Vietnamese Women's Badminton: Half a Court and a Gaze Slower Than the Smash

I sat in the third row, left side of the stands, exactly where I had sat eighteen years earlier to file a story on a men's singles final. That day the stands were packed, people stood in the aisles, security had to open extra doors. Today, the women's singles final of the national badminton championship, I counted forty-two people in the seats. Six were reporters and camera operators. Four were coaches from teams eliminated in earlier rounds. Two were the parents of the two players on court. Most of the rest were students from a nearby sports school, brought there to learn from experience.

Third game. 16-16. The player on the left side of the court — I will not name her, because this story does not belong to her alone — took a smash straight to the chest, stepped back twice, drew a long breath, and bent down to retie her shoelace. Anyone who has stood at the edge of a badminton court understands that gesture: it is not about the shoelace. It is three seconds of asking for mercy. She lost the next three points in a row, clawed one back, and lost the game 19-21.

When the umpire called the match, the stands applauded. Forty-two pairs of hands clapping sounded like rain on a corrugated iron roof. I folded my notebook, went outside for a cigarette, and thought about a number I had counted seven years earlier: 4,200 hours of men's football on Vietnamese television in a single year, against twelve minutes given to women's football. A gap of twenty-one thousand times. Now I asked myself: if someone sat down and counted the television hours given to Vietnamese women's badminton, what would the number be? I guessed it would be less than the hours I spend waiting for buses in a month.

Half a Court is not a name for a slogan. It is a measurement.

Context: a system designed for someone else

To understand why forty-two people watched a women's singles final, you have to understand the frame Vietnamese badminton was built in from the start. Vietnamese badminton has no professional league in the sense team sports do. It is a network of provincial, municipal and sector centres: Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Bac Giang, Dong Nai, Binh Duong, Lam Dong, Thai Binh, Da Nang, the Army, the Police. Each centre is an administrative unit with recruitment quotas, salaried coaches, meal allowances, wages. Players do not sign professional club contracts as in football. They are state employees, or students at a sports school attached to a centre.

Within that structure, men's singles and women's singles share the same recruitment frame, the same wage scale, the same nutrition regime. The difference does not live in the paperwork. It lives in where the money and the attention flow once the paperwork is signed.

I have sat through enough year-end meetings to notice a pattern: when a unit discusses priority investment, it always picks the group most likely to win medals at the competition that carries the highest administrative credit. In badminton, men's team events, men's doubles and mixed doubles are always seen as the safer route at regional level. Women's singles is placed in the 'possible medal' group. Possible is a very expensive word in a budget. It means overseas training slots are cut first, extra meal allowances are merged, fitness specialists are shared across two or three groups at once.

People often say Vietnamese women's badminton lacks talent. I do not believe it. I have sat in provincial arenas watching the national junior qualifiers and seen fifteen-year-old girls moving across the court faster than anyone in the national team when I entered the profession. Talent is produced steadily. What is missing is the system that keeps them past eighteen.

Vu Thi Trang was one of the first to prove that. She came up from a province outside the traditional badminton centres and became a mainstay of the national women's singles for years. Nguyen Thuy Linh came next, and went furthest in international ranking, entering the world's top twenty-five in the Badminton World Federation rankings at her career peak. Two names, two generations, a gap of nearly a decade.

For comparison, look at the men's side. Nguyen Tien Minh reached world No. 5 in 2026 and competed at four consecutive Olympic Games. He was the icon of Vietnamese badminton for more than a decade, known to a whole generation of Vietnamese who had never held a racket. Tien Minh's career was built on a focused investment system, a long overseas training placement, a personal specialist, a personal diet. Nobody denies his talent. My point is that his talent was placed inside a frame solid enough to develop over fifteen years.

The frame for women's singles is thinner. It is thinner at the point where a female player turns twenty-two and must face a question her male colleagues do not face to the same degree: keep playing, or move to another profession. That question does not come from ability. It comes from income, from stability, from the fact that playing women's badminton in Vietnam cannot support a person well enough to train full time until twenty-eight.

What I recorded in my notebook: where Vietnamese women's singles dies

I keep a small notebook I call the court-side ledger. Since 2026 I have recorded every women's singles match I have watched live, at every level: national junior events, the national championship, international events hosted in Vietnam, and some national team matches at SEA Games on screen. The ledger now holds more than four hundred matches.

The first conclusion: Vietnamese women's singles does not lose in game one. The win rate in game one against opponents of similar level in my data is higher than the win rate in game two, and far higher than in game three. In other words, we start well, then gradually lose control.

The second: the point gap in game three does not come from beautiful rallies. It comes from ugly ones. I counted unforced errors — smashes out, net dribbles into the net, faulty serves — in game three. In game one, a Vietnamese women's singles player loses on average four to five points to unforced errors in a game to twenty-one. In game three, that figure often doubles, sometimes triples. Unforced errors rise exactly in the stretch I call the bend: from point eleven onward.

The third, and this is where I want to spend the most ink: the biggest difference between Vietnamese women's singles and the world's top group is not stroke technique. It is movement technique once tired.

The stroke technique of a twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese women's singles player, compared purely as movement, is not inferior to players ranked forty to sixty in the world. The high smash, the net drop, the sliced drop, the deep clear — all present. The problem is in the third game, when the legs can no longer push at the right rhythm: the sliced drop still rotates correctly from the hand, but the feet do not return to position in time, so the shuttle travels with correct technique into a tactically wrong place.

I call this foot error. It never appears on the scoreboard. It appears in this way: a drop shot that was a winner in game one becomes a lost point in game three, with an identical movement. The coach looks and says she made a mistake. She did not make a mistake. She executed correctly into a position her feet could not recover from if the opponent counter-attacked.

The physical foundation of Vietnamese women's badminton, at provincial and national team level, still relies heavily on running volume and court drills rather than on specialised strength programmes built around the explosive model of the modern game. Meanwhile, elite women's badminton over the past decade has shifted decisively toward athletes with high physical strength foundations, superior lateral court speed, and the ability to repeat explosive efforts within very short windows. That demands a periodised training programme tied to the competition calendar, with load monitoring and individualised recovery.

At most Vietnamese women's badminton centres, the job title of personal strength and conditioning specialist barely exists. Some places have one fitness specialist covering both men's and women's teams, both junior and senior groups. Some places have nobody, and the technical coach doubles as the person sending athletes out for a morning jog. Distance running builds a general endurance base. It does not build the ability to jump twelve times in thirty seconds and still hold upper-body alignment when executing a smash after retreating to the rear corner.

This explains a paradox I see repeatedly: Vietnamese women's players can often match opponents ranked in the world's top hundred in game one, but once the third game begins the gap widens fast, sometimes within five to seven rallies. The match is not decided by who plays better. It is decided by who still has the legs to play what they intend.

Looking at playing styles, Vietnamese women's badminton has two clear schools. The first is control: keeping the shuttle deep, changing tempo, waiting for the opponent's error, limiting explosive effort. This suits players with good reach and shuttle placement, but it demands high tactical patience and a physical base strong enough to maintain shuttle depth across three games. The second is speed: attacking quickly from the serve, attacking early at the net, ending rallies in four to six beats. This has the advantage of shortening each rally, but it demands explosive strength and very fast inter-rally recovery.

In Vietnam, most female players are trained toward control, because that is the easiest thing to build in centres lacking specialised fitness programmes. The consequence is that we have good control players, but nobody with the physical base to play control for three games against a top-group opponent. Meanwhile regional rivals such as Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia have moved to a hybrid model: the physical base of the speed school, with the shuttle craft of the control school. We are playing a system from the previous decade with a physical base from the decade before that.

The gaze, not the ability

The court does not discriminate by gender; only the gaze discriminates between players. I first wrote that line for a piece on women's football, but it is truer for badminton, because badminton is boxed inside a hall with four walls. Everything visible lies within the sight of the people watching. No open stands, no songs, no flags. Only the court, the players, the spectators. And how people choose to look determines how the sport is retold.

I once sat in the press room of an international event hosted in Vietnam. In the post-match interview schedule, the organisers arranged four press conferences: two for men's doubles and men's singles, one for women's doubles, and one combined session for women's singles together with another event. The women's singles press conference took place in a small room, with four reporters, and lasted under ten minutes. The men's singles press conference the next day took place in the large room, with nearly twenty reporters, and lasted forty minutes.

I do not tell this story to blame the organisers. Organisers allocate resources according to audience interest, and audience interest is created by media, and media reflects audience interest. It is a self-feeding loop. Breaking that loop by saying audiences do not care is wrong. Audiences care about what they are shown. If for twenty years they have been shown that men's singles is the main event, then in year twenty-one they will still sit in the men's singles stand.

Commentary is another form of gaze. I have heard commentators describe a female player with an aggressive style in language reserved for men, as if strength in a female athlete were an anomaly that deserves special note. Conversely, I have heard the same people describe a male player with a patient, slow, controlled style in neutral language, even praising his intelligence. The same quality, two vocabularies. That is a blind spot. It does not create injustice immediately. It creates a linguistic habit, and linguistic habits create evaluation systems.

Sponsorship money follows that evaluation system. I once asked a marketing person at a domestic sports equipment brand why his company signed a male player ranked outside the world's top two hundred rather than a female player inside the top hundred. He answered plainly: men sell better. He did not say the man was better. He said he sells better, and within the frame of a business plan he was right. But what makes men sell better is not the nature of the sport. It is the result of twenty years of investment in image. People sell what they have taught customers to want.

There is a point here I want to state plainly because it concerns my own profession. In a sports transfer and sponsorship market, people look at transfer fees and treat them as the measure of value. But something more dangerous than a transparent transfer contract is a free-agent signing, where there is no transfer fee, no mandatory third party, no published figure. It bypasses the entire oversight system. In Vietnamese badminton, where players move between provinces, cities and sectors through administrative mechanisms rather than transfer contracts, what exists is even fuzzier than a free-agent move. A female player moves from province A to city B, benefits are negotiated bilaterally, no document is public, no independent body supervises. People call it rotation. I call it a gap nobody counts.

Transfers in silence

Vietnamese badminton has a transfer market; it just is not called that. In recent years I have recorded dozens of cases of young players changing their managing unit. Some moved from a small province to a major centre with a scholarship, meal allowance, monthly support and a guaranteed competition slot at national level. Some moved the other way because they could not win a slot at a big centre. Some moved because a coach transferred and brought students along.

No news item covers these moves. They surface only occasionally through the entry lists of the national championship, when a familiar name suddenly appears under a different delegation. Fans do not notice, because in Vietnamese badminton players are not identified by club as in football. They are identified by province, and provinces have no shirt colour, no fans, no supporters' group.

For female players, changing managing unit means something different than for male players. Overseas training slots, international competition slots, extra nutrition allowances, recovery care — all of these are distributed unevenly across centres. In theory, every registered athlete is equal. In practice, a female player at a centre with limited resources is automatically placed at a disadvantage in the competition for international slots, because in many places international slots are still decided on internal assessment rather than purely on international ranking.

I have an acquaintance who coaches at a provincial centre. He told me a story I will retell without names. A female student of his achieved good results at the national junior championship. Her chance of being placed on a long-term training list depended on a meeting. In that meeting, someone argued that men should be prioritised because men can contribute team medals. That argument is not wrong as a matter of competitive arithmetic. It is simply accurate to the point of being a confession that the system is counting administrative credit, not the development of a human being.

People call it leaving; I call it finding half a court of my own. When a female player decides to change province, retire, or move into coaching at twenty-eight, I do not read it as a failure. I read it as a decision about location. She is choosing a court where her ability is judged by what she actually does on court, rather than by a slot allocated in a meeting.

The points system: barrier or ladder

The international badminton circuit runs on the ranking system of the Badminton World Federation. Each tournament in the BWF World Tour has a level, and each level carries a corresponding points band. Rankings are calculated from a player's best results within a set cycle, and points expire after a period, usually one year from the end of the tournament.

This system produces a mechanism I call points-defence pressure. A player who wants to hold a ranking must return to tournaments where she previously scored well, to defend points about to expire. If she does not return, the points go, the ranking drops, and a lower ranking means that at subsequent events she may have to enter qualifying instead of the main draw, or meet a top seed in the first round.

For Vietnamese female players, this is a harder equation than for male players of the same level, because travel and delegation costs are not shared equally. A trip to a BWF World Tour event in Asia typically requires a delegation of three to five people: the player, a coach, sometimes a fitness specialist or a team leader. Flights, hotels, meals, visas, entry fees — the total is a sum a provincial centre must weigh. When weighing, people choose the trip with the best likely return per dong spent.

And here is where I want to offer a view I believe is overlooked. In the profession, people often say qualifying is a barrier. To me, qualifying is an opportunity to accumulate experience points.

A twenty-year-old female player outside the world's top hundred will not get into the main draw of a high-level event. She has two paths. The first is to stay home, train, and wait for a wild card. The second is to go and play qualifying at lower-level events, where costs are low, opponents are of comparable level, and every win brings a small but steady points return. After thirty qualifying matches in a year, she accumulates both points and international match experience at the same time.

I have watched enough Vietnamese female players walk into a match against a foreign opponent for the first time to recognise this: their biggest problem in a first match is not technique. It is rhythm. The entire rhythm of international play differs from domestic play. How opponents prepare to serve, how they move between rallies, how umpires manage, how crowds react, the silence between points. A player who only knows the domestic rhythm will spend game one adapting to the international rhythm, and in a three-game match that is half the match.

So when someone tells me that playing qualifying only costs money and gains nothing, I usually answer with a question in return: where do you buy that rhythm?

Rhythm and money

I once sat down and did the maths for a centre. A trip abroad for one female player to a low-level regional event, staying as cheaply as possible, flying the cheapest route, in a hotel far from the arena, still comes to a few tens of millions of dong per trip. A year needs at least eight to ten trips to keep the international calendar dense enough. Multiplied out, the figure sits at a level where a provincial centre must weigh investing in one female player at low international level against investing in a whole group of men competing in a regional team event with medal potential.

This is not a moral story. It is an allocation story. And in budget allocation, the priority always goes to whatever has the highest probability of short-term return. A men's team medal at a regional event is a relatively clear probability. A twenty-year-old female player moving from No. 150 to No. 90 in two years is a fuzzy probability, and moreover, even if it materialises, it brings no medal immediately.

I understand that logic. I merely argue that it is being applied to a sport whose elite results depend on each generation having at least a few players good enough to compete at a high level for many years. Cutting the budget at precisely the point that sustains that chain means that in ten years there will be nobody left to prioritise.

The fitness variable and the crowded calendar

In the profession, one complaint I hear constantly is that a crowded calendar is unfair to female athletes. I think that framing is right emotionally but wrong tactically.

A crowded calendar is a condition of the sport, applied to men and women alike. The difference lies in who has the resources to manage it. A female player with a fitness specialist, a doctor, and someone planning her training around the competition cycle will turn a crowded calendar into an accumulated points advantage. A player with none of that will turn a crowded calendar into injury.

So when I see a Vietnamese female player entering several events in a short window, I do not treat it as an act of self-destruction. I treat it as a fitness-management strategy — provided it is planned. The test question is simple: is anyone at home designing her training programme during the two weeks between events, or does she come home, train normally, and set off again?

In Vietnam, most cases fall into the second category. And the second category is where injuries are born.

I once watched a young female player train with a wrapped ankle for most of a season, because an old injury had never been properly rehabilitated, only temporarily offloaded so she could keep competing. When I asked, I was told there was not much time, because a tournament was coming. But a tournament is always coming. There are dozens a year. If you wait until the tournaments are over to heal, then healing always comes after something has been permanently damaged.

In Vietnamese women's badminton there is a recurring tragedy: a promising player at nineteen suffers a back, knee or ankle injury, trains on and off for two years, achieves decent results at twenty-two, begins to decline at twenty-five, and disappears from international courts at twenty-seven. People explain it with the word fate. I explain it with the word load: the total load a body must bear over a period, and the total recovery capacity that body is given. Nobody measures those two numbers, so nobody knows what they are spending.

What only those at the edge of the court can see

One thing the scoreboard never records: the quality of the training session before the match.

I once visited the training hall of a provincial women's team on the morning before a final. The players did doubles drills, serve drills, scenario drills from point eleven onward, and finished with more than two hours of work capped by distance running. One day before a final. The session looked serious on the surface. But in those two hours I saw no drill simulating a decisive scoreline. No drill recreating 16-16, no drill recreating a situation where one player is ahead and the other has equalised. There was running, there was hitting, but there was no decision-making training.

That is the second blind spot of Vietnamese women's badminton. Players perform well in a normal state and worse in a state where something is at stake. This is not a psychological problem in the sense of weak spirit. It is a training problem. People are only good at what they have practised. If you have never practised playing at 16-16 with tired legs, then at 16-16 on court you will act on survival instinct: play safe, increase depth, reduce risk. And in modern badminton, playing safe at the end of the third game is precisely how you hand the decision to your opponent.

I saw exactly that in the final I described at the start. From 16-16, the player on the left side switched to control. She dropped the shuttle into the net area three times in a row instead of smashing. The first two cleared the net safely. On the third, her opponent read it, stood waiting at mid-net and drove the shuttle cross-court. She could not retreat in time. That was the opponent's seventeenth point, and from there the match turned.

Her coach later said she lost her composure. I do not think so. She kept her composure very well. She simply had no practised script for that situation, so she chose the only script she knew.

What women's badminton is selling

If we analyse Vietnamese women's badminton only on technical grounds, we miss half the story. The other half is economics.

Women's badminton in Vietnam has a particular value that men's badminton does not: it is where the sport reaches a new audience tier. I have looked at internal figures from several sports equipment brands and several private training centres in recent years. The number of female students enrolling in recreational badminton classes in major cities has risen steadily. The number of parents enrolling daughters has also risen. This group is not buying because they want to see a SEA Games medal. They buy because they see a girl on court, and they want their child to be like that.

This is a kind of value the administrative credit system cannot measure. And because it cannot be measured, it is not counted in investment decisions. That is why I say the problem lies in the gaze, not in ability on court. The same player, the same match, the same smash. If what people see is a slot allocated in a meeting, that player is a line on a list. If what people see is a young woman who can make thirty children at a sports school want to play badminton, that player is a channel. And a channel needs investment, not division.

What I do not believe

I do not believe the story that Vietnamese women's badminton lacks talent. I have written it above and I repeat it because it matters: talent appears steadily. In every cohort I see at least two or three girls with the raw qualities to compete internationally given a pathway.

I do not believe the story that audiences do not want to watch women's badminton. I once sat in a provincial arena watching an exhibition match by female players as part of a promotional event, and that day's stands held nearly three hundred people, mostly students and parents, and they clapped very loudly. What is missing is not the audience. What is missing is the event.

I do not believe the story that early retirement happens because female athletes lack determination. I have seen female players train under conditions many male players could not tolerate: wages enough to live on, dormitory housing, no personal assistant, no personal doctor, no one calculating training load. Determination is not what they lack. It is the only thing they do not lack.

I do not believe the story that we must choose between investing in men and investing in women. This is a real story and it is true within a finite budget. But a finite budget does not mean distributing at the same ratio for twenty years. It means finding more sources. Women's badminton has a source men's badminton does not: it is the sport a parent with a daughter will pay for their child to learn. That is a market, not a subsidy.

A story from the three weeks I locked the door

I have told this story elsewhere, but I want to retell it briefly, because it explains why I keep writing about women's badminton even though nobody pays me to.

In 2026, when every tournament froze, revenue at the platform I founded fell from forty million to eight million dong a month. I lost most of my sponsors in three months. I locked the door for three weeks, did not answer messages, and just rewatched old match footage. For three weeks I heard the grass growing, and nobody kicked it.

Only two people noticed where I was: a former player and a veteran editor. They pulled me back to the keyboard. And the first piece I wrote after those three weeks was about a women's badminton match I had once watched at a national event, where the stands held forty-two people. I counted again while writing it. Still forty-two.

In sport, half the world is still competing; it is just that most of the stands are looking elsewhere. I write for the part of the stands that is looking away.

Another story, about the one who stayed

I once asked a retired female player who had moved into coaching at a provincial centre whether she regretted it. She smiled and said something I wrote in my notebook and have kept since: on court I played for one person, at the edge of the court I work for thirty.

That is what data analysis cannot capture. When a female player leaves the court, she does not disappear from the sport. She changes position. She brings something a male coach does not have: she knows what a female athlete's body needs at puberty, knows how the cycle affects a training session, knows how to talk to a fifteen-year-old girl so she does not quit. None of this is in the standard curriculum. It is in lived experience.

Vietnamese women's badminton now has its first generation of female coaches who came up from the international courts themselves. This is a signal I consider more important than any forthcoming medal, because it changes the nurturing system rather than merely the results board. A system with people who understand it from inside will produce different athletes than a system with only outside observers.

What half a court is

Half a Court is how I name the space women in sport have created for themselves, rather than waiting to be allocated a share. It is not half of a court that already had an owner. It is a different court, built by the effort of people who were not invited onto the first one.

In badminton, that half court looks like this: a private training centre in a major city opening a class specifically for girls, with a female coach leading it, and no drill cut for gender reasons. A recreational tournament with a women's singles draw that has more entries than the men's. A group of parents organising their own internal event for their daughters. A former player opening a class in her home town and turning away male students because there is no room left for female ones.

None of this appears in sports bulletins. None of it counts toward administrative credit. But it is creating a new audience tier for badminton, and that audience tier will be the real resource in ten years, when state budget sources become ever tighter.

I do not say this to console anyone. I say it because that is where the money will flow, and those who understand it first will have the advantage.

About a match I have no right to judge

Back to the final from the start. The player on the left lost 19-21 in the third game and left the court with a very quick bow of the head, the kind of bow a person makes when they want to reach the locker room before anyone asks questions.

I used to write about losses like this differently. Early in my career I wrote them as stories of effort. I used words like willpower, endeavour, overcoming one's own limits. Those pieces pleased the administering units, because they praised. But later I realised they did more harm than good. They turned a systemic problem into a story of individual morality. If failure is due to insufficient effort, the solution is to urge more effort. If failure is due to a missing fitness specialist, a missing competition pathway, a training slot cut in a meeting, then the solution lies elsewhere, and elsewhere is harder to touch.

I have no right to judge her. I have never had to stand at 16-16 in the third game of a national final with forty-two people watching. What I have a right to do is count. Count the people in the stands, count the matches televised, count the overseas training slots allocated to women and to men, count the full-time fitness specialists working with women's teams, count the sponsorship contracts signed with female athletes. When those numbers are fully counted, the question of individual effort disappears on its own.

That is my job now. Not to praise, not to blame, but to count.

Transfers, and the thing fuzzier than transfers

I want to add a little on the angle I consider most important to my profession right now: money flows in women's sport, and how they move without leaving traces.

In football, a transfer has a fee, a contract, a third party, a training-compensation mechanism for youth development. In a free-agent signing, there is no fee, no mandatory third party, and most figures sit in private personal contracts. That is where oversight is hardest, and also where the integrity of a sports system erodes most easily.

In esports the story is even clearer: betting systems develop faster than regulatory systems, and gaps are discovered only after they have been exploited. Badminton has a history of sanctions related to match-fixing and betting in the past, and federations have had to issue heavy penalties as a deterrent. To me that is a warning. The less money there is at the bottom of a sport, the more vulnerable the bottom is to offers involving money. And in a system where female players earn less than male colleagues of the same level, that pressure is greater.

I am not saying this has happened in Vietnamese women's badminton. I am saying that when we do not count, we do not know. And a sport that does not count will not detect what is happening at the bottom until it surfaces as a scandal.

What I think is changing

Three things are changing, and I want to record them before they become ordinary.

First, the number of recreational badminton classes for girls is rising. This is the most important change, because it acts at the root. A sport with many eight-year-old girls training will have many female players at twenty. There is no way to skip that step.

Second, the number of female coaches at centres is rising. This is a change with a lag, but its consequences last. A female coach who understands her female students' physiological cycles will keep more athletes in the sport than a coach who only knows a generic curriculum.

Third, and most fragile, a new audience tier is emerging from digital platforms. Short videos of beautiful rallies, of training sessions, of backstage stories from female players are drawing a small but steady viewership. That viewership is not yet enough to sell to major sponsors, but it is enough for a female player to speak directly to her audience without going through a press room.

These three changes are not loud. They are like shoes scraping on a court floor in an empty hall. People sitting outside do not hear it. The person standing on court hears it very clearly.

And the story still has half unwritten

I have been in this profession a long time, and I still keep a habit my younger colleagues tease me about: I still sit in the women's singles stands, even though nobody hires me to write about it.

I sit there not because I want to prove anything about myself. I sit there because every women's singles match I watch is one more piece of data on a question nobody has fully answered: what must a sport do to develop half its population, and how long does it take.

I hold one simple belief. A sport cannot be strong if it uses only half its human resources. This is not a moral argument. It is arithmetic. If each generation has only half its players properly invested in, the number of players reaching international class falls by exactly half, and the number of potential medals at every level falls with it. There is no scenario in which abandoning one half benefits the other. The budget merely shifts from one line to another, but the opportunity is lost forever.

Half the world is still playing badminton. They stand at mid-court, bow to the stands, and most of the stands are looking elsewhere.

What I want in ten years is not a medal. I want to walk into an arena in a provincial town on some Saturday afternoon and count more than forty-two people watching a women's singles final. I want to count without taking out my notebook, because there are too many to count.

And if that happens, people will say Vietnamese women's badminton suddenly produced a golden generation. I will not say that. I will say the rhythm arrived; it was just that nobody had sat down long enough to listen.

Leaving the newsroom is not leaving the profession; it is giving up a salary to follow my own whistle. The umpire's whistle in badminton is very quiet. But if you sit long enough in an empty arena, you will realise it rings louder than many noisier things.

I will keep sitting in the third row. And I will keep counting.