Gonzalo Fornari at 2.01m and Cong An Nhan Dan's Foreign-Striker Gamble

On the foreign-player line of the registration sheet for the Long An match on September 11, there was no name at all. That blank was small enough to be missed. An empty space sitting in the middle of Cong An Nhan Dan's list of domestic players, and it said more than any press release about the club's situation on matchday one of the 2026-2027 First Division season. The score was 2-1. Both goals came from Nguyen Hoang Anh, who entered from the bench. I sat in the stands beside a few supporters in red shirts, and after the final whistle everyone said the same thing: winning against Long An like this feels good, but over a long season it will not hold. The pitch never lies. Only the people in the stands lie to themselves every weekend. Cong An Nhan Dan is no longer the PVF-CAND of a few years ago. The name change brought a change of expectations: a youth academy long respected for its methods now wears the shirt of a club with promotion ambition and a strict operating structure. In the First Division, ambition is not measured in statements but in how correctly a club uses its limited foreign-player slots. Transfers are not deals. They are separations signed in legal ink. Early in the season, the club signed Santos Thaileon, the Brazilian striker who finished last season as the First Division's top scorer with 14 goals for Quy Nhon United. Read aloud, the signing announced its own target: win the title, get promoted, and sell tickets. But for the opener against Long An on September 11, head coach Nguyen Duc Thang did not register Santos Thaileon. Nobody on the coaching staff explained why publicly. At the level of a single First Division fixture, several possibilities always coexist: fitness not yet there, timing of integration, paperwork, or simply a tactical calculation for the run of games ahead. My experience following First Division matches has taught me one thing: when a foreign striker is absent on opening day, the problem usually sits in preparation, not in quality. Then the club went one step further. They signed another Brazilian striker, Gonzalo Fornari, 26 years old, ready to supplement both the National Cup and the First Division in the coming weeks. Gonzalo Fornari stands 2.01 metres tall, the tallest among all foreign players currently competing in both the First Division and the V-League. Last season he played for Busan IPark in K-League 2 and scored seven goals. I have followed K-League 2 for years, simply because it is the league of my home country and because its character is closer to Vietnam's First Division than people assume: slower tempo, more contact, and matches often decided in the air rather than through short combinations. From the Busan IPark games I watched last season, my impression of Gonzalo Fornari is of a target man who plays with his back to goal, wins aerial duels inside the box, and drags two centre-backs toward him. He is not a ball-carrying dribbler, not a player who creates chances himself from 30 metres of open space. He needs the ball delivered into the right place. That is what makes this signing more interesting than it looks. The National Cup has a replacement and registration deadline at 15:00 on September 17. The First Division deadline is 15:00 on October 15. Between now and then, Nguyen Duc Thang has nearly a month to weigh which foreign striker to register for the competition that actually decides promotion. A month of training sessions, internal friendlies, conversations with the medical staff and calculations about the wage bill. To understand why the choice is hard, you have to understand how the First Division is played. Most teams build a low defensive block, prioritise numbers in front of the box, and accept conceding possession in midfield. Space behind the defensive line barely exists. In that environment, set pieces and crosses are the cheapest routes to goal, and also the most underrated when people talk about technical quality. A striker at 2.01 metres gives his team something very concrete: a fixed destination in the box at corners and free kicks, a body that can hold the ball so the second line can push up, a dropping ball that is retained rather than cleared. In a league where a goal sometimes comes from a scramble, keeping a dropping ball inside the box is a form of power. But height does not score on its own. To use Gonzalo Fornari, Cong An Nhan Dan must change how they build attacks: more early crosses from both flanks, more deliveries from the second line, more set-piece routines designed on purpose rather than taken out of habit. The team must accept losing some transition speed in exchange for an anchor. And in this climate, on pitches that are not always flat, a 2.01-metre player has to learn to play with his head before he plays with his feet. Then comes the substitution rule. Five changes let a deep squad use its depth, but they also turn the final 20 minutes into a war of attrition. The team with more quality options wins matches it used to draw. For Cong An Nhan Dan, holding two foreign strikers is a clear advantage in options, but it also creates a paradox: splitting minutes between two centre-forwards means neither reaches real match rhythm, and in the First Division a striker's rhythm is worth gold. Here, the memory of another signing surfaces, and it is a recent memory rather than an old tale. In the 2026-2026 season, Nam Dinh had a striker standing 2.06 metres, the Englishman Kyle Hudlin. He scored a brace in the 2026 Super Cup match his side lost 2-3 to Cong An Ha Noi. He scored a brace against the Vietnam national team in a friendly his side won 4-0. He scored in a 1-3 away defeat to Gamba Osaka in the 2026-2026 AFC Champions League. In the 2026-2026 V-League, Kyle Hudlin scored no goals in five matches and said goodbye early through injury. Read those two sets of facts side by side and a pattern appears. Kyle Hudlin's goals came in a Super Cup, in a friendly against a national team, in a continental competition. Those are open games: both teams want to win, defensive lines push up, space exists. The V-League is a run of compressed matches, where centre-backs know exactly how tall he is and choose to stand in front of him rather than race him. A tall striker is only useful when his team manufactures situations in which height becomes an organised advantage. For Gonzalo Fornari, the lesson weighs more, because the First Division is physically punishing in a different way from the V-League. First Division teams have no stars, so they compensate with running volume and discipline. There is little room for a centre-forward who only waits for the ball. If Cong An Nhan Dan do not build a system of crosses and second-ball duels around him, 2.01 metres will remain a nice number on a profile page. Money deserves a mention too, because this is the transfer window and noise on the market always exceeds real quality. At First Division level, foreign contracts are usually short, tied to the season's objective, and mostly negotiated through agent networks already familiar with the Southeast Asian market. A striker arriving from K-League 2 is priced on three things: goals, age, and physique. The first two can be verified; the third says nothing about the ability to score. That is where I want to pause a little longer, because it is the blind spot of collective memory. Vietnamese football has had a brief love affair with tall foreign strikers. Every time a player clears 1.95 metres at the airport, the media has an exciting week and the fans have a week of hope that every attacking problem will be solved by crosses. But across recent seasons, the foreign signings who succeed in Vietnamese leagues tend to be players between 1.75 and 1.85 metres: quick, durable, able to read situations. The names above 1.95 metres usually leave behind a few beautiful cup moments before fading out of the long picture. The reason lies where scouting reports rarely write: tactically, the First Division and the V-League do not reward pure height; they reward the ability to hold the ball under pressure and the ability to move without it. A striker must know how to choose a position to receive before the centre-back closes him down. He must know when to drop and lay the ball off, when to pin a full-back to open space for a teammate. Those skills are not in the height column. So what actually decides the First Division? From what I have observed across many seasons, three things: defensive organisation across 22 rounds, the quality of set pieces at both ends, and the ability to take points in matches where the team plays badly. A tall striker's goals are a reward, not a foundation. If Cong An Nhan Dan want promotion, the foundation has to come first. As for Gonzalo Fornari himself, seven goals in K-League 2 last season is an average return, not a promise. It says he can contribute; it does not say he will dominate. K-League 2 is a league of physically strong centre-backs, and the fact that the tallest player in the division managed only seven goals suggests he has never been a systematic match-winner. In Vietnam he will meet shorter defenders who are quicker and more aggressive in the first contact. Adaptation also belongs on the scales, and no statistic measures it. A 26-year-old Brazilian arriving in Southeast Asia for the first time must pass through a long list of invisible tasks: work permit, medical checks, international transfer paperwork, adjusting to heat and humidity, adjusting to food, finding a house, bringing family over or accepting living alone. Each item can cost two weeks, and a First Division season has only 22 rounds. I write these lines from Saigon, where I watch most First Division matches on a small screen in my office. Saigon watches football on a small screen, but their hearts still hang in the stands. And precisely because I watch on a small screen, I noticed something a crowded stand sometimes hides: the teams that get promoted are not the ones with the best foreign strikers, but the ones that make the fewest mistakes in away matches. The upcoming schedule will answer part of the question about Gonzalo Fornari. Cong An Nhan Dan host Hue at home in the National Cup qualifier on October 6. On October 11, they travel to Khanh Hoa in round two of the First Division. Those are two very different matches: a cup tie where risk is affordable, and an away league game where every risk is paid for. What interests me is not whether Gonzalo Fornari scores in those two matches. What interests me is whom Nguyen Duc Thang will choose when the 15:00 deadline on October 15 arrives. If he chooses Santos Thaileon, the story becomes about a top scorer put back in his rightful place, and Gonzalo Fornari becomes a cup option. If he chooses Gonzalo Fornari, the story becomes about a football philosophy: this club believes height and aerial play are the shortest road to promotion. Some will argue that two foreign strikers are better than one, that squad depth is always an advantage. That is true in theory and false in practice. Two foreign centre-forwards competing for one starting place means two egos wounded every week. At a club chasing promotion, a stable dressing room matters as much as a goal. And what about Nguyen Hoang Anh? His brace against Long An is a reminder that this club still has domestic strikers who score when given the chance. If both Santos Thaileon and Gonzalo Fornari start, Hoang Anh's minutes shrink, and that is the player-development problem no club wants to face under pressure to deliver results. Professional football carries an uncomfortable truth: every foreign signing is a door closing on a young domestic player. So what happens if this gamble fails? There is no catastrophe, only a wasted season. A foreign slot used wrongly means an attack genuinely short of one option across 22 rounds, home draws against lower-ranked teams, and a growing gap to the top month by month. And if the gamble succeeds? Other First Division clubs will watch and copy. The league's foreign transfer market will keep revolving around profiles with height, and the loop repeats. We grow old among generations of players, but we have never grown old among matches. I have seen more than a few foreign strikers arrive in Vietnam with a beautiful profile and leave with a suitcase they never fully unpacked. I have also seen men considered backup options become the scorers of deciding goals on the final matchday. The question I leave here is not how tall Gonzalo Fornari is. The question is how many delivery routes Cong An Nhan Dan have prepared to reach that 2.01-metre head, and whether they have the patience to wait for it to fall in the right place before the registration deadline closes.