Indonesia Bids Farewell to Local Strikers: John Herdman's Gamble and the Cost of an 'Imported' National Team

On 14 September 2026, when John Herdman announced his 23-man squad for the ASEAN Cup, four names were simply gone. Hokky Caraka, Ramadhan Sananta, Septian Bagaskara, Eksel Runtukahu — four local strikers, four faces that once represented a different current in Indonesian football, none of them listed. In return, Mitchell Baker appeared as a direct rival to Ole Romeny, Luke Vickery was positioned as a wing option alongside Ragnar Oratmangoen, and Dion Markx prepared for his debut. After forty-six years following regional football, I realised I was watching a transfusion that is no longer a purely tactical story. This is a manifesto about Indonesia choosing to buy speed with a passport, instead of forging it with sweat.

Ahead of the 2026 ASEAN Cup, Herdman sits between two pressures. The first comes from PSSI — a federation that has poured money into the naturalisation programme for years, and treats the regional tournament as a mandatory test. The second comes from the wave of local media, where the headline "Selamat Tinggal Striker Lokal" has turned a personnel decision into a political symbol. Of the twenty-three names, nearly half play in Europe or have just completed naturalisation: Romeny, Thom Haye, Ragnar Oratmangoen, Dean James, Mitchell Baker, Luke Vickery, Dion Markx. When I rewatched the FIFA Series footage from May, most of the core shape was already in the hands of this group — this is not a sudden revolution, but the endpoint of a process that has been accumulating quietly for months.

The interesting part lies in the structure of the attack. The wholesale removal of four local strikers, including Hokky Caraka — once an icon of Indonesia's U23 generation — is not because they lack talent, but because they represent a different striker profile. Herdman is looking for physical intensity, high pressing capacity and tactical mobility — qualities forged in European academy environments. When Romeny, a product of Dutch development, must compete with Baker, who came through the English system, Herdman is sending a signal: a starting spot no longer belongs to anyone simply because they were born with Indonesian nationality. The selection criterion has shifted from passport to physical profile — and this is the first time in ASEAN Cup history that a Southeast Asian team has publicly declared that local genes are not sufficient to play striker.

I once witnessed a similar process at Guangzhou Evergrande in the summer of 2026, when the club spent four million yuan to loan Deng Hanwen from Beijing Renhe. I was the first to report that deal, and what I learned was this: every personnel decision in regional football carries a hidden financial layer beneath it. People filter transfer news; I filter the sweat of the market too. In Indonesia's case, that sweat flows from two sources. The first is the cost of naturalisation — legal procedures, FIFA eligibility confirmation, and training compensation and solidarity mechanisms often make each new passport cost hundreds of thousands of dollars indirectly. The second source is not in the report at all: the absence of several Persib Bandung players due to the 2026/2027 ACL 2 schedule. This is the classic club-versus-country conflict — the club chooses the continental campaign with its prize money and commercial exposure, while the national team loses squad depth.

The new attacking structure also raises a specific tactical question. The appearance of Luke Vickery as a wing option alongside Oratmangoen suggests Herdman is building a wide-attacking shape, potentially 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 with pace and one-on-one ability on both flanks. The absence of any local wing option in the list shows he prioritises direct, vertical wide play over possession-based recycling. Thom Haye, in the deep-lying playmaker role, will be the main distributor — and this is why Marc Klok's exclusion is more significant than people think. Klok was the older generation of naturalised midfielder, rich in experience but slower physically. Dropping him from the list is not merely a technical decision; it is a declaration that the first naturalised generation has expired.

But this is where I want to pose the reverse question. A national team with nearly half its list made up of debutants and players returning after long absences, while also losing captain Jay Idzes to injury sustained playing for Sassuolo against Juventus — what will it run on? Football does not run on lists. It runs on muscle memory built through hundreds of shared sessions. Dean James returns after nearly a year without international football. Markx and Vickery have never played a minute for Indonesia. Romeny and Baker have never combined in a competitive match. When Idzes leaves the pitch, the team loses not just a centre-back — it loses the anchor of the defensive spine, the on-pitch voice of command, and the bridge between groups of players from different football cultures.

At this age, I no longer run faster, but I know which way the wind blows. And the wind blowing in Indonesia is the wind of a leveraged gamble. PSSI is betting that European quality will compensate for a lack of cohesion. Herdman is betting that his selection authority is enough to forge a new identity in a short time. Indonesian media is betting that audiences will be excited by new names rather than mourning abandoned local strikers. All three could be right — for one match. But the ASEAN Cup is not one match; it is a compressed sequence, where squad depth and rotation capacity decide outcomes more than a single moment of brilliance.

The real blind spot lies in the reserve striker department. Excluding both Jens Raven and Mauro Zijlstra — two young naturalised strikers — shows Herdman is betting everything on Romeny and Baker. If either is injured, or if both fail to adapt to the intensity of regional matches, Indonesia has no verified striker option left. This is the kind of risk that squad-analysis algorithms cannot capture: it does not lie in the quality of the chosen player, but in the void behind him. Watching regional tournaments over two decades, I have seen teams collapse not because they lacked a star — they collapsed because the only star had a problem.

At a deeper level, this is a development-model experiment. Indonesia is turning its diaspora community in the Netherlands and other European countries into its primary talent supply, while the domestic academy system — which produced Hokky and Sananta — is pushed to the margins. In the short term, this is a structural advantage Thailand and Vietnam cannot easily replicate, since neither has a large European diaspora with a strong football tradition. But in the long term, it is a transfer of responsibility: instead of investing in youth development, PSSI is buying finished products from European academies. Every transfer number is an athlete sprinting, and here, that number is sprinting in the opposite direction from the Indonesian children kicking balls on dirt pitches.

14 September 2026 will be remembered as a milestone. If Indonesia wins the ASEAN Cup, the naturalisation model will be replicated across the region, and other federations will start searching for their own diaspora. If Indonesia fails, the "local versus naturalised" debate will explode, and Herdman will pay with the very selection authority he just asserted. Both scenarios mean something: Southeast Asian football has entered a phase where a passport becomes a tactical asset. The pandemic taught me that empty stands are also a form of data. This time, the void in Indonesia's attack is too — and I will follow it to the last match, without abandoning it, because that is the only way to know whether a gamble deserves to be called vision or merely haste.