Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I'd like to talk about an interview with Park Hang-seo, the South Korean coach who was in charge of the Vietnamese national football team from 2017 until early 2023. I watched it on television at my parents' house in Nam Định around the time he stepped down, during a long farewell programme. I'm not a huge football fan, to be honest, but my father is, and he'd announced that nobody was allowed to change the channel. The conversation went through an interpreter, which slowed it down in a way I quite liked. As far as I remember, he spent a lot of time on the under-23 final in Changzhou in 2018, the one played in heavy snow, which Vietnam lost at the very end of extra time. He described how the players had barely seen snow before, and how he told them afterwards not to hang their heads because they had given everything. He also talked about smaller things, like getting used to Vietnamese food and the well-known photo of him massaging a player's foot, which he seemed slightly embarrassed about. What struck me was how little credit he took. Each time the presenter praised him, he steered the answer back to the players or his assistants. At one point my father, who never compliments anybody, said, 'That man understands Vietnamese people better than our own coaches do.' I felt unexpectedly moved. Here was a foreigner in his sixties, speaking through a translator, and half the country regarded him as an uncle. It made me think that respect doesn't really depend on language. It also made me go back and watch that snowy final again, even though I knew exactly how it would end.