Vietnamese Table Tennis: When the Technique Is There but the Rally Is Not Long Enough

"An abandoned stand still keeps its old applause." I was sitting in the seventh row, the last row with enough space for a man taking notes, when the fifth game of the men's singles final at the national table tennis championship reached 10-9. On the left side of the table stood a twenty-two-year-old, ranked third in the country. On the right stood the defending champion, twenty-seven, a four-time finalist. The server tossed the ball nearly thirty centimetres high and chopped it down the middle. His opponent looped it with the forehand. The ball clipped the edge and flew out. The applause rose unevenly, a few dozen people, mostly coaches and parents. What I carried home from that match was a point that lasted three strokes.

I wrote about a long-distance runner long before I understood what endurance meant. At twenty-one I walked into an athletics stadium only to find a topic for a term paper, and I stayed in the trade ever since. Fifteen years later I sat in a table tennis hall and realised this sport's problem sits on the opposite side: nobody lacks stamina; what people lack are rallies long enough to prove they have it.

Vietnamese table tennis runs on a fairly clear coaching pyramid. At the bottom are talent classes in schools and children's culture houses, often run by a single coach covering four age groups. In the middle sit provincial training centres, concentrated in Hai Duong, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong and Nha Trang. At the top is the national team, assembled in short camps before each national games and each SEA Games. The national championship is the only elite stage in the country, held once a year, and for most young players it is the only time in twelve months they face someone of their own level.

The gap between those tiers is not a gap in basic technique. I have watched enough to say that a fifteen-year-old from Hai Duong has a forehand loop that is correct down to the joint. The problem lies elsewhere.

In my notebook from the last three national championships, more than sixty per cent of points ended within the first three strokes. That number is not bad in itself; modern table tennis is a sport of the first three strokes. But when I isolated the games between two players of equal level, the share of points that went past the fifth stroke dropped sharply, and the win rate of whoever attacked first on the third stroke climbed to nearly seventy per cent. Put differently: at the highest domestic level, the better server almost always wins. The rest of the match becomes procedure.

That pushes training towards serving and over-the-table flicking. Tactically sound, but it produces a generation with excellent short-range technique and very thin mid-range technique. Since the International Table Tennis Federation moved to a larger plastic ball in 2026, spin has dropped and the ball travels slower and heavier. To generate power you have to step back a metre and a half to two metres from the table, draw force from hips and legs, and strike the ball early. That is the most physically expensive style, and also the style that takes the most years to accumulate.

At the development level, Vietnam rarely has those years. Provincial coaches work with short time budgets, domestic events are few, and the rewards for junior results are usually larger than the rewards for building a foundation. A ten-year-old who learns to play away from the table will lose to peers who learn to flick over the table. Schools, parents and even the medal tables all prefer tomorrow's result to the result of ten years from now.

The backhand is where this shows most clearly. Most domestic players use the backhand side to block and push; very few flick early with the backhand. The backhand flick demands a flexible wrist, a high contact point, and above all the ability to read the opponent's spin the instant the ball leaves the rubber. Spin-reading only forms when a player meets enough different kinds of spin, which means having enough sparring partners of comparable level. For a province with three players in the same age group, that is close to impossible.

On equipment, many domestic players choose a hard, high-grip rubber on the forehand and a softer one on the backhand. That configuration suits a close-to-the-table, first-strike game. But it only pays off when the player repeats the same movement chain thousands of times a month, and that chain has to be repeated against an opponent who can return the ball to the right place. Without that opponent, the drill becomes the shape of technique with the purpose of technique removed.

At recent SEA Games, Vietnamese table tennis has stayed in the medal-contention group, and names such as Nguyen Anh Tu, Dinh Quang Linh, Tran Tuan Quynh, Mai Hoang My Trang and Nguyen Khoa Dieu Khanh have lasted across many editions. That durability is a foundation, but it is also the sign of a system that produces too few newcomers. When one generation lasts ten years, the question is not how good they are but where the next cohort is.

Saying Vietnamese table tennis lacks talent is the lazy conclusion. The harder task is looking at the incentive structure that produced the current style of play. If I had to name one blind spot, I would name premature specialisation. Children aged eight to ten are already sorted by style: the strong one becomes an attacker, the short one becomes a close-to-the-table defender. The sorting brings early results, but it blocks the way back. A player who peaks at eighteen, stalls at twenty-two and disappears at twenty-five is usually someone who was never taught a second way to play.

There is another layer few mention. Live scoring from domestic events, once digitised, quickly becomes data for betting companies. When the scoreboard becomes a financial instrument, invisible pressure appears: shorter points are easier to sell, easier to cut into small broadcast slots. Nobody orders players to hit faster, but the entire system that reads the score rewards speed. In 2026 the International Table Tennis Federation cut games from twenty-one points to eleven. Twenty years later we have a sport in which the opening stroke decides almost the whole match, and a generation that has never been asked to endure a long rally.

Fans may stay outside the arena, but the arena is never short of them. What the hall lacks, and what this country's table tennis lacks, is a circuit long and thick enough to give a nineteen-year-old a reason to stay another ten years. The technique is already there. It is time to build longer rallies.