The Vietnamese men's futsal team stopped in the quarterfinals of the 2026 Asian Futsal Championship because they lost to Indonesia 2-3. Coach Diego Giustozzi and captain Nguyen Manh Dung emphasized 2 points that the Vietnamese team "deserved a better result" and "created more opportunities". Sports players are probably familiar and also understand this feeling.
Showing good, more opportunities, but still losing. The feeling here is bitterness. It is very normal for some people to use it to justify failure, others not. If it is mass sports, we just say it and ignore it, but at the professional level, we need to look deeper into many angles of "opportunity".
Opportunity is the time or favorable situation that appears in a specific circumstance, allowing people - if recognized in time and handled properly, to take an action that can lead to a better outcome than normal. Simply put, opportunity is not the result, but the ability to lead to the result.
Whether in life or sports, creating opportunities follows a method that is after a series of actions, in a certain period of time. Opportunities are temporary, come in a certain context, associated with specific time, space and conditions. When the context changes, opportunities also disappear.
So, to turn it into a result, it must be the ability of the "finisher". Because in football, there is still a goalkeeper in goal, or in work, there is still effectiveness in reality that hinders. 1 opportunity taken advantage of is worth more than 10 missed opportunities. 1 or 2 missed opportunities may be regrettable. But 3 or more times is the problem. When missed opportunities recur, it is no longer luck, but the ability to improve.
Opportunity is the intersection between favorable circumstances and human willingness. Someone will ask, society is not short of incompetent people but there are still opportunities? In fact, it is not an opportunity, but "being facilitated". Or more subtly, "being backed up".
That way, it's hard to talk about the results and it's not sustainable either.
