Striker K'Thủa celebrating her goal against Abu Dhabi on Saturday, which sparked a remarkable comeback for HCMC Women. — Photo courtesy of the AFC

By Anh Đức

Thống Nhất Stadium in HCM City has witnessed many dramatic and historical football encounters, but I have never seen one of this magnitude in Hồ Chí Minh City Women's 5-4 comeback victory against Abu Dhabi Country Club last Saturday.

Social media dubbed the quarter-final tie "absolute cinema", which even spawned comparisons to Liverpool FC's 2005 Champions League Final comeback against AC Milan in Istanbul.

The comparisons had their basis, since Hồ Chí Minh City, the underdog, trailed 0-3 in front of 1,550 home supporters in the first half.

Against a squad full of players with greater physical advantages who seemed to score at every opportunity, along with a tremendously large lead, and a disallowed goal, who would have thought after the first period that HCMC Women were able to score a goal, not to mention staging a dramatic comeback?

Nobody, but coach Đoàn Thị Kim Chi and her players.

"Some players hit a mental wall in the first 20 minutes," said co-coach Nguyễn Hồng Phẩm.

"But coach Chi told the team that in football, anything can happen, that we should forget what had happened in the first half and play to the best of our abilities in the remaining minutes."

The pep talk seemed to work wonders as the women in red cut down Abu Dhabi's lead to a singular goal with goals from K'Thủa and Chương Thị Kiều.

K'Thủa's goal for me was crucial in breaking the mental deadlock of the home team, showing that their opponent is not invincible and that HCMC Women can capitalise on the opposition's mistakes.

After the match, K'Thủa's name on the back of the shirt even became a meme, since if written without diacritics, it became 'K Thua', which can be translated to 'never lose' in Vietnamese, a phrase that summarised the whole story of the match.

Even when Eugenia Tetteh brought Abu Dhabi's lead back to two with a mere fifteen minutes remaining, Kim Chi's team did not back down. The replies from the home team were explosive: two stunning shots from around twenty metres rocketed towards Abu Dhabi Country Club's net, ensuring that HCMC Women 'never lose' the match.

If you can watch the highlights of the match, you would share the same opinion as I have: those two wonder strikes by Trần Nguyễn Bảo Châu and Ngô Thị Hồng Nhung were even rare for men's football. Bảo Châu's goal was a one-touch volley from just outside the box, while Hồng Nhung's equaliser was a difficult half-volley banana shot that curved to the top corner.

A common gender stereotype is that women are always emotional and tend to easily collapse. A 0-3 first half should have knocked the stuffings out of HCMC Women, but the home team challenged the adversities, as well as the stereotype itself, to cement a 5-4 comeback in the final minute of regulation time.

Abu Dhabi, who led and played well for the majority of the match, was the one who were shell-shocked. The relentless perseverance of the girls in red and the thundering noise from the fans was perhaps what the club from the Middle East did not expect.

A whopping VNĐ9.4 billion (US$340,000) was given to HCMC Women after the match, which is a rightful reward given their achievement of being the first Vietnamese team and the first South East Asian team to make it into the top four of the AFC Women's Champions League.

But the glory and the money were, for me, not the achievement that this match created. What the match has done, is perhaps the biggest advertisement to women's football in Việt Nam: a game that can bring about excitement not just equal to but sometimes better than the men's game. — VNS