Farewell to the Local Strikers: Indonesia's Era Under John Herdman Has Already Changed

Minute 63 at Mapei, and the squad list read out in Jakarta

On 13 September 2026, Sassuolo hosted Juventus at Mapei Stadium. In the 63rd minute, Jay Idzes planted his left foot, landed on his toes, and his left knee buckled. The captain of Indonesia's national team stayed down for around four minutes, then walked off unaided. No stretcher. No scream. Just a shrug from the home bench and a stadium that stood to applaud.

Fifteen hours later, in Jakarta, John Herdman read out 23 names for the 2026 ASEAN Cup. Jay Idzes was not among them. Neither were Hokky Caraka, Ramadhan Sananta, Septian Bagaskara or Eksel Runtukahu.

Four domestic strikers vanished in the same morning. Mitchell Baker appeared. Luke Vickery appeared. Dion Markx is set to play his first match for a country he has never lived in for more than six months. Dean James returns after nearly a year away. Marc Klok, who has worn this shirt across several coaching regimes, is absent.

It is a squad list. No doping samples. No balance sheet. No leaked transfer contract. But to me it is still a file, and every file has an underground capital. I only look for the road to it.

Context: a team with three layers

To read Herdman's 23 correctly, you have to see it as three layers stacked on each other. The first is the established core, mostly Europe-based, carried over from the FIFA Series and FIFA Matchday window in May 2026: Ole Romeny, Thom Haye, Ragnar Oratmangoen. This group supplies identity — high physical intensity, comfort under pressure, zonal discipline.

The second layer is the new or returning naturalised group: Dion Markx, Luke Vickery, Mitchell Baker, Dean James. Each name corresponds to a completed or nearly completed legal process, an undisclosed cost, and a question about integration time.

The third layer is what was cut: four domestic strikers and Marc Klok. This layer corresponds to no cost at all. That is precisely what makes it politically important.

Meanwhile, several Persib Bandung players are missing because the club still has fixtures in the AFC Champions League Two 2026/2027. That detail looks like scheduling. It is actually the single most revealing piece of evidence about the shifting power balance between Indonesia's national team and its clubs.

And above it all sits Herdman, who said the line I have heard a hundred times in my career: "I think we must promise that we will give everything we have. That is the only thing we can promise to the fans." That is not a target. That is a risk-transfer note.

The striking department: deliberate turnover, not accident

The most visible change is up front. For the first time under Herdman, Ole Romeny has direct competition for the starting striker role, after Mitchell Baker was called up.

Read as a news item, it is simple. Read alongside the simultaneous removal of four domestic strikers, it becomes a decision about player archetype, not about two weeks of form. All four dropped names share a profile: forwards developed inside Indonesia's domestic system, quick in the box, limited in long-range duels and in high-pressing structures. Baker offers the opposite: taller, wider in his movements, involved in the first line of pressure.

Herdman chose physicality and tactical discipline over instinctive finishing. It is a defensible bet with a price. If Romeny is injured or loses form, Indonesia has no striker who has scored at senior international level.

I have seen this structure before. In 2026, analysing 18 Derby County player loans between 2026 and 2026, the lesson was not that clubs collapse because of one bad contract, but because their structure rests on a single point of support. Football does not go bankrupt. Someone behind the scenes engineers the collapse to pick up the pieces. Here nothing has collapsed, but the design still has a single point of support at centre-forward.

Wings and a fluid structure

Luke Vickery is projected as a wide option alongside Ragnar Oratmangoen, who can play either flank and drop into a false-nine role. That gives Herdman a team capable of shape-shifting in-game rather than a fixed system. Fluid systems only work when players share the same tactical language, and that is not something a passport can buy.

Public data cannot help here. There is no expected-goals figure, no passes-allowed-per-defensive-action, no possession data for this new line-up. All anyone has is a list and inference. A list does not describe a structure. People assemble lists to speak on behalf of the truth they want told.

The leadership vacuum

Losing Jay Idzes is a two-layer shock. Professionally, Indonesia loses its Serie A centre-back, its set-piece organiser, and its first passer out of defence. Organisationally, the team loses its captain at the exact moment it has the most debutants. In a dressing room containing three groups — domestic, long-term naturalised, newly naturalised — the captain is the only bridge all three accept.

Teams that lose their captain rarely lose the first match. They lose the third, when the tense moments arrive and nobody steps forward. Tournament pressure does not show itself in the first minute. It shows itself in the 88th.

The cost of naturalisation

No Southeast Asian newsroom writes this section properly. Every naturalised player corresponds to a chain of costs: legal files, verification of source documents, federation legal department hours, travel and accommodation for FIFA meetings, and in many cases training compensation and solidarity mechanisms under international transfer rules.

None of this appears as a separate line in any federation's annual report. It is scattered across administrative costs, professional services, and external relations. With seven Europe-based players called in a single window, the scale is not small.

Money in sport shows up twice: once when it enters the account, and once when it appears in court. In Indonesia right now, we have only seen the first appearance, on the pitch.

Persib, ACL Two, and the club-country balance

The absence of Persib players is read by some as a lack of cooperation. That reading is economically wrong. For a club, the ACL Two brings prize money, broadcast revenue, sponsorship triggers and continental commercial value — all quantifiable. Releasing players for a regional tournament outside the FIFA international calendar brings no equivalent revenue. Clubs are not obliged to release players outside FIFA windows. Persib is behaving as a rational economic actor, not a saboteur.

This is the most important point in the whole story and it is almost entirely absent from emotional commentary. Indonesian clubs are becoming financially strong enough to prioritise continental football over the national team. Over the next decade, this will shape national-team squad depth more than any naturalisation debate.

Legal chains and mid-tournament risk

Every naturalised player must complete FIFA's change-of-association process. Errors are unlikely but the consequences are severe: a successful challenge could cost the team its place or the results of affected matches. With many files processed in a short window, pressure on the federation's legal department is real. Clean is not the same as transparent. One is a fragrance; the other is double-entry bookkeeping.

Indonesia as ASEAN's diaspora power

Southeast Asian football is splitting into three tiers: Thailand and Vietnam at the top, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore chasing, and Cambodia, Laos, Brunei and Timor-Leste developing. Indonesia is trying to jump tiers by mobilising its diaspora — the only country in the region with a European-origin community large enough to industrialise that strategy. Thailand and Vietnam cannot replicate it.

The advantage is real. But it only converts into results if the squad has time to learn to play together. Time is the one thing that cannot be naturalised.

The contrarian angle

"Selamat tinggal" — goodbye — is a media frame, not a strategy document. It sets up a binary of local versus naturalised that does not reflect the decision. Herdman did not drop four local strikers because they were born in Indonesia. He dropped them because they do not fit the archetype his system requires. If a domestic striker had the physicality and pressing capacity, he would be called regardless of passport.

Which means the real problem is not Herdman. It is a development system that has not produced that archetype. Blaming an individual is the easiest and most wrong way to handle a scandal. I learned that over years, and I still have to remind myself of it.

A second contrarian point: Persib withholding players is a sign of financial maturity, not indiscipline. A league where clubs can protect their continental interests is a league on the rise. The consequence is that the national team must learn to work with clubs rather than summon them.

A third: Herdman's "give everything" line is expectation management, calculated and deliberate. He is lowering the bar from "champions" to "maximum effort" before the media raises it. But that also raises a counter-question: if internal expectations were already lowered, why create a political gamble by cutting four domestic strikers right before the tournament? A coach confident in results would not generate that wave. That assumption may be disproven within weeks.

What is actually being measured

I will not predict whether Indonesia win. Predicting without three layers of evidence is recklessness, and I learned that lesson in 2026 when a 4,000-word investigation into Russian football doping data was rejected for lacking direct proof. I filed it away, and four years later it became a link in a Qatar 2026 series.

What I can say is that the 2026 ASEAN Cup is measuring three things that do not appear on the scoreboard: the integration speed of the new players, the defensive organisation without Jay Idzes, and Ole Romeny's ability to carry the burden as a single point of support.

Open ending

When Jay Idzes left the pitch at Mapei, he did not look up at the stands. He looked at the grass, walked straight into the tunnel, and did not look back. A centre-back with a knee injury usually knows the outcome before the doctor speaks.

Fifteen hours later, his name was not on the list. Neither were the four domestic strikers, on a morning none of them played.

If I leave one thought for Indonesian football, it is this: the true cost of the naturalisation strategy is not in passports. It is in the academies left unfilled over the next decade. If the Dutch pipeline slows, the national team will need a domestic generation trained to a new archetype — and that generation must start training today.

Methodology

This article is built on Indonesia's 23-man squad list for the 2026 ASEAN Cup, published on 14 September 2026, and John Herdman's statements at the announcement. I did not have access to wage data, naturalisation contracts, or detailed tactical data at the time of writing. All cost estimates are labelled as inferences from FIFA's regulatory structure, not verified figures. Where I do not know, I say so. That is the whole difference between analysis and speculation.