The Empty Cell on the Data Sheet

In the men's singles final of the National Table Tennis Championship, in the fifth set, with the score at 9-9, there was a rally the head referee dared not call. He raised his hand and summoned the assistant referee. The two looked at each other for a few seconds, then bent over the paper scoresheet. On the arena's electronic board, that point appeared as a single dash. A dash. Not the number 10, not the number 9. Just a blank, marked as a blank, a way of saying: here, the human being does not yet know. The next morning, I opened my phone. The dash had become a number. Three different outlets gave three different numbers. One wrote 10-9. One wrote 11-9. One, more concise, simply wrote "won by a margin." None of them had been in the arena that night. None of them called the referee. They only needed a number to fill the blank, and they chose the number that sounded most plausible to the reader's eye. Fifteen years in this trade, I have learned that the hardest part of sports writing is not writing about what I know. The hardest part is preserving a blank when the whole world around me is impatient to fill it. That night, on an almost empty stand, I sat alone with my notebook. Below, the two players still stood at the table, waiting for a decision. I remember writing exactly four words in my notebook: "no data yet." Those four words later became a kind of mantra throughout my career. In Nha Trang, where I live, the sea is calm in the morning and changes colour in the afternoon. My trade is the same: in the morning people need decisive numbers, in the afternoon they need stories with soul. Between those two demands lies a blank, and I choose to stand inside that blank. THE DASH AND THE HUNGER FOR NUMBERS Vietnamese sport over the past decade has passed through a quiet transformation. Competitions from national to provincial level are now recorded electronically. Every rally, every metre run, every serve can be tagged with a number. Live-data platforms have sprung up like mushrooms, and behind them lies a larger ecosystem: betting apps, prediction algorithms, automated news aggregators run by machines. I am not against numbers. I live by numbers. But I once witnessed something that made me shudder: when live data becomes merchandise sold to betting companies, accuracy is subordinated to speed. A wrong number delivered thirty seconds ahead of a rival is worth more than a correct number delivered ten minutes late. That is the darkest side effect of the digitalisation of sport, and it never appears in any press release. I once sat beside a live-data operator at a domestic tournament. On his screen a message line ran continuously: the people on the other end were pushing for numbers. Each time a rally ended, a clock started. He had fifteen seconds to enter it. If he was slow, someone else entered it first. I asked him what happened if he was not sure. He smiled and said: "Nobody pays for uncertainty." In 2026, I had just started at an online sports outlet. During a World Cup group-stage match in Russia, between Nigeria and Argentina, while commentating live, I mispronounced the name of goalkeeper Francis Uzoho as "U-zo-ho" three times in the first half. A colleague laughed. But that laugh taught me more than a compliment. Shame at the Russia World Cup taught me that ignorance is a starting point. I spent the following month rewatching the footage of twenty group-stage matches, taking notes on tactics and on how to pronounce the players' names in each country. I built my own data sheet covering more than three hundred players, with tactical diagrams and even how they stood before the microphone after a match. Since then, before writing a name or a number, I always check it again. The ritual of "rewatching the footage" became a mandatory part of my work. It is not glamorous. No one gives an award for sitting alone, rewinding a rally thirty times to confirm that the server tossed the ball a little higher than the rules allow. But that ritual is what separates a writer from a copying machine. TECHNIQUE THAT IS NOT ON THE SCORESHEET In 2026, while still a final-year student in Nha Trang, I followed a friend to the National Athletics Championship at Thong Nhat Stadium. There I discovered a nineteen-year-old athlete named Pham Thi Hong Le, who ran the 10,000 metres with an unusual "ground-strike" technique. No one noticed her, because she finished seventh. On the results board she was a small line of text at the very bottom. I wrote about that long-distance girl before I understood what endurance meant. I wrote about her training with a nearly forgotten coach in Dak Lak, about the mornings she ran along a red-earth road before dawn. The piece was shared by a student sports page. That was the first time I felt the deep connection between tactics and human fate. What still troubles me to this day is this: on that day's scoresheet, Pham Thi Hong Le's "ground-strike" technique did not exist. No column recorded that she placed her heel on the ground in a way unlike anyone else. No number measured the patience in each stride. The scoresheet recorded only the placing, and the placing said she came seventh. That is why I no longer write in a dry, statistical style. I began to dig into the personal story behind every record, seeking the meaning of a training session or a new tactic instead of merely describing results. But I also learned the opposite: a story without numbers easily drifts into vague emotion. Between those two extremes, I choose to stand in the middle, where number and human being coexist. In table tennis, where I spend most of my professional time, the data gap is even wider. A national championship has hundreds of matches, but detailed figures on point-win rate on serve, win rate in long rallies, or the placement distribution of each player are almost never published. We know who won, but we do not know why. I once sat for three straight days in an arena to hand-record every rally of a young player. I counted how often he served short, served long, how often he chose a backhand loop instead of a forehand loop on decisive points, how often he retreated far from the table when pressured. Those three days gave me one page of data, and that one page told me more than all the aggregated news reports online combined. When I asked whether anyone else was doing similar work, the answer was no. Not because people are lazy. Because they have never thought it was worth recording. Vietnamese table tennis has talented players in both categories, and SEA Games matches we win or lose by a few fragile points. But when the match ends, all that remains is the final result, while the way we won or lost dissolves like smoke. That gap is not a table-tennis matter alone. It is the story of the entire Vietnamese sports scene in disciplines that television does not court. Athletics has a queen of the SEA Games, an athlete who has won multiple golds in a single edition, yet detailed data on her speed distribution across each lap is hardly kept systematically. Basketball, volleyball, swimming all have similar gaps. NUMBERS WITH NO PATRON I want to be clear about one mechanism. Data does not generate itself. It needs someone to pay for it. In disciplines with money, with television, with big sponsors, data is generated continuously, cared for, archived. In disciplines with little money, data is generated chaotically, then disappears. There are three layers in that chain. The upstream layer is equipment, youth development, training facilities. The midstream layer is events, federations, clubs. The downstream layer is media, commerce, and derivative markets. When the upstream does not record, the midstream has nothing to pass on, and the downstream is forced to invent something to sell. I have seen this very clearly in how people talk about a racket. When a player switches to a new rubber, the whole table-tennis community gossips that it is the cause of a new run of form. But almost no one has the data to prove it. There are no comparative figures on spin speed, control, or point-win rate before and after the switch. So the story of the racket becomes a legend, not an analysis. This is where I must be most careful in my trade. Because a legend is easier to hear than a table of figures. A story about changing a racket, changing shoes, changing coach, is always more appealing than a data table saying: we do not have enough sample size to conclude. But that very caution is what distinguishes a serious writer from an entertaining one. THE TRAP OF COMPLETENESS In football, I have a lingering suspicion about one venerated number: the goalkeeper's distribution. People count a goalkeeper's accurate passes, highlight it on screen, turn it into a measure of modernity. Meanwhile the basic reflex, the thing that made a keeper's name, is pushed into a secondary role. A goalkeeper with declining reflexes but good passing still commands a high transfer fee. The market has learned to love the number that is easy to measure over the number that matters. This is a form of blank filled wrongly: people cannot easily measure reflex, so they choose to measure what is easy to measure, then declare that the easy-to-measure thing is the important thing. Every blockbuster transfer is a tragedy wrapped in three digits. Those three digits are sometimes born from a blank: a club does not disclose the fee, an agent says "a record number," a journalist needs a headline. And so a number is born, not to describe the truth, but to fill a gap. Here I want to speak of a trap that even serious writers easily fall into: the trap of completeness. When we look at a data sheet, our instinct is to want every cell to hold a number. A blank cell makes us uneasy, as if it were an error. But in analysis, a blank is often the most honest piece of information. It says: nobody knows here yet, and an honest writer will leave it exactly as it is. I have a personal rule: when the source material contains no information, the correct conclusion is "insufficient information to assess." It sounds simple, but it is hard to practise. Because society rewards certainty. A decisive answer, even a wrong one, is usually received more warmly than a cautious answer, even a right one. Readers want to know who won; they do not want to hear that nobody yet knows who won. But that very caution is what protects the craft of journalism. When I write "no data yet," I am not appearing weak. I am holding a place for the truth, so that later, when the data arrives, it has somewhere to stand. 2026 AND THE LONE RUNNING TRACK In 2026, when stadiums closed, I fell into a serious emotional crisis. No events, no stands, no applause. My work, which rested on observing people in their most tense moments, suddenly lost its material. In that void, I turned to three track-and-field athletes training alone at home. A hurdler named Nguyen Van Toan had built himself a wooden frame on a rooftop in Hanoi to practise technique. I wrote the series "Lone Running Track," recording each morning training session through video calls. That series won an annual journalism award. In 2026, I ran alone and understood why athletes fear the night. When there is no audience, when there is no scoresheet, when no one confirms that your training session is real, a person begins to doubt himself. The athlete's loneliness mirrors the writer's loneliness. Both of us stood before a reality unlike the ideal, and both had to choose: continue, or let go. Since then I have shifted fully to a more contemplative style, emphasising the quiet space between seasons. But I also remind myself of another trap: contemplation easily slides into vagueness. Whenever a paragraph of mine starts to soar, I force it to anchor to a number, a stroke, a specific morning. Philosophy without data is just steam. DEPTH AND DIVERSITY There is an old argument I have always found interesting: should one go deep in a single sport, or understand many? People usually praise depth. A table-tennis expert, an athletics expert. But I belong to the type that believes diversity is where discoveries hide. When I place side by side a table-tennis player's serve and a distance runner's stride, I see the same question: how do you create a difference in a thousandth of a second? Table tennis teaches me rhythm and deception. Athletics teaches me patience and the distribution of strength. Swimming teaches me to be at home in water in a way land cannot teach. Placing the sports side by side, I understand each one more deeply. That is why I call myself a polymath. I build cross-discipline narratives between different events, seeking the shared laws of human limits. Because the limits of a human being do not change with the sport. They merely wear different clothes. But here is the counter-intuitive point: diversity without depth becomes superficiality. The difficulty is not in knowing many sports, but in being deep enough in each to see the common ground. It took me many years to understand that, to compare two sports seriously, I must understand each deeply enough not to say nonsense about either. And this is the counter-intuitive view I want to defend: in a sports scene starved of data, chasing the completeness of data may be a bigger mistake than accepting the shortfall. People believe more data is always better. But wrong data, fabricated data, data born only to fill a blank, does more harm than no data at all. An honest blank is better than a deceitful full cell. WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE NEED In recent years I have spent more time at youth tournaments. There I see a new generation of athletes, born in an age when everything is measured. They grow up with phones in hand, with heart-rate apps, with numbers about sleep and step counts. But there is one worrying thing: they are taught to trust numbers, without being taught to doubt numbers. When a young coach hands me a data sheet about his student, I often ask one question: "Where does this number come from?" The answer is usually silence. That is why I believe teaching the young generation how to read data matters no less than teaching them technique. An athlete who knows that a number can be wrong, can be missing, can be bent, will be stronger than an athlete who believes blindly in numbers. And a sports scene that knows how to keep its blanks will mature more than one that only knows how to fill them. I once sat with a group of young coaches in central Vietnam. We talked about why they did not keep records of their training sessions. The answer was: record for what, since no one reads it. It is a vicious circle. No one reads because no one records. No one records because no one reads. To break it, someone must begin, someone who records because he believes the act of recording has value in itself. AN ABANDONED STAND STILL KEEPS THE OLD APPLAUSE I still keep the habit of visiting empty arenas. There, there is no cheering, no floodlight, no one to confirm that a match ever took place. But in that space I hear what a crowded stand cannot give me: the bounce of the ball, the squeak of shoes on the floor, the breathing. Fans may not enter the arena, but the arena never lacks them. Their memory remains in every scratch on the floor, in every chalk mark left on the running lane, in every dent a powerful loop left on the table. The sports writer, in turn, has the duty to preserve those memories as honestly as possible. But I must also warn myself. The "abandoned stand" mood can seep in too deeply, leading a writer to lose himself in recollection and forget the present. I have learned to set myself a concrete time marker: right now, where is that athlete, what is she training, what difficulty is she facing. Recollection without a present is only nostalgia. And nostalgia, however beautiful, helps no one improve. There are also moments when indignation rises. When I see a fabricated number spreading, when I see an athlete treated unfairly by a wrong line of news, I want to write at once, write hard. But I remember the advice of an old teacher: write the emotional draft first, let it cool overnight, then revise. Resistance through data is stronger than resistance through anger, because data can stand after the anger fades. THE BLANK AS A PROMISE I return to the dash in that final. The next day, I called the referee. He told me he was not sure, and he chose not to record a number he was not sure of. I asked if he feared criticism. He smiled: "I do. But recording it wrong is worse." That sentence, to me, is the definition of integrity. In a world where numbers are produced faster than truth, the referee chose to keep a blank. He did not know he was applying a principle it took me fifteen years to name. I wonder: what would happen if every sports writer preserved their blanks? There would be fewer headlines. Fewer sensational numbers. Fewer brief fads. But there would be more truth, and truth lasts longer than a fad. I think of Pham Thi Hong Le, the long-distance girl of that year. She still runs, though no longer at her peak. On the results boards of recent races, her name may no longer appear. But her "ground-strike" technique still exists, in the memory of a writer who sat in that stand in 2026 and recorded it. A blank was kept, and because of that, something was not lost. SPORT AS A COMMON LANGUAGE Sport is a common language. A serve in Nha Trang and a stride in Dak Lak, a goal in Russia and a wooden frame on a Hanoi rooftop, all say the same thing: human beings always seek to surpass their own limits. The writer's task is not to make that story louder, but to make it truer. I do not know how many more years I will write. But I know I will keep keeping my blanks. Because a blank kept in the right place is a promise to the reader: that when I give you a number, that number has been faced by me, verified by me, paid for by me. And if one day you read a report and see a gap carefully marked, please do not think the writer was lazy. Perhaps that person is holding a place for you to stand.