On the evening of May 21, 2026, at the provincial arena in Bac Ninh, I sat in the fourth row from the ring, holding a small notebook and a ballpoint pen that would run dry twice in a single night. On the big screen, the SEA Games 31 organizers posted the scorecard of a men's light-weight semi-final: three judges scored it 29-28, 29-28, 30-27 in favor of the home fighter. But in my notebook, written hand by hand, round by round, punch by punch, I read a different story. I counted 47 clean jabs from the losing fighter, and only 31 from the winner. I even counted the number of times the back foot slid on the canvas when driven into the corner: 14 for the winner, 6 for the loser. The numbers disagreed, and once again I had to ask myself: do I trust my own eyes, or the sheet of paper those three men up there just raised?

Across sixteen years of writing and making sports documentaries, I have learned that combat sports are the most misread of all misread sports. Football has goals as a measure. Track has the stopwatch. Swimming has the touchpad. But the ring entrusts one person's fate to three subjective perceptions, recorded as three round numbers like three smooth pebbles. A 0.2-second discrepancy taught me to trust my own eyes on the track. It turns out that in the ring, the eye must also learn to count, because no one will count for you.

This piece is not an indictment of the three judges sitting there that night. It is a data report, written by hand, about how Vietnamese people are slowly learning to see combat sports through numbers they create themselves, instead of through inherited belief.

Context: A fighting nation without a ledger

To understand why a boxing match in Bac Ninh kept me up counting until midnight, we need to step back.

Vietnamese boxing entered SEA Games 31 as a host team hungry for medals. The entire sporting apparatus set a target of topping the overall medal table, and martial arts, along with track and swimming, were expected to be the gold mines. In boxing, the national team carried international experience gathered across several editions of the Games, a few fighters who had competed in Olympic qualifiers, and a rising generation. But behind the glory of medals lay a quiet hole few talked about: we had fighters, coaches, venues, but we had almost no data.

Based on my experience watching matches across many domestic and regional tournaments, one thing is certain: most boxing matches in Vietnam end without anyone recording the number of landed punches, the strike rate, or the number of blows absorbed to the head or body. Organizers record points. Referees record fouls. But the very thing the international analytics community regards as the backbone, detailed statistical data, is left blank.

I remember the first time I went to a national youth boxing tournament in a northern province, around 2026. I brought my notebook and sat counting every round. By the third round, a coach next to me turned and asked: "What are you counting?". I told him I was counting landed punches. He laughed: "Why tire yourself out counting, just watch the flow and you'll know who's winning". That answer was not naivety. It was a precise answer for a martial arts culture that for decades has read matches only through eyes and intuition, never through numbers recorded systematically.

The trouble is this: ten people's intuition yields ten different results, but the number of landed punches is only one. When we have no single figure to compare against, every argument about a loss ends in feeling: "I saw fighter A win". And feeling loses in court.

The world left us far behind on this. In international professional boxing and in developed boxing nations, every match has punch counters, systems recording strikes by the second, by body region, statistics updated round by round. International viewers see a number on screen instantly: this puncher throws 78 per round and lands 41, that one throws 55 and lands 39. That is the basis for argument. And an argument with a basis is very different from a shouting match built on bias.

In Vietnam, we still lack that habit. Not for lack of tools. A notebook and a pen are enough to start. What is missing is the awareness that numbers deserve to be recorded. I counted every move of Iceland by hand, and suddenly saw an entire world. If a small nation of 300,000 people could use hand-counted data to forge a tactical manifesto, then a martial arts culture with thousands of fighters can do the same. We just have not started.

My own story: the 0.2-second gap and the first notebook

Before the ring, I must talk about track, because track taught me how to write about boxing.

In 2026, as a new editor at an online sports channel in Hanoi, I made a mistake I still remember vividly. At SEA Games 29 in Kuala Lumpur, I handled the quick news on the Vietnamese athletics team. I wrote that a Vietnamese female 200m runner had finished her semi-final in a time of 11.72 seconds, placing second in her heat. The truth was she ran 11.92 seconds and finished fifth. A 0.2-second error. It sounds small. But the consequences were not: a fan page with over 200,000 followers posted a correction, my article was shared more than a thousand times with mockery, and I had to take it down and write a two-page report.

That report was the most shameful document I ever wrote. But it was also the document that changed me. I decided to make amends the way a stubborn man would: I re-watched all twelve official tapes of the tournament and built a handwritten data table recording stride rhythm, distance, and final-lap speed for eight Vietnamese female athletes. I wrote it by hand, line by line, column by column. When the table was finished after nearly two weeks, I discovered something no agency had published: over 200m, most of our athletes lost speed in the final twenty meters, and that was precisely the fragile gap between a medal and a consolation ticket.

A 0.2-second discrepancy taught me to trust my own eyes. From that mistake, I formed the habit of verifying three sources before using any number. In my later documentaries, every figure carries a source or a note; if I cannot verify it, I write it as an estimate with context rather than an absolute claim. And when I entered the world of martial arts, I carried that same notebook, that same temperament.

Because boxing and track share something few notice: both are sports of small gaps. A punch that misses by two centimeters is a punch that does not score. A footfall a tenth of a second slow is an irrecoverable loss of momentum. In the ring as on the track, victory lies not in the grand moment but in the smallest gaps that only those who count can see.

Core: What can you count in a Vietnamese ring?

That night in Bac Ninh, I counted using a system I had built over years. I did not count by feeling. I counted by precise metric groups, so that later I could compare them with the official scorecard.

The first group is punches thrown, meaning every strike a fighter launches at the opponent, hit or miss. The second is punches landed, meaning strikes that connect with a legal area of the opponent's body. The third is accuracy, landed divided by thrown. The fourth separates head shots from body shots. The fifth is punches absorbed. The sixth is times driven into the corner. And the last, the seventh, is breathing rhythm and recovery between rounds, recorded as a subjective estimate but with contextual notes.

The men's light-weight semi-final I mentioned at the start is a textbook example. According to my notebook, over three rounds:

Round one: the home fighter (call him A) threw 62 and landed 18, an accuracy of about 29 percent. The away fighter (call him B) threw 51 and landed 22, about 43 percent. Round one leaned to B.

Round two: A threw 71, landed 24; B threw 48, landed 21. A dominated in volume but still had a lower accuracy. Round two was roughly even on clean connects, but A pressed more.

Round three: A threw 66, landed 20; B threw 57, landed 26. Once again, B had a markedly higher accuracy.

Across the whole fight, A threw 199 and landed 62; B threw 156 and landed 69. B landed more than A both in absolute terms and in accuracy. Yet the official scorecard gave A the win, 29-28, 29-28, 30-27.

Here, I am not claiming the judges were wrong. I am claiming that the scorecard and my notebook told two different stories, and that without the notebook, both stories would vanish into nothing. That is exactly my point: the danger is not that one fight was scored off. The danger is that when a fight is scored off, we have nothing to compare it against.

The body is a blackboard that no coach ever reads in full. And in the ring, that body records every punch through physical traces: a flush of red, a shoulder dropping lower, a breath more ragged in the second minute of the final round. International viewers have learned to read those traces through data. Vietnamese viewers, for the most part, still read only through cheers. That is not the viewers' fault. It is the fault of people like me, who should have brought numbers to them but instead often brought only emotion.

I have asked myself many times whether this avoidance of numbers is the essence of Vietnamese martial arts. And my answer, after years of counting, is no. The essence of Vietnamese martial arts is not the evasion of numbers. It is that no one has taught how those numbers are born.

In traditional Vietnamese martial arts, lineages still transmit through oral instruction and demonstration. The master strikes, the student watches, the student imitates. There is no curriculum of impact-force analysis, no table of striking rhythm, no database on reaction speed. This makes Vietnamese martial arts rich in humanity but poor in measurement. And when it steps onto the international stage, that poverty turns into defeat.

I have spent years watching how domestic martial arts federations organize training. A common trait is that good coaches inspire but rarely transmit data. A typical session has warm-up, technique, sparring, and conditioning. But it rarely has a block of "review the footage and count your own landed punches". When it does, it is often emotional: "You didn't commit", "your slip was late". No one says: "You landed 18 of 62 in round one, which is 14 percent below your opponent".

That is why I believe the biggest step Vietnamese martial arts needs this decade is not a foreign coach, nor a new sports center. It is a notebook. A notebook in which every fighter, every coach, every fan can record what the naked eye overlooks.

What the scorecard never says

There is a question I always carry when I sit in any arena: what does the scorecard say, and what does it hide?

The scorecard says who won, who lost. It hides the way the win was made. A fighter who wins 30-27 may have won by running for two rounds and only uncorking in the last. A fighter who loses 27-30 may have pressed an opponent almost to a knockout, only to be docked late for losing balance.

I once counted a youth tournament fight in which the winner threw only 89 punches over three rounds and landed 19, yet had his hand raised. Nineteen landed punches across nine minutes of action, barely more than two a minute. If the audience had that number in hand, they would immediately ask questions. But because they did not, they could only clap along to the drums and the lights.

My job is to find the piece the whole stadium forgot. That piece may be a body shot that scores nothing but slows the opponent's breathing by half a second in round three. That piece may be the moment fighter B, in round two, shifted from counter-attacking to pressing after a single shot to the temple, and that single shot flipped the entire fight.

In international combat analysis, people call these pieces "swing moments", the moments that turn a fight. The scorecard does not record swing moments. Only a counter can.

And when I say "a counter", I do not mean only experts. I mean anyone willing to spend an hour learning to watch a boxing match through numbers instead of cheers. Once fans have that skill, they are no longer passive spectators. They become participants in the fight by asking questions. And a martial arts culture whose fans ask questions is a martial arts culture with a future.

I want to add one more story. At another match at the national championship, I counted 17 times a fighter was driven into the corner over three rounds. That number is very high. It means the fighter was being cornered roughly once every three seconds. But when I read the post-fight reports, almost none mentioned that number. All said "fighter A fought with effort". "Effort" is a fine word. But "effort" does not help a fighter improve. The number 17 does, because it points precisely to what needs fixing: footwork, turning angles, or the ability to counter when pinned to the ropes.

One of the most interesting things I discovered through hand counting is the gap between the audience's perception and the real data. Many times I asked those sitting next to me who they thought was leading after two rounds, then compared with my notebook. In most cases, the audience leaned toward the fighter who threw more, the one who looked "busier", even when that fighter's accuracy was lower. This is a known psychological effect: people confuse activity with effectiveness. A fighter throwing three missed punches looks like he is trying harder than a fighter throwing one that lands. But in scoring, only the one that lands counts.

That is why counting punches is not only a referee's job. It is the job of a culture. A culture that can separate the seemingly-real from the actually-real is a culture that can correct itself.

The counter-angle: when specialization becomes a trap

Here I must argue against myself, because that is what I always force myself to do before ending any piece.

I have spent this whole article praising numbers. But there is a truth that number-addicts like me often forget: specialization can become a trap. Once we turn boxing into a spreadsheet, we risk losing the very thing that makes it beautiful, the sense of uncertainty, the ability of one small punch to flip a whole fight, the trembling of a fighter before stepping into the ring.

I have a private fear. It is that the next generation of fighters grows up in an environment where every punch is measured, every tactic optimized, every decision based on probability. Then will we still keep the moment a Vietnamese fighter, bare-handed and with a racing heart, throws a punch no one predicted? Or will we turn the ring into a data showcase, with no surprise, no miracle left?

I once lived through this feeling with a project I initiated. In 2026, when the pandemic paused domestic football, I proposed simulating the entire season on a video game and predicting the champion. I was thrilled, thinking I was bringing science to football. The series failed badly, running only six episodes with an average of just over 12,000 views each, when the channel's normal figure was in the hundreds of thousands. I argued directly with the content director: "If the audience won't watch simulations, let's invite them to argue.". A new debate show was born, gathering coaches, tactical analysts, and even esports players, reaching 45,000 to 60,000 views per episode. But the most valuable lesson was not in that number. The lesson was: data cannot replace emotion. Data can only be the foundation for emotion.

With boxing, this is even truer. If we turn every fight into a spreadsheet, we lose the shout when a fighter is knocked down and rises again. We lose the moment a mother in the countryside watches her child on TV and weeps. We lose what no number can touch.

So when I call for Vietnamese martial arts to learn to count, I am not calling for it to learn to be cold. I am calling for it to learn precision so that from precision it can love more rationally. Numbers are the foundation, emotion is the master. Reverse them, and we get a martial arts culture that is either barren or blind.

There is one more thing I want to state plainly: I myself nearly fell into the number-addict's trap. For a time, I was so absorbed that I counted everything, measured everything, until I forgot to look a fighter in the eye after a match. I forgot that behind the numbers are people. It was a coach friend who reminded me: "You count well, but do you know what that kid is thinking when he's been cornered 17 times?". That question made me stop. Since then, alongside the counting notebook, I always keep a small notebook recording the fighter's words after the match. One book for numbers. One for people. You need both to write anything decent.

Failure: the asset Vietnamese martial arts has not used

If numbers are the foundation, failure is the material. And Vietnamese martial arts sits on a huge untapped deposit of material.

I observe a common trait in Vietnamese sports media: we write a great deal about victory, and very little about defeat. Whenever a Vietnamese fighter loses on the international stage, reports tend to use accompanying phrases: "not lucky", "unfortunate", "narrow loss". Rarely do we get a long, serious piece dissecting why that fighter lost, through data and story.

I consider that a waste. Because in sport, failure is more valuable data than victory. Victory usually just confirms what we already knew. Failure reveals what we did not know.

I once made a short documentary about a young fighter who lost his opening match at a regional tournament. When I pitched the idea to the editorial board, the first reaction was: "Who watches a loss?". I made it anyway. I did not make a film about the loss. I made a film about what the loss taught him. In it, I recounted every round, pointed to the exact moment he lost balance, and let him describe the feeling in that second. The film ran over nine minutes, but views exceeded expectations, thousands commented, most saying they saw themselves in it.

This taught me: audiences are not afraid of failure. They are only afraid of stories about failure written with pity or with excuses. They want honesty. They want numbers. They want to know why.

Empty summer stadiums, dead series, yet I found an echo. That echo is the voice of fans who want to understand more deeply, not just know the result. And in martial arts, where results are often decided subjectively, the need for depth becomes more urgent.

I want to say more about the notion of a "stillborn season" in Vietnamese martial arts. There are talented fighters whose careers are cut short by injury, circumstance, or lack of investment. We usually treat these as sad stories, as zeros. But to me, they are precious documents. Every unfinished career is a lesson about the limits of the system. If we bother to count, to record, we will see a repeating pattern: wrist injuries, knee injuries, the absence of nutritionists, the absence of psychologists. Those numbers are not sad. They point the way.

And if I could say one thing to young Vietnamese fighters, it would be: do not fear being counted. When you know you landed 19 of 89, you hurt. But that hurt helps more than a thousand empty compliments.

Business and the trap of glory

I am a documentary filmmaker, not an economist. But when I look at Vietnamese martial arts, I must talk about money, because money is shaping the future of this sport.

One of the biggest paradoxes of Vietnamese martial arts is: events multiply, but the database thins. Federations hold festivals, sponsors pour money, tournaments are broadcast live, yet almost no unit is dedicated to systematically and durably recording athlete data.

This creates an interesting economic consequence. When sponsors invest, they want to see results. But the value of martial arts cannot be measured by the single number of medal count. It must be measured by the number of fighters who mature, by loyal audience size, by search volume, by the average lifespan of a career, by the number of fighters who stay with the sport after retirement. No one records those numbers, so no one can prove the true value of Vietnamese martial arts. And what cannot be proven is hard to sell. What is hard to sell is easily seen as a secondary sport.

I once talked with a media person for a martial arts federation. He told me something I never forgot: "We hold a tournament and then disband, no one keeps any data, and next year we start from scratch". That is a terrible waste. Every tournament is a gold mine of data thrown away, because no one has the habit of mining it.

And here is the link to the broader sports business story. In sports like football, people have learned to turn data into products: player indices, heat maps, transfer analysis. In martial arts, that product is still nearly empty in Vietnam. Whoever moves first will have an edge. A federation that keeps data on its fighters can sell image, story, curiosity. A fighter with data about himself can negotiate better contracts, attract better sponsorship.

Some will ask: does data make martial arts less wild? I do not think so. Data only makes it less murky. The wildness, the beauty, the thing that makes us hold our breath, stays in the ring. It is simply lit more clearly.

I must also speak plainly about another trap of glory. It is when a young fighter achieves early success and is turned into a media figure before he has time to grow. In combat sports, fame arriving too early can kill discipline. And discipline is the only thing that keeps a fighter on the ring long term. Data can help here: if we measure a fighter's progress monthly, we are less dazzled by a single win. We see whether he is advancing or stalling. That matters more than any medal.

The con of conditioning and commerce

In football, I once said that pre-season friendly tours turn clubs into circuses, and players' fitness is exploited by commerce. In martial arts, the same is happening, but in another form.

Fighters are increasingly pushed into a dense schedule. Friendly events, open tournaments, exhibition bouts, promotional appearances. Every activity has a clear commercial rationale. But the fighter's body is a limited resource. A fighter needs time to recover after each appearance, not just physically but mentally.

When I counted one fighter's strike volume across several consecutive matches, I saw a pattern: first-round punch volume declined from match to match within the same month. What does that mean? It means the body is tired. It means the fighter is competing on inertia and money, not on form.

If we do not record these numbers, we will never see the exploitation of conditioning happening before our eyes. We will only see a fighter lose and think: "Must have been unlucky today". We will not know he has fought his fifth match in thirty days.

This is where data becomes a tool to protect fighters. A federation with data knows when to rest a fighter. A coach with data knows when to reduce training load. A fighter with data knows when to decline a fight. That refusal, in a commercialized market, must be protected by numbers, not only by personal courage.

I counted every move of Iceland by hand, and suddenly saw an entire world. That world is not only tactics. It is how a small community uses data to defend itself against larger forces. Vietnamese martial arts needs the same spirit: using numbers to defend itself against uncontrolled commercialization.

But I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not calling for a fight against commerce. Martial arts needs money to live. I am calling for something simpler: money must come with responsibility. And responsibility, in the data age, means transparency.

The numbers that stay after the drums stop

There is a moment I always await at every tournament. It is the moment after the final ends, when the crowd begins to leave, when the lights begin to dim, and only a few remain in the stands. Among them are usually a few older coaches, a few journalists, and a few die-hard fans. We sit back, open our notebooks, and compare numbers.

In those comparisons, I learn more than while watching the fight. I learn that in the same fight, each person sees a different number. No one is entirely wrong. But when the numbers are placed side by side, the truth begins to appear somewhere in between.

This is what I want to stress to anyone reading this, including those who have never set foot in an arena: you do not need to believe in a single number. You need to believe in counting by hand. Counting by hand teaches you that the truth is neither in the scorecard nor in your feeling. The truth is where the two meet, and you are the one who must find that meeting point.

I once met a young fighter who told me he does not re-watch his losses out of fear. I told him that fear is exactly why he loses. In martial arts, an adult is someone who dares to watch himself again, frame by frame, and name every mistake. That name may be a number, but the moment of facing it is a moment of courage.

And here is the miracle: once you dare to count your failure, you begin to see its shape. It is no longer a fog. It is a misstepped foot, a missed breath, a round where you stopped throwing at the fortieth second. Once you see the shape of failure, you can fix it. And once you fix it, you have grown.

The big picture: a martial arts culture at a crossroads

If I had to place Vietnamese martial arts in a larger context, I would say it stands at a crossroads. One branch leads to continuing as before: emotional, oral, feeling overpowering data. The other leads to modernization: datafication, professionalization, transparency.

Both branches carry risk. The old branch keeps the soul of martial arts but tends to close itself off. The new branch might take Vietnamese martial arts to the world but might also lose its identity if it moves too fast and too mechanically.

I think the right path lies between, and it begins with one small act: learning to count. Counting not to replace emotion, but to give emotion a foundation. Counting not to turn fighters into robots, but to help them understand themselves. Counting not to silence the audience, but to make it ask sharper questions.

In three different fields, I have seen the same pattern. In sports data analysis, analysts' conclusions often detach from the rhythm of reality on the field, because they sit too far from the human body. In sports business, pre-season tours and friendly tournaments turn athletes into money-making vehicles, and their fitness is exploited. In tactics, there are indices that deceive above all, and we must be wary of them. In boxing, the most deceptive index is raw punch volume. Someone who throws more does not necessarily win. Someone who throws less does not necessarily lose. Only landed punches are trustworthy, and even they are only half trustworthy, because they depend on body region and power.

That is why I always advise young people who want to analyze combat sports to start by sitting alone and counting three consecutive fights, without talking to anyone. Do not follow the scorecard. Do not listen to commentators. Count for yourself, compare for yourself, draw your own conclusions, then compare with the scorecard. That comparison will teach you what no book can.

I believe that in a few years, a new generation of Vietnamese combat analysts will emerge. They will not need a license. They will need only a notebook and a patient eye. They will bring numbers to the audience and, through that, give Vietnamese martial arts something it lacks: the ability to look at itself accurately.

Between a 144Hz monitor and a 200m lane, I see the same rhythm. That rhythm also appears in the ring, in every punch, every step, every breath. The only question is whether we bother to listen.

The story of the teacher in Bac Ninh

There is one person I met that night I have never forgotten. He was an old coach, gray-haired, sitting in the top row, holding a worn-out notebook. During the break between two fights, I sat beside him and asked what he was writing. He handed me the notebook. On every page, he had meticulously recorded his student's punch count in each training session, along with the number of rest intervals, the minutes of focus, and even mental state in a few short words.

I asked him why he had done this for so many years without anyone knowing. He smiled and said: "Because I want to know whether the girl is improving. My eyes can be wrong. My notebook cannot".

Those words followed me throughout the journey. A small notebook in the hands of an old teacher in a provincial town did what an entire martial arts culture is struggling to do: record the truth systematically. He had no modern equipment. He had no professional software. He had only one principle: if you want to know the truth, count for yourself.

I tell his story to stress that datafication is not an expensive technological revolution. It is an attitude. It is one person deciding that his feeling is not enough, that he needs an objective tool to check that feeling.

In a martial arts culture where transmission often rests on the master's authority, this attitude is revolutionary. It tells the younger generation: trust the master, but also count for yourself. Learn the master's soul, but also record the body of numbers. For a soul without a body easily drifts, and a body without a soul easily falls.

The smallest punch and the biggest question

I want to end this counting journey with a question I do not have a full answer to.

If one day Vietnamese martial arts has a complete database, every number, every analysis, will we become a stronger martial arts culture? I believe the answer is yes. But will we still be ourselves? That answer I dare not be sure of.

What I am sure of is this: the road there begins with the smallest act, the smallest punch. The punch a young fighter throws in his first training session, uncounted, unrecorded, remembered only by his body. If we teach him to record it, we have given him a gift greater than any medal: the ability to understand himself.

I believe in that, and I believe in doing it by hand. One pen. One notebook. One fight. One late night in Bac Ninh. From there, a new way of seeing Vietnamese martial arts can begin.

Because in the end, between the deafening roar of a whole stadium and the quiet number in a small notebook, the number always stays longer. The roar fades when the lights go out. The number stays, bright until dawn.

So the final question I want to leave: have you ever counted a fight you love, with your own hands?

If not, try once. You will be surprised how much you have missed. And you will understand why I, across sixteen years, still cannot stop counting.