The Final in the Snow

Snow fell onto the grass and stayed there. It would not melt.

A player in a red shirt knelt down and brushed the snow aside with his hand. Once was not enough. He brushed it again, and again, until a patch of dark grass showed under the white, no bigger than two hands. It was just enough room to set the ball down and make it stay still.

A few of his teammates bent down to help him.

About ten steps away, a line of men stood shoulder to shoulder between the ball and the goal. Snow settled on their shoulders, on their hair, and on the chalk lines, which by now could hardly be seen.

Hold on to that moment for a little while. To reach this spot, these young men had traveled a very long road.

That afternoon was January 27, 2018. The stadium was in the Olympic Sports Center in Changzhou, China. The temperature outside hovered around zero degrees Celsius, and heavy snow fell for the whole match. Even so, the game kicked off right on time. It was the final of the Asian football championship for players under 23, between Vietnam and Uzbekistan.

Most of the young men in red that day had grown up in a country where snow almost never falls.

The man directing them from the touchline was a Korean coach named Park Hang-seo. He had taken the job in Vietnam in the fall of 2017, only a few months before this match.

Long before that, he had lived through a special summer in his own country. In 2002, when Korea and Japan co-hosted the World Cup, he was one of the two assistants to the head coach, Guus Hiddink, a Dutchman. The Korean team went all the way to the semifinals that year. Park's job then was to be a bridge between a foreign coach and the home players.

Fifteen years later, he went to another country, and this time he was the foreigner.

He once said that the biggest lesson from his old mentor was not about tactics. It was the need to understand the country where he worked, its culture, and the way its players react. In Vietnam, that was the first thing he set out to do.

The tournament that year began badly. In the opening match, the young Vietnamese side lost to the young Korean side, the team from their own coach's homeland. Then came a one to nothing win over Australia, and then a draw with Syria. It was just enough to slip out of the group in second place.

The quarterfinal was against Iraq. The two teams kept pace with each other all the way into extra time and finished level at three all. Then it went to a penalty shootout. Vietnam won it, five penalties to three.

The semifinal was against Qatar. Another draw, two all this time, and another shootout. The goalkeeper Bùi Tiến Dũng saved two shots. Vietnam won four to three. For the first time in its history, the country had reached the final of a continental tournament.

Then came Changzhou, and the snow.

The final started badly. In only the eighth minute, an Uzbek player rose high to meet a corner kick, and the ball sat snugly in the net. The snow grew thicker by the minute. The ball kept stalling on the pitch, and every pass fell shorter than the passer meant.

Then came the 41st minute.

Vietnam won a free kick just outside the penalty area. That was the moment the players knelt and swept the snow away with their hands, clearing a patch of grass no bigger than two hands.

The man who struck that ball was Nguyễn Quang Hải, who was 20 years old at the time. The ball rose, curled over the heads in the wall, and dipped down into the net. Across a whole field of white, there was only that one curving line of the ball.

People called the goal the Rainbow in the Snow. One all.

Later, when he was asked about it, Quang Hải said something worth remembering. He said the goal was not his alone. It only happened because his teammates had cleared the snow around the ball with their hands.

The start of the second half had to wait. People came out to clear some of the snow covering the pitch before play could go on. After 90 minutes, the score was still one all. The two teams went into extra time and played 30 more minutes in the snow, their legs as heavy as stone.

Then, in the last minutes of extra time, almost in its final seconds, Uzbekistan scored again from a corner kick.

The match ended two to one to Uzbekistan. The young Vietnamese team had lost, and they took home the silver medal.

This is where the story ought to turn sad.

But the next day, when the team arrived back in Hanoi, something else happened. Thousands of people packed both sides of the road, all the way from Nội Bài Airport to the city center. The bus carrying the team crawled along at walking pace. The official welcome ceremony had to be pushed back by five hours, simply because the convoy could not get through the crowd.

No one in that crowd was standing there for a trophy. The trophy belonged to the other team, and no one pretended otherwise. They stood there for a team that had given everything to the very last second, in weather it was not used to.

Almost two years later, the tournament held a vote to find the most iconic goal in its whole history. The free kick in the snow won with more than a million votes, far ahead of the goal in second place.

As for Park Hang-seo, he stayed in Vietnam for five more years. At the end of 2018, he and the national team won the Southeast Asian championship. The next year, the team reached the quarterfinals of the Asian Cup. Yet the thing that made people in Vietnam remember him most clearly, strangely enough, began with a defeat.

In the short clip of that goal, the ball is not the first thing to watch. Look instead at the hands of the players kneeling in the snow, sweeping away layer after freezing layer to clear a place for a teammate. Everyone sees a beautiful shot. But the place where that ball sat was cleared by those hands.