By Patrick Barta and Yayu Yuniar
It was an especially bad night, maybe even an unbelievably bad night, for Indonesia’s national soccer team. Ten goals for Bahrain. Zero for Indonesia.
Now, the ripple effects of that epic thrashing in an important World Cup qualifying match last week are spreading. On Wednesday, the Jakarta Post reported that Indonesia’s Ministry of Youth and Sports Affairs planned to stop funding for the local soccer association, the Indonesian Football Association, with Indonesia now facing a “football crisis,” according to the article.
That news came several days after the global body that governs international soccer, FIFA, launched an investigation into the match given its unusually-lopsided result, with Indonesia’s football association saying the referee was guilty of unfair conduct. Some backers of the team of have argued the result was especially suspicious given that Bahrain needed to make up a nine-goal deficit on rival Qatar to have a shot at advancing to the next round of qualifying.
In a statement on the matter, FIFA said it was looking into the result because of the “unusual outcome” and “in the interests of maintaining unequivocal confidence in our game.” Officials at the Asian Football Confederation, meanwhile, have insisted that they were confident the result was above-board and no teams were guilty of match-fixing, with clear evidence Bahrain was “the better team both tactically and technically,” according to a statement.
Indonesian fans, for their part, are still trying to figure out who to believe. More than 140,000 people have viewed youtube highlights of the match; it showed that while Bahrain did score some of its goals on penalty kicks, it also nailed several technically-difficult goals, including a perfectly-placed header off a crossing pass that sailed just above a leaping goalkeeper’s hands.
Indeed, for many Indonesians, the accusations of impropriety have seemed like an excuse for a team that was already struggling before the latest embarrassment. The Indonesians lost all five previous group matches, conceding 16 goals while scoring just three. The team’s FIFA ranking has trended steadily lower over the past year, to 146th in the world in February from 129th a year earlier.
Indonesia also suffered a big letdown when one of its squads was beaten by regional arch-rival Malaysia in the Southeast Asia Games final last year, with two fans killed in a stampede.
“We are defeated massively by 10-0 goals. Yet, you still blame the referee?” wrote one angry fan on a Facebook page dedicated to Indonesian soccer. Other fans lashed out at a loss they described as the “disgrace” of the match and further blasted Indonesian soccer authorities for letting the nation down.
The Indonesian Football Association has also apologized to the people of Indonesia for poor play and denied any suspicions of corruption or match-fixing, according to local media reports.
As for Bahrain, the big win didn’t really matter much in the end. It also needed Qatar to lose its latest match, but the team scored a late goal to pull a 2-2 draw against Iran, allowing it to advance to the next stage of qualifying.
-Celine Fernandez contributed to this article.