Silt, nutmeg, and Total Football: Part 3

Still ignoring the US election? Read on, friend.

This is the third and penultimate chapter of Silt, nutmeg, and Total Football or: An Artifice To Successfully Distract Myself During The US Election. See the earlier instalments here and here.

Last week we traced the odd lineage of colonial interests and imperial swapsies that facilitated the rise of Total Football in the 1970s. It would have been more compelling to channel that energy into producing a Virgil van Dijk fancam but I lack the requisite skills. Another confession: I do not care about Dutch footballing excellence. It is thrilling, though cold and glassy to the touch. What can we learn from it? It is profitable to a) to be situated roughly 20 metres away from the country that invented association football, and b) rapaciously harvest wealth and talent from your far-flung empire. I am much more interested in the rich history and contemporary mediocrity of Indonesian football. You’ve got to be nimble to pounce on this wildly mistimed through-ball.

We do know know exactly when association football landed in the Dutch East Indies but we can safely assume it arrived on a European boot. Sailors, soldiers, and traders played informal games between themselves in the latter half of the 19th century. And why not introduce the colonies to the harmonious dimensions of round ball? It’s fun to watch and great way to stay in shape with all your friends. It also happens to be a superb vehicle to consciously develop cultural and political meaning. Unfortunately for the colonial authorities in Batavia a very different identity glommed onto footy. One unsympathetic to their interests despite (read: because of) three centuries of civilising Dutch presence. This is the story of how the Dutch East Indies were dispossessed, nutmegged, and scored against. It roughly follows the plot of White Men Can’t Jump (1992) with one divergence: Woody Harrelson can’t hoop.

My most Anglo trait is that I am going to skip several thousand years worth of native Asian forerunners to association football and focus on those uppity schoolboys running about Berkshire and Cambridgeshire. (One thousand apologies to Sepak Raga ultras.) At the midway point of the 19th century those preppy little bastards in England formalised a ruleset that is still in use today. Then, as now, the upper crust of Britain’s colonial possessions eagerly sent their children to Eton, Harrow, and the like for a good liberal education. They brought home football. As the story goes, a schoolboy with the distinctly un-Javanese name of John Edgar was sent to England to brush up on his Thucydides. Upon return to Surabaya he founded the first amateur club in 1896 and gave it the propitious name of Victory. Some suggest that the Batavian club Rood Wit pipped Edgar in 1894 but we’ll leave that to the historians to debate. Around the turn of the century clubs were sprouting across Java.

From the get-go these clubs reflected the tiered racism of Dutch rule. White Dutch were legally first-class citizens, the mercantile Chinese community one-rung below, and natives were relegated to the bottom of the heap. For example: Sumatra’s Padangsche Voetbal Club was a team for the Dutch and Dutch alone. By 1914 a blended intercity competition had emerged on Java; Batavia, Surabaya, Semarang, and Bandung fielded teams in a league that Batavia almost uniformly won. The Chinese soon incorporated their own competition but it was only in 1930 that a man named Soeratin Sosrosoegondo founded an Indonesian association. Soeratin did not just have idle ball sports on his mind when forming the Persatuan Sepakraga Seluruh Indonesia (PSSI) — his goal was a nation.