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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