Herdman cuts 11 naturalized players: Where Indonesia is thinnest is not the attack

The 23-man list John Herdman published on September 19, 2026 had one detail that made me read it three times. Not the absence of Rafael Struick — that is only 'quite interesting', as VIVA itself wrote. It is that both Jay Idzes and Mees Hilgers vanished together, plus Sandy Walsh, meaning Indonesia's entire naturalized defensive spine was unplugged in a single move. People argue over who Herdman dropped up front. The rock he actually cracked open lies behind, where nobody looks.

I once got one thing right and everything else wrong — this piece is about the part I got right.

Context: A national team built on a diaspora pipeline

Let me rebuild the context for anyone who does not follow regional football daily. Indonesia under Herdman — as VIVA describes it — built its national-team identity around a group of Indonesian-descended and naturalized players from Europe: Idzes from Sassuolo, Hilgers, Walsh, Romeny, Oratmangoen. This is not an academy-export model. This is a talent-import model via passport and lineage.

The team sits in Group A with Singapore, Malaysia and Bangladesh — a draw that, flatly on paper, is comfortable for a full-strength Indonesia. The tournament runs from September 24 to October 5, 2026. The list was locked just five days before kickoff. That is too narrow a window for anyone to patch things up.

The absentee list spreads across names: both big stars and players previously called up frequently. Herdman does not hide his reasons. He splits them into two groups — those out through injury and those omitted by choice. That transparent split is, frankly, a rather deft media-management move. He knew the reaction would surge, so he framed the story himself.

Core analysis: The cut lands exactly where it hurts

The most important thing in this list is not the number of players dropped, but the positional distribution of those dropped. It is not spread across the pitch. It pools into the defensive spine.

Idzes and Hilgers are explicitly named as defenders. Walsh is a wide defender. A team can lose a striker and patch it without changing structure. But losing two first-choice centre-backs plus a full-back forces one of two paths: change the quality of personnel at the heart of defence, or change the entire defensive structure — dropping from a back three to a back four, or vice versa, to hide the absence of specific profiles.

Based on my experience watching matches, this is the kind of decision a coach only makes when he trusts the opening draw. Group A has Singapore, Malaysia and Bangladesh. Lose half the defensive core and meet Thailand or Vietnam on matchday one, and I would suspect Herdman loses his job. Against the current opponents, he has enough cushion to experiment.

One economically notable detail: the report states Idzes was injured while playing for his club Sassuolo. This is where club interest and national-team duty intersect — what insiders half-jokingly call the 'FIFA virus'. A player is a Serie A club's asset, yet an injury at club level directly damages a national team thousands of kilometres away. That is a structural risk point, not mere bad luck.

The biggest blind spot of the naturalization model is that it places a national team's availability in the hands of European clubs' schedules and doctors — organizations with no obligation to prioritize Indonesia.

In midfield, Marc Klok's absence is another signal. Klok is a core midfielder and, from what I have watched across seasons, also carries some set-piece and penalty duties. Losing a designated dead-ball taker is no small matter in a short tournament where a set-piece goal can be the difference between advancing and going home.

Then the attack, where the story flips entirely. Herdman brings in Luke Vickery and Mitchel Bakker as new choices, alongside Ole Romeny and Ragnar Oratmangoen. One could read this as attrition. I read it as a deliberate refresh, not a forced cull.

For a simple reason: if the attack weakened for reasons beyond control, we would call it makeshift. But when you actively 'grant places' to two new faces while keeping two old ones, that is the signal of a coach building a different attacking identity. I have seen this decision pattern at many European clubs: strip weight from defence to add attacking options, accepting higher variance.

A team gutted at the back but loaded up front becomes a machine that scores many and concedes many — and in a short group-stage-only tournament, high variance is a gamble, not a plan.

There is one data point to verify. The report lists Mitchel Bakker among the forwards, but Bakker is primarily known as a left-sided defender. If accurate in context, he may be deployed as an attacking wing-back or wide forward — a positional conversion worth tracking. If inaccurate, it signals the source's positional reliability is imperfect.

Contrarian angle: Where I could be wrong

People call me a controversialist. I treat that as a job description.

But to be fair, I must flag three holes that could sink the analysis above. First, the competition is called the 'FIFA ASEAN Cup 2026'. Historically, this tournament is organized by the AFF — the ASEAN Football Federation — not FIFA. A FIFA-branded ASEAN Cup is a sign of inconsistency with a known governance structure. Second, all dates sit in the future relative to established football records, so they cannot be checked against results. Third, the claim that Herdman leads Indonesia conflicts with the coaching situation I knew in the current cycle. Everything above rests on 'as-stated by the source', with a confidence discount.

If I am wrong, I am wrong in a structured way — and I accept it. No idea is too wild to be worth testing — the pandemic taught me that.

If the premises hold, my most confident point is not who Herdman dropped, but that Indonesia's naturalization model has a governance ceiling: its value depends on the availability of a group of players controlled externally. This is not an analysis of a match. It is an analysis of a structure.

What to keep tracking

Three things I will watch in the group stage. One, the actual starting defence: if it is a centre-back pairing that has never played together, variance rises and the risk of an upset rises with it. Two, Bakker's position: if he plays as an attacking wing-back, the source was right about function; if as a wide forward, it was right about the label. Three, recovery timelines for Idzes, Hilgers and Walsh — if any returns mid-tournament, my whole judgment must be rewritten.

At 58, I have seen everything — but not the thing I am about to analyze.

If Herdman wins this group with a makeshift defence and a brand-new attack, the lesson is not 'naturalization is useless'. The lesson is: a good coach can turn absence into restructuring, provided the draw is generous. And if Indonesia falls in an easy group, that will not be the fault of those who were absent. It will be a question of who put all the eggs in one European basket.

Morocco had no miracle. They had homework, and they did it thoroughly. Indonesia has a different assignment — and nobody has graded it yet.