Will the joy of victory come again to the Vietnamese female players? - Photo: NGOC LE
Facing a weaker opponent, the UAE, the Vietnamese women's team is aiming for victory to get closer to a ticket to the Asian Cup finals.
After an easy 7-0 victory over Maldives in the opening match, with 3 points, coach Mai Duc Chung and his team need one more victory to consolidate their top position in the group. Meanwhile, the UAE and Guam women's teams are ranked 2nd and 3rd in Group E with 1 point, while Maldives is at the bottom with 0 points.
Because they played later, before welcoming the UAE team, coach Mai Duc Chung and his team had time to wait for the results of the match between Guam and Maldives. If Guam did not win, the Vietnamese women's team only needed to beat UAE to secure a ticket to the next round early. If Guam won the Maldives, a victory over UAE would still be enough for the Vietnamese women's team to take the initiative before the final round. At that time, with 6 points, the host team only needed to draw with Guam (4 points) to secure a ticket to the 2026 Women's Asian Cup Finals.
And in both of the above scenarios, the necessary condition is that the Vietnamese women's team must win against the UAE. The correlation of capabilities, both in theory and in practice, is leaning towards the students of coach Mai Duc Chung. Indeed, in 2025, until the Asian women's qualifiers, the UAE women's team almost only played domestic practice matches and played friendly matches with some mid-level or weak teams.
They drew 2 matches against Bahrain, won 2 matches against Bangladesh and lost 4 matches against the Philippines and Malaysia. Both in the past and present, the head-to-head record against Southeast Asian teams is not in favor of the UAE national teams. In the world women's football rankings, the UAE women's team is ranked 117th, much lower than the Vietnam women's team (ranked 37th).
The UAE women's team, despite bringing naturalized players to Vietnam, did not register for the qualifying round and instead used 100% domestic players. This strange decision could be good news for the Vietnamese women's team.
In fact, in the opening match against Guam, the UAE women's team was completely overwhelmed, almost taking the brunt of the attack for most of the time and rarely having a chance to shoot at the opponent's goal. "The UAE Football Federation has only restarted the women's football development program in the past few years. Although we face many difficulties, we will still try our best to know where we are," said head coach Vera Pauw of the UAE women's team.
The message from the Dutch coach shows that UAE will almost certainly do everything to find a point against the Vietnamese women's team, similar to what they did against Guam. Facing the opponent's crowded defense scenario, coach Mai Duc Chung and his students need to take advantage of scoring opportunities to quickly realize the goal of getting a ticket to the final round and improve their finishing ability.
After the 7-0 win over Maldives on June 29, coach Mai Duc Chung talked about the problem of the Vietnamese women's team: "The players missed too many opportunities. We could have won by more, but they slowed down in the second half. Therefore, we need to improve our finishing ability in the next match against UAE."
Source: https://tuoitre.vn/doi-tuyen-nu-viet-nam-dau-uae-chien-thang-trong-tam-tay-20250702110617548.htm
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