Vietnamese Table Tennis Is Missing a Scorekeeper

Every time I travel to the national table tennis championships, I walk to the corner of the arena behind the umpires' desk. There is a small table, a sheet of carbon paper, and an older man writing scores with a ballpoint pen. He records every set, every point, meticulously. The last time I asked him: "Do you note which serves won points directly?" He looked up and smiled: "Who would read that?"

I tell that story to talk about a gap far wider than a notebook. In more than thirty years of writing, I have sat in every kind of stand: a provincial arena, a SEA Games hall, an international round. The distance between those places is not ticket price or the number of lights. It is the amount of data someone is willing to write down about each match.

At home, the notebook captures half a match. Abroad, every touch of the ball leaves a trace.

A notebook that only holds half a match

Table tennis is a sport of short decision chains. A serve, a return, a third-ball attack - a match can turn inside those three beats. Coaches call it the "first three shots" zone. Whoever wins that zone usually owns the match. Yet for many domestic seasons, the only officially recorded information I could access was a single category: who won which set, and by what score.

Nobody records the percentage of points won on serve. Nobody records how many points a player wins at 9-9 or 10-10 - the zone every coach calls decisive, without anyone holding the numbers to prove it. Nobody measures backhand efficiency when pushed wide, how often a player is forced to retreat from the table, or the success rate of a power loop against an opponent already in rhythm.

How a player chooses a serve at a decisive moment is a map of their competitive instinct. Some serve short to pull the opponent in. Some toss high to break tempo. Some quietly switch rubber faces to change spin. Looking back at fifty matches from the same player, you can see how often that instinct repeats and how it shifts once it is read. Abroad, that is material for a two-hour technical meeting. Here, it stays inside one coach's memory.

Vietnamese table tennis lacks something harder to see than talent: the ability to read itself back through data.

Based on my experience watching matches at national finals, youth tournaments and SEA Games, I keep finding the same paradox: the people who understand the game best are the ones who record the least. Our coaches remember every athlete, every weakness, every bad habit at the table. But that memory lives inside one head. When that person leaves the team, the seat or simply retires, an entire archive disappears without a trace.

This differs fundamentally from how strong table tennis nations operate. There, a player is not managed by impression but by file. That file follows them from junior events to the national team, through every coaching change.

The first three shots and what nobody counts

At an international event I attended a few years ago, I counted four people sitting behind one Asian team's technical zone: a head coach, a personal coach, an analyst and a video operator. Three of them never spoke during the match. They just typed. At the interval, a sheet came out: the opponent served short 62 percent of the time in the first set, and 41 percent of those went to the backhand side. Their player walked into the second set with one specific change.

We do not yet have that fourth chair. Not because we lack the money for a laptop, but because nobody has been assigned to sit there and record, consistently, what happens on the table.

One comparison may be uncomfortable. In athletics and swimming, data generates itself. A track has electronic timing, a pool has touch pads, a start reaction is measured to the thousandth without anyone counting by hand. Table tennis has no such privilege, because every point is a situation with too many variables: spin, placement, tempo, psychology, even the way a crowd goes quiet before a serve. Precisely because machines cannot replace people here, handwritten records become a strategic asset. And precisely for that reason, our gap runs deeper than in any other sport.

I have tried to do that job alone many times. Sitting in the fifth row, I counted how often a young provincial player missed the third ball in one set, then counted again in the next. After the match I handed the sheet to his coach. He read it, stayed silent for a while, and said something I have never forgotten: "I knew he missed a lot. I did not know it was this much."

That is the whole story of data, packed into one sentence. Vietnam's table tennis problem was never that we do not know we are weak. It is that we do not know at which coordinate, at which moment, against which opponent, and by how much. An illness without coordinates cannot be treated, only endured.

Fifty-five years of looking at life through a lens taught me that every sport is only a story about people, differing only in the field of play. But those people can only grow when they see themselves reflected in a mirror bright enough.

A table tennis nation with no one reading the numbers

The knock-on effect of the data gap shows up in selection. Without numbers, picking players defaults to impression: the impression of whichever coach happened to be in the hall that day, at that event, in that age group, from that province. A fifteen-year-old in a distant province who beats three strong opponents in four days with unusually good serve efficiency may never be seen - not through deliberate neglect, but because that signal has no way of crossing geography and a culture of not writing things down.

A hidden champion does not need a spotlight; they need someone patient enough to look at them. In a system without data, that patience becomes a matter of luck.

Conversely, the absence of data makes it easy to misallocate playing load. A SEA Games means four or five events for a key player: team, singles, doubles, mixed doubles. Who can handle that schedule, who collapses in the third match, who loses feel after two matches four hours apart - such questions need a database built over years. Without it, decisions come from intuition, and the price is paid in losses nobody can later explain.

There is one image I cannot forget from the period when sport shut down during the pandemic. For the first time in my life I watched table tennis and football in empty arenas. I spent months compiling data from more than four hundred closed-door football matches across several leagues, and found that home advantage came mostly from the crowd rather than the pitch. Home win rates fell from about 46 percent to 38 percent; draws rose from 22 percent to 29 percent. The summer of empty stands taught me that crowd noise was never background - it is the heartbeat of a match.

Applied to our table tennis, that lesson stings more. A national final in a half-empty hall does not only lack atmosphere. It lacks pressure, and therefore lacks the environment in which psychological data can be created. Nobody can record a head that shakes at 10-9 if that head has never been placed in a situation where someone was watching.

When data becomes somebody else's commodity

There is a dimension of this story few want to discuss. Match data is raw material for the international betting market. Any detail about placement, serve-win rate or a player's true form can be converted into money in another market. In Vietnam that activity is largely illegal, yet the raw material still flows outward every time a match is streamed.

The paradox is this: we cannot build a data system for ourselves, but we inadvertently supply data for others. The digitalisation of sport carries a dark side effect - live data sold to betting companies, where the value of a rally is priced by its profit potential rather than its beauty.

Meanwhile, technology in match officiating tells its own story. Table tennis still relies heavily on the umpire's eye: an edge ball, a serve judged to be hidden, a decisive point late in the game. At some major events video review has arrived and resolves part of the dispute. But technology does not erase controversy, it relocates it - to who chooses the camera angle, who interprets the frame, and how long a decision takes.

For a table tennis nation without data, talking about high technology sounds premature. The correct order should be reversed: record first, standardise second, technology last.

Where the real bottleneck sits

When discussing Vietnamese table tennis weaknesses, the familiar answer always circles around money: lack of funding, tables, standard venues, tournaments. All of that is true and important. But if money arrives without a habit of recording, we will buy more tables, stage more tournaments, and produce more matches from which nobody learns anything.

A standard printed form, one page of basic metrics per match, one person compiling quarterly - the cost of that is negligible next to a single overseas training camp. What is missing is not money. What is missing is a profession: nobody is paid to sit and read those numbers and turn them into decisions.

A counter-argument deserves a hearing. Data can be abused in the opposite direction, once people start picking players by index rather than by eye. A player with beautiful domestic numbers may still not survive a qualifying match abroad, where opponents read the game far faster. And some things never fit a table: composure at match point, the ability to self-correct between sets, the calm of someone who just lost the first set 3-11.

But respecting what cannot be measured does not mean staying blind to what can. Vietnamese table tennis must catch up on both fronts at once: preserving the human quality while building the system.

One regional lesson is worth noting. Singapore women's table tennis rose to the world summit through a long-term project, with a carefully developed squad and an accompanying analysis unit, peaking with the 2026 world team title in Moscow after beating China. Thailand has maintained regional leadership for years through a few outstanding individuals backed the right way. Both models show one thing: sustainable results always come with information infrastructure, not talent alone.

What remains after every tournament

In September 2026, the Asian Games will take place in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. There, the continent's leading teams will walk into the arena carrying thick dossiers on their opponents. Our team will walk in with the best we have: instinct, the experience of the coaching staff, and determination.

I believe those things have real value. But I also believe that what remains after every tournament is not the score, but the people who became a moment - and for those moments not to be forgotten, they have to be written down.

Every season is a whispered promise that tomorrow can rewrite everything - but that promise only holds if we still keep a record of yesterday. If, at the fifth set of last year's final, we cannot remember how we served, where we failed, what we changed, what reason is there to believe we will do it differently in the fifth set of next year's final?

What I hope most for the next round, sitting in the stands behind the umpires' desk, is to see a notebook open at every table - not to record who beat whom, but to record how they did it.