Healthy competition: Young people take part in a friendly football match organised by Football For All in Viet Nam, a Hue-based NGO. — VNS Photo Jari-Pekka Pesonen

by Jak Phillips

Under the blazing sun just outside of Ha Noi, 14 young men are playing a fiercely intense football match. As temperatures rise and sweat pours freely, one player is brutally upended by his opposite number, crashing to the ground and sending huge clouds of dust swirling like a rhino felled in the Serengeti. With the stakes high, teams closely matched and competitiveness reaching fever pitch, one strongly suspects this crude foul could prove the catalyst for a 14-man brawl. Instead, the players involved simply shrug, shake hands and pass the ball back to the goalkeeper to restart the match.

To an Englishman, such as myself, this scenario is foreign in every sense. Brought up under the blood, sweat and tears example of the English Premier League, I have been taught that personal conduct and fair play are secondary to obtaining three points and that victory should be achieved by any means necessary, regardless of a game's importance.

In my 15 years as an amateur and semi-professional footballer, I have seen referees assaulted, supporters staging 50-man free-for-alls in the middle of the centre circle (while the game was going on) and perhaps most memorably, a goalkeeper using a corner flag to scythe down opposition aggressors like some sort of metrosexual Jedi Knight. As preposterous as this all may seem – and let's be clear, it is – behaviour like this is all too often dismissed as "part of the game", while acting like a caged beast and committing what is tantamount to assault is frequently ascribed as simply "letting your passions boil over".

And when you look at the example that English players have to follow, the much-revered yet increasingly maligned English Premier League, it's all too easy to see why savage behaviour is the norm. With the seemingly endless fall-out of the Suarez-Evra and Terry-Ferdinand affairs, two incidents where players were racially abused in front of millions of televised viewers in the 21st century, football has once again been hitting the headlines for the wrong reasons.

The England captain used to be a nationwide role model for young children, a hero to look up to and an example to follow. When you consider England have just replaced former captain John Terry (a man who among other misdemeanours, drunkenly mocked US tourists in the aftermath of 9/11, was charged with assault of a nightclub bouncer, had an affair with his best friend's girlfriend and was found guilty of racial abuse) with Wayne Rooney (a man who is reported to have slept with prostitutes while his wife was pregnant, been sent off numerous times for reckless attacks and once celebrated a goal on live TV by shouting expletives into a camera), one can only hope that the nation's children have found a new figure to idolise.

Every week they see pampered footballers dive, cheat and hack their way to ridiculous sums of money that the likes of you and I can only dream of. And away from the players, the children see fans (sometimes their parents) chanting abhorrent abuse from the stands, or in the extreme case recently, invading the pitch to assault an opposition player. With the mass-exposure that English football enjoys through 24-hour media coverage, it's fair to say that Pavlov's Dog wouldn't be the only one to pick up some of these superstars unsavoury habits.

It's hardly fair to blame the children and amateur players for attempting to emulate their idols, so the example has to come from the top. With its elevated detachment from regular society and the vast sums of money involved these days, whether the Premier League's stars are even capable of changing their ways is another question entirely.

But one thing's for certain, they could certainly learn something from Vietnamese attitudes to football. It's high time the stars dropped their fists and learned to shrug their shoulders. — VNS