The Curse


 

Listen: I want to tell you about a curse. Not the kind you read about in those pulp horror magazines your mother used to hide under the bathroom sink, but something worse. Something real. The kind that gets into a nation’s bones and won’t let go, no matter how many prayers you say or how many times you tell yourself this time will be different.

The Indonesian National Team—and yeah, I know what you’re thinking, football, really Riyan? But stick with me here—they’re standing on the edge of something that October in 2025. Two games. King Abdullah Sports City Stadium in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Beat Saudi Arabia. Beat Iraq. Simple as that. Simple as breathing. Simple as not thinking about the thing under your bed at night.

Except it’s never been simple. Not once in nearly ninety years.

The Ghost in the Machine

The thing about curses—and I’ve written enough about them to know—is they always have an origin point. A moment when everything goes wrong. For Indonesia, that moment might’ve been 1938, when they played as the Dutch East Indies and got stomped 6-0 by Hungary at the World Cup. That was bad, sure. Humiliating. The kind of loss that makes you want to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt in after you.

But it wasn’t the curse. Not yet.

No, the real curse—the one with teeth—it started taking shape in 1956 at the Melbourne Olympics. Picture it: A team that wasn’t even supposed to be there, stepping onto the pitch because Taiwan withdrew. Replacement players. Second-fiddles. The kind of team that gets forgotten before they even tie their cleats.

They played the Soviet Union to a 0-0 draw through 120 minutes of hell. One hundred and twenty minutes of holding the line against Lev Yashin—Lev Yashin, the Black Spider himself—and Igor Netto and Eduard Streltsov. FIFA President Sir Stanley Rous called their defense “almost perfect.” Almost perfect.

Remember those words. They’re important.

The replay? 4-0 loss. But that first game, that draw—it planted something. A seed of hope that would grow into something twisted and thorny, something that would strangle Indonesian football for generations.

When Politics Kills Dreams

May 12, 1957. Ikada Stadium in Jakarta. The air thick and wet the way it gets in tropical cities, the kind of humidity that makes your shirt stick to your back like a second skin. Indonesia beat China 2-0. Both goals from a guy named Ramang—one right after halftime, another in the 35th minute. The crowd went wild. They could taste it. The 1958 World Cup. Sweden. The whole beautiful dream of it.

They lost the second leg in Beijing 3-4, but scraped through on goal difference after a 0-0 draw in Yangon. One more round. That’s all. One more round and they’d be there.

But here’s where it gets interesting—and by interesting, I mean the kind of thing that makes you want to punch a wall. Indonesia was grouped with Israel. And President Sukarno, positioning Indonesia as a symbol of anti-colonialism, forbade the national team from playing against Israel. Wouldn’t allow it. Not on principle, not on any terms.

FIFA awarded Israel an automatic victory. Indonesia’s dream ended. Not with a loss on the pitch, but with politics. With principle. With a decision made in an office somewhere far from the grass and the sweat and the hope.

That’s when the curse really dug in. That’s when it got comfortable.

The Penalty That Killed a Generation

February 26, 1976. Let me set the scene for you the way I know how.

Senayan Stadium. 120,000 people packed in like sardines, all of them believing—really believing—that this was it. This was the moment. Indonesia had beaten Malaysia 2-1 under Dutch coach Wiel Coerver, a man who’d brought discipline and tactics to a team that needed both. Now they faced North Korea for a spot in the Montreal Olympics.

The match went scoreless through 90 minutes. Through extra time. Through 120 minutes of torture. Then came penalties. The kind of moment where everything goes quiet in your head except for your own heartbeat, loud as a drum in your ears.

4-4. Sudden death. Suaib Rizal steps up. Striker for PSM and Persija. Good player. The kind of guy who’d made that kick a thousand times in practice.

He missed.

The stadium went silent. Not the kind of silence where you can hear a pin drop—that’s bullshit, by the way, nobody ever really hears pins dropping. No, this was the silence of 120,000 people having their hearts ripped out at the same time. The silence of a dream dying.

That miss planted something in the Indonesian football psyche. A sickness. The sports writers started calling it “mental collapse.” The players who came after, they could feel it. This weight of history pressing down on their shoulders, whispering in their ears: You’re going to fail. You always fail. That’s what you do.

The Genius Who Couldn’t Save Them

The 1980s brought Sinyo Aliandoe, a tactical genius with a calm demeanor who assembled a golden generation. Bambang Nurdiansyah, Herry Kiswanto, Rully Nere, Zulkarnaen Lubis. Names that mattered. Players who could play.

They dominated their group in the 1986 World Cup qualifiers. Four wins, one draw, one loss. Topped the group. Started dreaming about facing Maradona’s Argentina in Mexico.

Then South Korea happened. 0-2 in Seoul. 1-4 in Senayan. 1-6 on aggregate. Dreams crushed like aluminum cans under a boot heel.

But here’s the kicker, the thing that’ll really get you: After those losses, Sinyo’s family received death threats. Death threats. Because a football team lost some games.

And Sinyo himself, he knew what was wrong. He told Tempo magazine: “Even though I was given full freedom to select players, there was still internal pressure. As long as this continues, Indonesian football will stay the same.”

He saw it. The rot. The corruption. The interference. He saw it all, clear as day, and he knew—knew—that it would keep happening. The curse wasn’t supernatural. It was bureaucratic. It was human. And that made it so much worse.

The Recent Wounds

May 2024. The U-23 team reached the semifinals of the AFC Asian Cup in Qatar. They’d beaten South Korea 11-10 on penalties—South Korea—and they were so close you could taste it. So close to the Olympics. So close to breaking the curse.

Uzbekistan beat them 2-0. Then they lost to Iraq 1-2 in extra time for third place. One more chance: an intercontinental playoff against Guinea.

Pierre Pibarot Stadium, Clairefontaine. May 9, 2024. A penalty in the 28th minute. Ilaix Moriba converts. Guinea wins 1-0.

Here’s the thing, though—and this is the kind of detail that makes you want to scream into the void—the foul had occurred outside the box. Outside. The referee pointed to the spot anyway. Coach Shin Tae-yong got sent off for protesting. The dream died. Again. Like it always does. Like it always does.

Unfulfilled since Melbourne 1956.

The Real Horror

So what’s the curse, really? What’s the monster lurking in the shadows?

It’s not supernatural. It’s not some vengeful spirit or ancient evil. It’s systemic failure. Bad governance producing flawed training. Flawed training producing fragile players. Fragile players collapsing under pressure.

Mental fragility. The August 2024 analysis showed it clear as daylight: Players panic under pressure, lose focus in crucial moments, commit fatal errors. Sometimes they feel inferior before the match even begins—creating a gap between strategy and execution that no amount of tactical genius can bridge.

The PSSI—the football association—is a mess. Unproductive officials. Lack of competent staff. Shortage of skilled coaches and referees. Minimal budgets for development. Poor planning. Worse supervision. Youth development suffering from low-quality competitions, poor funding, outdated coaching methods.

And then there’s Kanjuruhan. October 2022. 135 people dead in a stadium tragedy. One hundred and thirty-five. FIFA nearly dropped the hammer. The darkest side of Indonesian football exposed: no safety, no oversight, no accountability.

Each failure met not with reform, but with quick fixes. Band-aids on a severed artery. The cycle repeats. Always repeats.

October 9 and 12, 2025

So here we are. Two games in Jeddah. Two chances to make history. To break the curse.

But the thing about curses—real curses, the kind that dig into institutions and cultures and psyches—they don’t break easily. They don’t break cleanly. Sometimes they don’t break at all.

If Indonesia fails to reach the 2026 World Cup, it won’t be bad luck. It won’t be fate. It’ll be the natural consequence of a disease that’s plagued their football for generations. The rot that Sinyo saw. The pressure that broke Suaib Rizal. The interference and corruption and incompetence that’s been there all along, lurking beneath the surface like something waiting in the dark.

Still. Still.

Beneath all the rubble of failure, hope remains. It always does. That’s the thing about hope—it’s stubborn. Persistent. Even when it shouldn’t be. Even when it’s been proven wrong time after time after time.

Maybe this time, history will finally side with them. Maybe this time, PSSI will truly, finally, reform.

Maybe.

But I’ve been writing horror stories long enough to know: Sometimes the monster wins. Sometimes the curse doesn’t break. Sometimes “almost perfect” is all you get, and you spend the rest of your life wondering what perfect might have felt like.

Sometimes “almost qualified” is just another way of saying “not good enough.”

And the clock is ticking.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

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