W

hat would it actually take for our national team to ever be one step closer to the real thing — the World Cup? What more support did we need when we were playing at home against Bahrain? Right from the start, the “12th player” — the spectators — painted Bung Karno Sports Stadium (GBK) red with from their clothes and costumes; and even the President and his family came along to watch the game in order to support our national team.

It’s interesting to observe that we were treated unfairly by the South Korean referee when he didn’t issue a yellow card to Hammed when he had tackled Bustomi from behind, while Hartono was issued a yellow card by the referee after he tried to stop one of the Bahraini players in the 82nd minute. The same thing happened when we played away against Turkmenistan: in that game, our players were issued yellow cards more than three times by the Iranian referee during the first half of the game alone.

As always, coach Wim Rijsbergen likes to raise the ante as if he’s playing poker without heeding the banker’s cards, by entrusting the same old man in goal, leaving us to take the brunt of an unpleasant result. Take a look at how Bahrain was teaching us a hard lesson when they scored two goals into our “heavily-defended” net; those two goals should have been easily anticipated by the goalkeeper and, based on his experience, they should have been easy saves.

It seems that coordination is not good between our goalkeeper and the defenders, while on the opposite side, “good cooperation” bore fruit when Bahrain scored their second goal; our so-called defenders played just too damn far from their posts, which therefore left the goalkeeper literally head-to-head with a Bahraini player. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

During the entire game, we could easily see how vulnerable our defense was, and that’s how Bahrain was able to score a goal even in the 45th minute at the end of the first half — something that even Iran couldn’t do during the first half. How did Wim make our bastion more vulnerable than before? We were quite strong during the first half of our game against Iran, for they couldn’t score any goals until the second half. How easy it was for those Bahraini players to literally ransack our defense during the first half of the game.

Knowing that the national team would certainly lose the game, the spectators sought external distractions and started to set off fireworks across the stadium, which triggered the referee to consult with Asian Football Confederation (AFC) officials, and ultimately forced both teams to stop playing. The next thing we knew, the entire Bahrain team was forced to leave the field until the AFC officials decided what should be done.

Many believed that they would stop the game right there, as the situation was simply deteriorating; the game would only be resumed if spectators would stop firing those fireworks instantly. Consequently, many spectators ended up leaving the stadium as they just didn’t think it was worth watching the last 15 minutes or so of the game.

Acce
Cirebon, West Java