Four Years After Kanjuruhan: Indonesia Face Bangladesh Between Memory and Pressure

I have never stood in the stands of Gelora Bung Karno. But I know the smell of an empty stadium. In the summer of 2026, I stood among 45,000 empty seats at Lạch Tray, listening to the sea breeze of Hải Phòng slip through every pane of glass, listening to the boots of a veteran goalkeeper step onto the grass in silence. Lạch Tray stood empty, yet the goal still held the shadow of a goalkeeper sitting and waiting. That feeling has never left me.

Today, more than two thousand kilometres from Hải Phòng, Indonesia is preparing to open another stand. Bigger. Hotter. And carrying a kind of memory that no fan wants to recall, yet no one allows themselves to forget.

On 1 October 2026, at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, 135 people died after a match. On the night of 1 October 2026, exactly four years later, Indonesia's national team walks out for its final group-stage match against Bangladesh. The same day. The same country. The same sport that took 135 lives, now asked to deliver a victory.

John Herdman, Indonesia's English head coach, has spoken before the match. He did not talk about formations. He talked about memory.

To understand why a group-stage fixture carries such weight, we have to look at two layers of pressure stacked on a single night.

The first layer is purely sporting. This is the final match of Group A. According to the information released, Indonesia needs a positive result to keep alive its hope of reaching the final. That means this is no longer a game for rotation or experimentation. This is a game where the result — not the performance — is what gets written into the table.

The second layer is memory. Four years ago, the Kanjuruhan tragedy became one of the worst stadium disasters in the history of world football. A few dry details bear repeating, because dry details are what last longest. After the final whistle, as fans flooded onto the pitch, security forces fired tear gas into the crowd. The crowd panicked and searched for exits, but many gates were locked. People fell on top of one another. The final death toll recorded was 135, among them children. No passage of play is worth 135 lives.

After that night, Indonesian football entered a period of restructuring around stadium safety, crowd control and organisational responsibility. A match falling exactly on the anniversary of that event cannot be an ordinary match.

Between those two layers of pressure, Herdman chose a very particular way of speaking. He reminded everyone that this team is a representative image of the country's football. He spoke of how the tragedy had been acknowledged as far away as North America, where he once worked, to show that the pain of Indonesian football had crossed national borders. And he reminded his players — among them Kevin Diks, a naturalised defender — to stay focused on their duties on the pitch.

Gelora Bung Karno is Indonesia's home ground, with a capacity in the tens of thousands, sitting at the heart of Jakarta. A match there, on a date like 1 October, is the meeting of the biggest stage and the most sensitive day. The bigger the stadium, the bigger the pressure, and the bigger the responsibility.

From the vantage point of someone who watches training grounds, I recognise something familiar in that way of speaking. A dressing room does not lie. It only stays quiet long enough for you to hear the truth. A coach who does not talk about tactics before a match is usually a man handling something harder than tactics: the psychology of a group carrying the symbol of an entire nation on its shoulders.

The first thing worth noting is that Herdman did not use the anniversary to fuel the will to fight. He used it to anchor the team to a responsibility larger than themselves. In modern football, coaches are usually judged by numbers: points, goals, pass completion. Herdman put a different measure on the scale — how a group confronts a collective memory.

When a coach chooses to speak about memory before a decisive match, it is usually a sign of a man who needs unity more than he needs a training drill.

At a deeper level, Herdman's mention of Kevin Diks carries no small meaning. Diks is a naturalised player — a product of the programme that recruits players of Indonesian descent abroad, a programme this country's football has pursued for years. When a naturalised player is placed in a position representing the spirit of the team, the story of national identity and the story of professional resources intersect. A national team built from people born in several different countries, standing before the anniversary of a national tragedy, is forced to answer an old question: what truly makes a team belong to a people?

I once followed a similar debate in Vietnam, when the first overseas-born Vietnamese players were called up. Some supported it, seeing it as a way to raise the professional level. Others opposed it, arguing that it blurred identity. Both sides had a point, and both sides easily forgot one thing: national football is not a club, and a national team rises above the sum of its best individuals. It is a story that an entire people wants to tell about itself. A naturalised player can play well, but the story has to be written with more than skill.

From Hải Phòng, I look across and see a familiar pattern. Every Southeast Asian football nation is racing to upgrade its resources. Vietnam calls home its overseas-born players. Indonesia goes further with a large-scale naturalisation wave. The Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand — each in its own way. But there is one common thread: when a national team becomes a meeting point of many origins, the role of shared memory becomes more important. Memory is what makes a scattered group feel that it belongs together.

And in Indonesia, the biggest memory in the country's football, sadly, is Kanjuruhan.

The Southeast Asian regional championship holds a special place in the football life of the region. For Vietnamese fans, it is the tournament we have won, lost in tears, stood on the highest podium for, and sat at the bottom of in disappointment. For Indonesians, it is the tournament they have not won for decades, a blemish in the football history of the most populous nation in Southeast Asia. That explains why every match in this competition carries such weight, and why even a group-stage game can be treated like a final.

Moscow has snow, Hải Phòng has sea breeze. Football brings both into the same story. Today that story gains one more piece: Jakarta has a great stand, and on it sits a silence kept for 135 people.

But the accuracy of the information needs to be made clear. The competition is referred to as the FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026. Historically, the Southeast Asian regional championship is organised by the ASEAN Football Federation (AFF), not FIFA. The traditional staging window also usually falls between November and December, not 1 October. These are two points that need verification before being cited. It could be a new format, a rebranded or restructured competition; or it could simply be an error in the reporting. For someone who works as an observer, the distance between those two possibilities is very large.

In sports journalism, a competition name called wrongly is no small matter. It is the first sign that people are copying information rather than verifying it.

On the football itself, this match provides almost no tactical data. There are no figures for passes allowed per defensive action (PPDA), no expected goals (xG), no projected line-up. That forces every read on the style of play to carry the label of inference. On the usual regional hierarchy, Indonesia is rated above Bangladesh. A stronger side playing at home usually controls possession, while the weaker side drops deep to defend. But that is my inference, not information from the match.

The more interesting thing lies in the pressure. A match in which the home side must produce a positive result usually pushes a coach towards safety: prioritising the result, reducing risk, raising the value of set pieces. When sporting pressure is compounded by the emotional pressure of an anniversary, that tendency becomes even clearer. This is why I believe the night of 1 October in Jakarta will be a match played with caution, regardless of the opponent's reputation.

There is another aspect rarely mentioned: the pressure on the organisers. When a match carrying national symbolism falls exactly on the anniversary of a stadium tragedy, organisational responsibility becomes a matter of honour. Every stage — from ticket control, crowd routing, to incident response — sits under the eyes of an entire nation remembering its past. Indonesia's football federation and the stadium organisers will almost certainly tighten safety procedures. But the difficulty of stadium safety is that it is only noticed once it is too late.

I once spoke with people doing organisational work at Lạch Tray. They told me something I have not forgotten: the day without an incident is the day no one remembers their work. Safety is an invisible profession. It only becomes visible when it fails.

From a media perspective, a match like this is a gift. It has conflict, emotion, symbolism, human stories. Broadcasters and digital platforms like matches like this, because audiences watch longer, comment more, share more. But precisely because it is emotionally compelling, it also makes people skip the hardest part: genuine analysis. A match sold on memory is usually analysed through emotion. That is a trade-off anyone in this profession needs to recognise.

Outside Indonesia, most coverage of this match will be told through a familiar mould: the team is determined to win in memory of the victims. It is a beautiful mould. It is easy to read, easy to share, easy to move people.

But I am not sure it is the right way to tell it.

When a tragedy is converted into fuel for a match, we inadvertently turn pain into fuel. The match ends, the fuel burns out, and what remains is a scoreline — not a lesson about stadium safety. 135 people died of something preventable. If the memory of them is used only to lift a team's spirits for 90 minutes, then the most important part of the story has been left behind.

The forgotten ones in this story are not the players. They are the people sitting in the stand behind, whose names appear in no line-up. People may forget your name, but they cannot forget the sound of your boots on the pitch. For the 135 at Kanjuruhan, the sound of footsteps has stopped. Football's job is to keep it from being forgotten — through real safety regulations, not a minute of silence before kick-off.

I do not blame Herdman. A coach can only speak with what he controls: the psychology of his players. He does not decide safety procedures, does not route the crowd, does not supervise the gates. His job is to beat Bangladesh. And perhaps the way he chose to speak about the anniversary — invoking learning, invoking responsibility — is the most honest version a football man could offer in those circumstances.

But the honesty of a coach cannot replace the honesty of a system. A commemorative match only means something if the reforms born from the tragedy are still intact four years later. If the rules on capacity, on fencing, on tear gas, on emergency exits have been loosened under pressure from commerce and crowds, then the commemoration is just a fresh coat of paint over an old crack.

I wonder what will happen if Indonesia lose that night. Will the memory of 135 people be dragged into the story of a defeat? Will people say the team let the victims down? That is a dangerous kind of logic, because it turns the dead into an invisible pressure placed on the shoulders of the living. The dead do not need a victory. They need a system that does not repeat the mistake.

And this is where I want to say a word for the region. Southeast Asia is a place where football burns at full flame in the stands. We are proud of that. But that very fervour has more than once pushed stadiums to the brink. Kanjuruhan was not the first such event, and if we are not careful, it will not be the last. In Vietnam, we have also seen nights of overcrowded stands, blocked exits, surging crowds. We have been lucky not to have a Kanjuruhan of our own. But luck is not a strategy.

Stadium safety in Southeast Asia relies on luck more than on systems. That is what 1 October should force all of us to admit.

On the night of 1 October, when the ball rolls in Jakarta, I will not follow the scoreline first. I will watch how the stands are controlled, whether people remember the old lesson or only the date. Wherever a ball rolls, there is a beat keeper. I am only the one who listens. And sometimes, the one who listens has the duty to repeat what the cheers deliberately drown out.