Indonesia Under John Herdman: Four Local Strikers Gone and the Invisible Chessboard in Jakarta

On September 14, 2026, in Jakarta, a list of 23 names was published. In the attacking line, four familiar names vanished: Hokky Caraka, Ramadhan Sananta, Septian Bagaskara, Eksel Runtukahu. At the same time, three new names appeared in the offensive zone: Mitchell Baker, Luke Vickery, Dion Markx.

No press conference explained it. No statement called it a revolution. There was only a list, a Canadian coach, and a national team about to enter the 2026 ASEAN Cup with a front line redesigned from the ground up.

I read that list three times. The first time to count. The second time to cross-check it against the May call-up for the FIFA Series and FIFA Matchday. The third time to find out who was left at the number 9 position. The answer: only Ole Romeny is an established striker, and behind him sits a gap nobody has filled.

Four names leaving in a single afternoon is not a personnel decision. It is a declaration about the physical profile the head coach wants at the front of his team.

Context: a machine that has been running for years

Indonesia has pursued the naturalization of players of Indonesian descent abroad — mainly from the Dutch-Indonesian community — for years. This is not John Herdman's invention. It is an organized program with a legal team and a roadmap for FIFA eligibility confirmation under Article 7 (change of association). Every called-up name is the end of a paperwork chain completed long before.

What Herdman did differently is not about calling naturalized players. It is about proportion. He pushed that proportion to a level none of his predecessors dared: Ole Romeny, Thom Haye, Ragnar Oratmangoen, Dean James, Mitchell Baker, Luke Vickery, Dion Markx.

There is a detail easy to miss: Jens Raven and Mauro Zijlstra were not called. Both young naturalized forwards were once seen as the future of the attack. Their absence, alongside the exclusion of four local strikers, leaves a void in the middle — between what was discarded and what has not yet been used.

And behind them, Indonesia enters the tournament without captain Jay Idzes, the Sassuolo defender injured while playing for his club against Juventus.

Four names gone. A captain gone. A generation of local strikers pushed aside. And a coach telling the press the only thing he can promise is that his players will give everything they have.

The core: how the striker profile changed

Start with the comparison of two player types.

The local Indonesian strikers — Hokky Caraka, Ramadhan Sananta, Septian Bagaskara, Eksel Runtukahu — represent a typical Southeast Asian profile: shorter, quick in short distances, strong in physical duels, effective inside the box on crosses from wide areas. This type suits a possession game at moderate tempo, where the striker receives the ball with teammates already around him.

The type Herdman added — Mitchell Baker — belongs to a different ecosystem. A player raised in European football is trained in three things the local Indonesian striker does not have: off-ball running intensity, the ability to sustain pressure for 90 minutes, and positional discipline inside a pressing system.

Those three things sound abstract. They are far more concrete than that.

A European striker in a pressing system is usually asked to block the centre-back's horizontal passing lane at a specific angle, not to chase the ball. If he does it right, the centre-back is forced to play back to the goalkeeper or into a wide channel already covered. If he is one step wrong, the whole structure behind him collapses.

Pressing is not about running faster than your opponent; it is about running at the exact moment they stop thinking.

That is why placing Mitchell Baker next to Ole Romeny is not merely creating competition. It creates a race for a physical standard. Romeny — who has held the number one striker role without a challenger for a long time — now faces someone with the same physical profile but nothing to lose.

For a coach, this is ideal. For a national team, it is a risk. While the striker competition is unresolved, the team has no fixed anchor in its attacking system. Who do the long balls target? Who do the right-wing crosses aim for? Who occupies the opponent's box on quick counters?

There is no answer right now. That is precisely the problem.

Wings and structure: redrawing the corridors

Looking only at the striker position tells half the story.

The other half lies on the flanks. Luke Vickery arrives as a wide option alongside Ragnar Oratmangoen, a player who can operate anywhere across the front line. Thom Haye remains as a deep-lying playmaker.

These three pieces say more than a headline about strikers.

The arrival of Vickery and Oratmangoen points to a wide attack built on one-on-one threat on the flanks and vertical balls rather than horizontal circulation. That maps onto two possible shapes: 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1.

In a 4-3-3, Herdman needs a holding midfielder strong enough to screen a back four, plus two box-to-box runners. With Haye in midfield he has a deep distributor, but he lacks a genuine destroyer.

In a 4-2-3-1, Herdman could pair Haye in central midfield and use a free attacking midfielder behind the striker. But that creates another demand: the number 10 must know when to drop to create space and when to push up to occupy the box. That is game-reading, not running.

And here is the key point the list does not state.

A 23-man squad is a blueprint on paper. The in-game formation is something else entirely. Between two teams, there is always an invisible chessboard in motion. That board is operated by versatile players like Oratmangoen — starting on the left, drifting inside on 30 minutes, switching to the right after a substitution. It is operated by a shape that shifts between 4-3-3 in possession and 4-5-1 out of it.

I spent many nights re-watching Morocco's matches under Walid Regragui before the 2026 World Cup. Three years later I still keep my notes: they shifted from 4-3-3 in possession to 5-4-1 in defence, and pressed for only three seconds when the ball was in the opponent's third. No more, no less.

Herdman does not have the squad to play like Morocco. But he is showing signs of following the same design logic: a shape that changes with the state of the ball.

Midfield and the forgotten fitness problem

There is one dimension Indonesian media barely mentions when debating local versus naturalized strikers.

The midfield.

Looking at the list, the central question is not who will score. The central question is who will hold the ball long enough for the attack to express its new physical profile.

In Southeast Asian regional matches, the average tempo is considerably lower than in European national team fixtures. That gives midfielders more time on the ball. But it also means duels happen in tighter spaces, with more players packed into a smaller area.

With a midfield built around Thom Haye and European-based players, Indonesia gains in passing under pressure. But it pays in reading the rhythm of Southeast Asian football, where games follow a different logic.

I have written before that a statistics table is only a map, and the real road lies between the numbers. Metrics like PPDA only tell you how intensely a team presses, not whether it presses in the right places. A team can post a very low PPDA and still be cut open in spaces the numbers never record.

That is why I do not put much faith in what the list promises. I put faith in what I see once the ball rolls.

The leadership vacuum and the returning-injury question

Jay Idzes' injury is the most important event of this call-up, and it has been overshadowed by the striker story.

A captain is not just a better player. He is the man who preserves the organizational rhythm between lines, handles internal friction, and resets the team's distances when it loses control. Losing him before a regional tournament is not losing a starting spot. It is losing an entire mental organizing system.

Herdman must appoint a new captain or move to collective leadership. Both carry cost. A new captain needs time to be accepted in the dressing room. Collective leadership needs time to agree on a single voice. In a tournament starting immediately, both cost time the team does not have.

Another case worth naming is Dean James, recalled after nearly a year out.

Here I hold a clear position and I will state it plainly: demanding that a player returning from a long injury layoff prove himself immediately is a physically cruel requirement, and it raises the probability of re-injury. A body needs time to readapt to top-level intensity. Tendons, muscles and the motor nervous system do not recover on a coaching staff's schedule.

If Dean James enters at the 60th minute in a high-tempo game, he faces risk in one of the most dangerous windows of a comeback: the first 20 to 40 minutes of high-intensity exposure, when the body has not adjusted but the mind is already in the match.

No article mentions this. That is exactly the problem.

Club versus country: Persib and ACL 2

Several Persib Bandung players are absent from this list because of the club's 2026/2027 AFC Champions League 2 schedule. Beckham Putra and Marc Klok are among those missing.

This is the intersection of club interest and national duty, evolving in a direction Southeast Asian football administrators should watch closely.

Under FIFA's International Match Calendar, clubs must release players for national teams inside designated windows. Outside those windows, the obligation does not exist. If the ASEAN Cup falls outside a FIFA window, Persib has the right to keep its players — and keeping them is a perfectly rational financial decision.

An ACL 2 campaign brings prize money, matchday revenue, and above all commercial value. Weigh that against a regional group-stage match outside a FIFA window, and any club keeps its players.

What matters is not that Persib withheld players. What matters is that Indonesian clubs are now financially strong and confident enough to refuse the national team. A decade ago that almost never happened. Now it happens quietly, in a line of a report about absentees.

In the long run, this is a structural shift in the power balance between clubs and federation in Indonesia. It is also a warning for building a national team on a narrow player pool: if two or three big clubs withhold players in the same window, the national team loses depth with no fast way to replace it.

Every contract is a chess game that began years earlier. This time, the club moved first.

The contrarian angle: the trap of the local-versus-naturalized binary

Indonesian media has framed this as a neat binary: local strikers out, naturalized strikers in, a new era begins.

That framing sells well, and it is wrong in one fundamental way.

Herdman did not drop four local strikers because they are local. He dropped them because their physical profile does not fit the pressing system he wants to build. If a local striker met the physical and positional demands, he would be called.

The real problem lies elsewhere, and it is far harder to solve.

The problem is that Indonesia has no domestic striker pipeline meeting the standard, and calling naturalized players is covering that gap rather than filling it.

Look at the list again. Four local strikers dropped. Two young naturalized forwards, Jens Raven and Mauro Zijlstra, also not called. What remains is one established striker, Ole Romeny, plus one newcomer with no international caps, Mitchell Baker.

That is not an attack built for the future. It is an attack built for now, with a single point of dependence in the most important position on the pitch.

If Romeny is injured in the first match, what is left? A Baker who has never played international football. An Oratmangoen who can play high but is not an instinctive striker. An improvised solution.

This is what analysts call single-point dependency risk. It appears in no statistics table. It surfaces only when you redraw the formation and ask: what happens if this piece disappears?

With Jay Idzes, the answer already exists. The captain disappears, and the team scrambles to replace him.

Execution blind spot: the final twenty minutes and the war of attrition

One factor changes how we read modern matches, and it is rarely mentioned in squad analysis.

Five substitutions.

In theory, five subs make deep squads stronger, because a coach can rotate, sustain intensity and change a game with high-quality bench options. In practice, it turns the last twenty minutes into a war of attrition.

When both teams have five subs, both can introduce fresh legs from the 65th minute. The result is that in the final twenty minutes, direct duels increase, tempo does not drop as it once did, and more space opens. The team with the deeper physical reserves wins this phase.

For a squad assembled from many new players who have never played together, this is the most dangerous phase. In fatigue, players lose the ability to make complex decisions. They revert to instinct. And the instinct of a collective that has not trained together long enough is individual instinct.

I learned this from one sleepless night.

In 2026 I watched Japan against Belgium in the World Cup round of 16 in Russia. Japan led by two goals. Then on 69 minutes Vertonghen headed one back. On 74, Fellaini equalized. On 94, Chadli finished a counterattack that started deep in Belgium's own half. I replayed those three goals until three in the morning.

What I realized was not about the three goals. It was about the window between the 60th and 69th minutes, when Japan's midfield lost its pressing capacity and no substitution came to compensate.

Minute 69 taught me this: a match does not belong to the team that leads, but to the one that reads the moment.

For Herdman, a similar question waits at the 65th minute of any given match. Whom will he bring on? To protect a result or to add a goal? And if the outcome depends on the team holding its structure for the final twenty minutes, can a freshly assembled collective sustain that structure?

Herdman's message and the art of lowering expectations

At the pre-tournament press conference, Herdman said: "I think we must promise that we will give everything we have." And: "That is the only thing we can promise the fans."

On the surface, it is a humble statement. Deeper down, it is a calculated expectation-management move.

A coach targeting the title talks about the title. A coach who knows his squad is still gelling talks about effort. Herdman chose words so precise you can measure the distance between them and the expectations of the national media.

He also stressed the players' commitment when wearing the Indonesia shirt. It is a small but telling detail. It shows the loyalty question around naturalized players has been raised before, and Herdman is handling it before it becomes a dressing-room issue.

Managing a group of Indonesia-born and Europe-born players is a question of identity-building, not of tactics. And identity is not built in a two-hour meeting.

What will shape how we read this team

I do not have enough data to say what formation Indonesia will play. There is not one competitive minute of this squad to measure pressing. No xG. No average position data. Nothing.

That is not a flaw of this article. It is a flaw of the moment. When a national team enters a tournament with a squad that has never played together, every analysis must begin with an admission: we are reading a blueprint, not a building.

What I do know is this.

When the first match kicks off, I will not look at the score. I will look at the window between the 60th and 75th minutes. I will watch whether Ole Romeny still blocks passing lanes, or has dropped into his old familiar position. I will watch who resets the defensive line after an opponent's corner. I will watch who Herdman's first substitute is, in which position, and for what purpose.

Those three observations will answer more questions than any statistics table.

Because a newly assembled collective always reveals its true nature in the sixtieth minute, when the head is tired and the legs only follow trained habit.

A thought to carry forward

If Indonesia wins the 2026 ASEAN Cup with this squad, the media will write that the naturalization strategy has been proven. If Indonesia exits in the semifinals, the same outlets will write that dropping four local strikers was the cause.

Both conclusions will be wrong in the same way. Both read results backwards into process, while the process lies elsewhere: in a federation choosing the shortest path to a result instead of the longest path to a system.

The question I leave behind is not whether Herdman was right to drop four local strikers. The question is: if those four strikers were not good enough for a regional tournament, where does Indonesia's domestic striker development system stand in this picture?

And will anyone dare answer that once the final whistle has already been written into history?