the referee's threshold sits. If that threshold is set low, by mid-season a hard tackle becomes a legitimate substitute for defending with structure. I still tell younger colleagues in the press room: spectators confuse a fiery feel with quality, while matches are decided by control of tempo. A player who kicks a man is usually a player who has already lost that contest.

Data tells what has passed. The dressing room tells what is coming. In the tunnel in Dong Nai, what was coming had already surfaced before the referee reached for his pocket: home players told each other the opponent would stop dribbling if he got hurt a few times. It was said quickly and quietly. It was never an attacking plan. It was a defence plan in a deformed shape. And it can only survive if the man with the whistle does not react.

Three blind spots that punishment does not reach

The most visible response is to demand a heavier hand: more red cards, more bans, more fines. That sounds decisive, but it mostly addresses the consequences we can see.

A decision on the pitch is not the product of one person. The on-field referee's view is limited by distance and timing, while the VAR room has screens. When both stay silent, outsiders turn towards the referee and ignore the VAR room. Who advised, who overruled, who said nothing — those three situations require three different treatments. A system that only punishes the person who is visible will naturally produce people who retreat into the invisible. VAR can only intervene in what the human sitting in front of the monitor is willing to speak up about.

For young players this is a bodily issue rather than a purely legal one. Dinh Bac has just broken through, and his body is not yet used to being hunted for ninety minutes. A thirty-year-old who takes two kicks from behind needs a few days to recover; a twenty-year-old can lose an entire development phase and, in some cases, lose his playing style for good. If Tan Sinh's conduct is allowed to continue as a template, more than three points from one match are taken away: a generation of attacking players learns that speed is a sin that must be paid for. In the women's game I have seen the same thing, young players judged by a physical yardstick rather than a technical one.

Then there is us, the media. An off-the-ball stamp replayed ten times draws more views than a three-man press escape. If audiences bow to the shiver of a collision, a few more players will copy the template every season. In some corner of all this, the fault is ours before it is the referee's.

Busan taught me that silent observation says more than shouting. I do not believe in a league that hands out red cards to calm public opinion for a few rounds and then drifts back. What is needed is far more stable and far harder to see: a card threshold set firmly, applied by the law, identical in the fifth minute and the ninetieth, identical in a headline match and a bottom-table one. Then every player can predict the price of what he is about to do. In football, clarity carries more weight than momentary severity.

The signals sit in documents few people read

From where I sit, the signals worth tracking live in dry administrative paperwork.

The referee appointment list for the coming rounds will answer the question about Le Vu Linh and the VAR team. The VFF Disciplinary Committee's list will show whether Huynh Tan Sinh and Le Van Son face retroactive punishment. Dong Nai's internal notice will show whether the club treats those two players as assets or as a problem. And Dinh Bac's next match is the practical test: if he is still hunted from behind while the cards stay in the referee's pocket, then every meeting between VFF, VPF and the Referees Committee was recorded in minutes rather than in the laws of the game.

There is another way to read Dong Nai versus CAHN. If Tan Sinh's offence is turned into a clear precedent, on-field violence this season can genuinely fall. If not, it will simply change shape: from elbow to shoulder, from studs to forearm, and still outside every replay frame.

Dinh Bac will keep dribbling. What remains to be seen is whether others must keep paying for the fact that he does.