John Herdman Erases Fourteen Names: Indonesia Calls Home Its Overseas Sons, Leaving Persib Behind

Night in Bandung, after the rain, people read the squad list on their phones and no one said anything. Not out of anger. Surprise had gone first, leaving a gap that Persib supporters in this city had grown used to — the gap of a name that should have been there, but wasn't. John Herdman has erased fourteen names from the Indonesia national team for the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026. Five of them wear the Persib Bandung shirt. One of them is Sandy Walsh, the right-back who spent months running the flank under the red-and-white shirt, now excluded from the list due to injury. Another is Marc Klok, the midfielder that Indonesians for years called, fondly, the heart of the midfield. The third is Eliano Reijnders, young, just called up, just starting to believe he would stay, also outside now. The remaining two names belong to Persib, and this list made the whole of Bandung sit down, quiet. I read that list in an apartment in Shenzhen, where I have lived for ten years. Outside the window, the city keeps shining, keeps running, keeps believing that everything has a price and every price is worth it. Inside the page, a national team is rearranging itself, and I realize I have seen this scene before. Not in Indonesia. In Shanghai. In 2026, I was 27, a mid-level staffer at a new sports platform in Shenzhen. I was assigned to write about Carlos Tevez arriving at Shanghai Shenhua on a forty-million-euro-a-season contract. Tevez wore number 32, played twenty matches, scored four goals, and I followed him from his first training session to the day he left the team in January 2026. I found a man who missed home, was silent, and by October only walked on the pitch. I had the statistical tools to write about performance, but I chose to write about a tired god. Colleagues criticized the piece as lacking tactics, and I doubted myself for three weeks. That story isn't directly related to Indonesia. But it is related to how I read lists like this one. A national-team list is not just a collection of names. It is a map of decisions that were made without anyone saying them aloud. The erased names are the real storytelling. And in Bandung, fourteen names were just erased. Five of them wear the same club colour. We love a team the way we love a poem — not for the meaning, but for the rhythm. Indonesia's rhythm before the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026 has changed. The question is not who was erased, but what the new rhythm will sound like when the match begins. John Herdman arrived in Indonesia with a CV heavy enough to sit in this chair. He had led the Canadian women's national team to two Olympic Games and medals, and then brought the Canadian men's team back to a World Cup after a thirty-six-year absence. He is a man who knows how to rebuild teams that have been sleeping. But Canada and Indonesia do not share a football climate. Canada is a country with a North American physical foundation, where young players are developed in the college system and MLS. Indonesia is an archipelago with hundreds of small clubs, a national league full of heat but lacking sustainability, and a tradition of expectation so severe that it becomes crushing every time the national team steps onto the pitch. Herdman knows this. Cutting fourteen players in a single announcement is a wordless statement: the previous AFF Cup version had reached its ceiling, and he wants a different ceiling. Here is what the list reveals. The goalkeeper tier has changed almost entirely. Previously, Indonesia's goal frame relied on keepers developed in the domestic league, with good reflexes but limitations in playing with their feet and building from the back. Now, Maarten Paes — playing in MLS — and Emil Audero — trained in Juventus's Serie A system and having played in Serie A and Serie B — both appear. Nadeo Argawinata is retained as a thread to the past. This shift is not small. It says the Indonesia national team will play more from the back, with a higher defensive line, and trust in the keeper's distribution rather than only his reflexes. The midfield changes personnel but not structure. Marc Klok and Eliano Reijnders leave. Thom Haye and Ivar Jenner remain, carrying European experience in the Netherlands and the Dutch league. Joey Pelupessy and Calvin Verdonk are brought in. This shows Herdman is not cutting the Dutch midfield, but replacing pieces that did not fit with other pieces. Klok is a slow player who reads the game well, but at thirty-two and after many domestic seasons, his ability to compete physically at ASEAN level is increasingly difficult. Eliano Reijnders is young, has potential, but lacks consistency. Pelupessy has played for Groningen and various Dutch sides, while Verdonk is a versatile player who can play left-sided centre-back or wide midfielder. They bring the physicality and processing speed of Dutch football — where tempo and intensity are trained from academy level. The central defensive line is heavily reinforced. Kevin Diks, Elkan Baggott, Justin Hubner, Shayne Pattynama, and Dean James all join. These are names any Southeast Asian national team would want. Diks has played in the Eredivisie and earned a place at Copenhagen. Baggott has good height and English league experience. Hubner is at Wolverhampton even without many minutes. Pattynama and Dean James are additional options for the left flank and the left-sided centre-back. Looking at this list, Herdman is trying to build a defence capable of circulating the ball and defending one-on-one — two qualities Southeast Asian national teams usually lack when facing technically sharper Asian sides. The attack and both wings also changed. Ole Romeny, a striker who has played for Utrecht and NEC, and Luke Vickery, a young Australian-born player, both appear. Saddil Ramdani is retained, notably because he just moved from Persib to Persebaya on loan — an internal Indonesian football arrangement that does not touch his national-team eligibility but does change his match environment and form. Rafael Struick is absent, which surprised many who follow the team. Also missing are Hokky Caraka, Ramadhan Sananta, Witan Sulaeman, Egy Maulana Vikri. These are names that were once expected. Their absence shows Herdman is reading a different standard from his predecessors. Looking at the whole picture, I see a clear structure: Herdman is replacing the team's spine. Goalkeeper, centre-back, central midfield. Those are the three lines most heavily touched. These are positions where every decision has a price — because the spine is where a team talks to itself. If the spine is stable, the team can accept dazzling pieces on the wings. If the spine is off, everything collapses. Herdman has chosen the new spine. And he has chosen it before a single match has been played to prove it. I once witnessed Germany's collapse in Kazan in 2026, and I drew one lesson: big teams do not collapse because they lose good players, but because they lose their own rhythm. Germany had enough stars in that match against South Korea. They had twenty-six shots and not one goal. They did not lose the ability to play football. They lost the ability to say the same sentence together. When Kim Young-gwon opened the scoring in the 90+3rd and Son Heung-min sealed it in the 90+6th, the whole stadium was silent, and in that silence, no one talked about a 4-2-3-1. People only felt that a generation had unplugged itself. Herdman's Indonesia stands before a similar risk — not of player quality, but of rhythm. Fourteen cuts plus at least ten overseas names playing in Europe and North America create an almost-new national team. Its rhythm will be rewritten from scratch. The question is how long rewriting takes, and whether, while rewriting, the opponent gives you that time. In depth of squad, this is a clear step forward. In cohesion, this is a gamble with no model to reference. And in Southeast Asian football, where tournaments are short, fixture density is high, and every match can be decided by a single flash of brilliance, cohesion is usually more important than individual quality. This is what teams like Vietnam and Thailand have understood for years. I have followed the Indonesia national team through many AFF Cups, and I recognize a pattern: they win with emotion and lose with emotion. Meaning, when the team has enough time to become a single block, they can beat anyone in the region. When the team is shaken up, they can lose to anyone. Herdman is shaking things up. He has his own reason, but he is betting that the shake-up will freeze over in time before the first match begins. There is a detail I want to make clear, because it matters more than its surface. On Herdman's list, Persija Jakarta is the club contributing the most players — six, including Rizky Ridho, Dony Tri Pamungkas, Jordi Amat, and Nadeo Argawinata. This is a strategic choice. Persija is a historic club in Jakarta and one of the most structurally stable sides in the domestic league. Retaining the Persija bloc means Herdman is keeping a cultural spine of the national team — men who already know each other, have played together, understand how each other runs. Meanwhile, Persib Bandung — the club hardest hit with five players cut — will be the focus of any discontent. This is a club with Indonesia's largest fan community, a city that loves football in a way that cannot be expressed in numbers, and a local feeling so strong it becomes part of identity. When five players from this city are erased, it is not five players erased. It is a piece of identity erased. I have lived away from Hanoi for years. I understand that feeling. When you live in a city that is not your hometown, every time your hometown appears on the news, you see another version of yourself also appearing. For the people of Bandung, the national team is an extension of their city. When no one from that city is in the team, they feel the team no longer speaks their language. This is the price any foreign coach must pay when changing structure. Herdman knows. He only hopes that price will be repaid with results. There is a deeper layer I want to excavate. Not about who was cut, but about the model being built. Indonesia in recent years has become the leading Southeast Asian country in calling up dual-nationality or overseas-heritage players to the national team. This is a model long established in Europe, but new to Southeast Asia. Indonesia has moved ahead of Vietnam and Thailand on this. Names like Diks, Baggott, Hubner, Paes, Audero, Verdonk, Romeny all belong to that model. They were born or raised in Europe, trained in academies Southeast Asian football can only dream of, and they choose to wear the shirt of a country they may only visit a few times in their lives. I do not judge that. Modern football is this way. But I want to ask about the price this model creates behind the scenes. Every time a national team relies on players developed abroad, a portion of that country's development resources is not activated. Every time a young Indonesian player at a domestic academy sees the national team filled with names from the Netherlands, England, Italy, and the United States, he will ask himself: does my path really lead there. And the honest answer is: yes, but the shorter path is to go abroad. This is a long-term effect. It does not appear in one AFF Cup. It appears in ten years. There is one thing I have learned from years of following transfers: when a player leaves an environment, he leaves part of himself there, and that part does not transfer to the new place. The same happens with national leagues. When Indonesian clubs lose national-team players, they lose an invisible asset — the status of a club that develops stars. The club still plays, still has fans, still has sponsors. But they lose their place in the national story. And in football, the national story is a product. Persib, Bali United, and Dewa United — the three clubs losing the most players in this window — will feel this in different ways. Persib loses five men and loses their presence in the bigger story. Bali United and Dewa United lose fewer but the same kind of loss. This is not an accounting loss. This is a symbolic loss. And symbols are what sell tickets in Southeast Asia. Now I want to talk about a detail I saved for last: the name of the tournament. The original article mixes "AFF Cup 2026" and "FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026". This deserves attention. For many years, the Southeast Asian national championship was organised by the ASEAN Football Federation under the name AFF Cup or AFF Championship. If FIFA has joined the organisation from 2026 under the new name "FIFA ASEAN Cup", that is a major change in governance, sponsorship, and format. That change means the tournament becomes a more official part of the FIFA system, and decisions like squad lists will be scrutinised more strictly on player eligibility. This brings me to a point I want to state clearly but without judging: the eligibility of naturalised or dual-nationality players is a sensitive area. FIFA has specific rules about the genuine link between a player and the country he represents — through birth, descent, or residency. Calling up a wave of players under this model in a tournament carrying the FIFA name requires documentation to be complete before publication. If a dossier is incomplete, an administrative risk could appear. I am not saying that has happened in Indonesia. I am only placing it as a variable that anyone following the Indonesia national team should be aware of. There is one thing I have observed in many years in this profession: naturalisation programmes always come with an ecosystem of agents, lawyers, and managers. That is part of modern football, nothing new. But when a country relies on this model at scale, that ecosystem expands accordingly. This is a reality not written in press releases. Nor should it be. But the reader should know. In Shanghai, people pay a god so that he may sit tired. I wrote that sentence seven years ago, and I still think it is true for many situations. But Indonesia does not pay these players in that sense. They pay in another form: they pay by admitting that the domestic development path, after decades of building, is still not fast enough. This is hard to write. But it is real. Every summer has a god, and every god has its price. For Indonesia this summer, the god is a national team richer in potential but having lost many old connections. The price of that god will be settled next month, on the grass, by a shot that may or may not go in. There is one thing analysts usually overlook when reading lists like this: they analyse tactics, but they do not read emotion. And emotion is a real tactical variable, especially in Southeast Asia, where a player plays for the national team for a different reason than a player plays for a European club. In Europe, a player plays for the national team as a career peak, a line item on the CV. In Southeast Asia, a player plays for the national team as an obligation to family, to the city, to a group he has belonged to since childhood. When Herdman erases fourteen names, he does not just change personnel. He changes the story every Indonesian player tells himself about his own path. A young player at the Persib academy, who once dreamed of the national team, will now read this list and ask: has my path just become longer. A veteran at Bali United, who had a few caps, will now ask: has the door closed. These are questions without answers. But they leave traces in the way players play. People call it football, but I call it a manuscript always being rewritten. And the Indonesian manuscript was just rewritten in red ink. What I want to emphasise is: Herdman's decision is not a wrong decision. It is a calculated one, and Herdman is experienced enough to understand his own risk. He did not cut players because they played poorly. He cut them because he believes in a different structure. This is what foreign coaches usually do in Southeast Asia, but few dare to do completely. Herdman did it completely. The problem with this gamble is that it bets on the hardest thing to measure: time. Time for Diks, Baggott, Hubner, Paes, Audero to learn each other's names. Time for Rizky Ridho and Jordi Amat to understand each other at centre-back. Time for a striker to understand the through-ball rhythm of a midfielder. In football, this kind of time cannot be bought with money. It can only be built through matches, and in Southeast Asia, the number of international matches before a major tournament is usually not many. There is a technical detail I want to offer as groundwork. When a national team imports a group of players from different leagues, it also imports different rhythms. A player currently in the Netherlands is used to teammates running into space after he passes. A player in MLS is used to receiving the ball in space at a different pace. A player in Serie B is used to being pressed for time more. When they meet in a national team, they carry different clocks. The coach must synchronise those clocks within weeks. This is the hardest job in international football, and no software does it for you. This is why I think Herdman kept the Persija bloc. He needs an anchor. A group of players who have played together, eaten together, understood each other, and who can transmit rhythm faster to newcomers. That anchor is Jordi Amat, who has been with the national team for years and once played for clubs in England and Spain. That anchor is Rizky Ridho, young but already a domestic pillar. When the defensive spine is stable, the rest of the team can experiment more. But an anchor also has limits. When overseas players arrive with higher tempo, the anchor can become a drag. If a centre-back used to domestic-league rhythm plays alongside one used to Dutch rhythm, the gap between them can be exploited by a team like Vietnam, Thailand, or Malaysia — teams that play direct counter-attack and can read the space between two centre-backs. This is what worries me most when I look at Indonesia's potential setup. Rhythm is the second problem. When the team plays too slowly, technical players become isolated. When the team plays too quickly, domestic players are left behind. In either case, one part of the team is not speaking the same language as the other. And in short tournaments like the FIFA ASEAN Cup, one match off-rhythm can collapse a whole campaign. We love a team the way we love a poem — not for the meaning, but for the rhythm. Indonesia's new rhythm is being rewritten. I do not know how it will sound. But I know that once the writer has erased fourteen sentences, the poem will be different — not only in content, but in breath. Now I want to return to Bandung. There is one thing about football clubs in Southeast Asia outsiders often do not realise: a club is not only a team. It is part of a local ecosystem — the coffee shop where fans meet, the shirt with a player's name that a child wears to school, the song on the terraces that an entire city knows by heart. When a club's player goes to the national team, that city gains another reason to be proud. When he is no longer there, that city loses an emotional anchor point. Persib Bandung lost five players in this window. Among those five are Marc Klok, who wore the captain's armband in many matches, and Sandy Walsh, who can play in multiple positions and has rescued the national team with his speed several times. Their absence is not merely a technical loss. It is a storytelling loss. Indonesia's story at the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026 will now be told without two important characters, and the story will be different. This raises a question about the Indonesian federation's communication strategy. If the team wins, the story will be a story of renaissance. If the team loses, the story will be a story of erasure. Neither story is completely true. But in football, the winning story is always the simplest one. Herdman knows this. And he chose to bet on a complicated story. There is a small detail I want to keep as a final note. On this list, some young players are called for the first time — like Luke Vickery — and some veterans are retained — like Jordi Amat, Nadeo Argawinata. This combination says Herdman is not only building a team for the coming tournament. He is building a structure for several years. This is one of the most correct parts of his decision, and also the easiest to criticise if short-term results do not arrive. I have followed many national teams across many continents for more than twenty years. One thing I have learned is: successful national teams are usually those with a man willing to take responsibility for one large change, and an organisation patient enough not to interfere in the first six months. If Herdman gets that patience from the Indonesian federation, Indonesia could have a stronger national team in two years. If not, the cycle will start again, and fourteen new players will be called, and fourteen old players will be erased again. Kazan is where a generation ended itself in silence. Indonesia is not in Kazan. Indonesia is at a different point — before the story begins, when everything can still happen. And in the moment before the story begins, silence is not a sign of collapse. It can be a sign of preparation. The empty stadium taught me that grass still grows, but the crowd's roar has become memory. In the night in Bandung, grass still grows on Persib's training pitch. The erased players will train there tomorrow, as on every other day, and they will play for their club at the weekend, as on every other week. Meanwhile, in Jakarta, a new national team is being rearranged. The distance between those two places is only a few hours' drive. But in football, that distance is sometimes an entire generation. And I think this is true for every country, not just Indonesia. Every time a federation chooses renewal, a group is left behind. That is not tragedy. It is the price of growing up. But it is also a reminder that football has no free choices, and every national-team list is a contract between the present and the future — one whose signer never sees all the clauses. Seven years ago, I wrote about Tevez as a tired god in Shanghai. Tonight, I read a national-team list in Bandung and understand that there is another kind of tiredness in football: the tiredness of a man standing before a large decision and not knowing whether he has enough time to prove it. Herdman is in that tiredness. And Indonesia, from Bandung to Jakarta, from youth academies to terraces, sits quiet and watches to see whether their English coach is right. I will follow Indonesia's first match at the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026 with the eye of a poet more than of an analyst. I will not count shots. I will count the number of times eleven Indonesian players touch the ball with each other in about thirty seconds. If that number is high, Herdman was right. If it is low, Indonesia will become a team that can beat anyone and lose to anyone — the kind of team we have seen too many of, and nowhere more than in Southeast Asia.