Witan Sulaeman and the Locker Room That Did Not Cheer: Persija Hides Its Joy to Keep the Season

In Jakarta, after a derby, people learn to count their joy in breaths rather than in shouts. On the night of 12 September 2026, at Gelora Bung Karno, Persija Jakarta beat Persib Bandung 2-1. The match closed in a manner Witan Sulaeman described as a game that had to be worked for very hard. But what made me pause was not the scoreline. It was the locker room, which should have erupted, and did not.

Witan Sulaeman, Persija's wide player, the man chosen to face the media after the match, spoke about the atmosphere in the locker room with a calm that felt almost deliberate. He said the team had worked hard, that this victory was the product of a process, and that there had been no excessive celebration. He spoke about trust: whoever is given the chance must prove it, and whoever wants to keep that trust must sustain their form. Listening to those words, I recognised something quite different from the ordinary joy of football. This was not the shout of a team escaping a long thirst, but the held breath of someone who knows the season is far longer than a single night.

To understand why a derby win was received with such restraint, it needs to be placed in its proper context. Persija and Persib are the two great powers of Indonesian football, two clubs whose meeting is already a national event. The derby was played at Gelora Bung Karno, a venue of national scale rather than a home ground belonging to either side. Before 12 September, Persija had gone five consecutive meetings without beating their neighbours. That five-match winless run was a psychological scar, the thing that turned these derbies into nights harder to sleep through than a final.

Breaking that scar matters more than three points, and Witan touched on it without needing to spell it out. His team now has six points from two matches and sits third in the 2026/2027 Super League table. Last season they finished third, a placing both the coaching staff and the supporters regarded as not enough. Coach Shin Tae-yong was brought in with a publicly stated target: to compete for the title. In such a context, beating Persib is not the summit of the season. It is only a door that has just been opened.

This is where I want to linger. A team that has just broken its curse against its greatest rival, with a perfect start after two games, would normally be loud. But the silence after this derby is a more reliable signal than the scoreline.

In modern football, the five-substitution rule has turned the final twenty minutes of every match into a war of attrition, and has also turned squad depth into a strategic weapon. A team that can rotate without losing quality will travel further through a long season. When Witan speaks of competition for places as a positive, he is describing a selection model in which no position belongs to anyone, where minutes are the currency, and where trust must be repaid with performance.

The strategic meaning of a locker room that does not cheer lies here: this team is training a muscle harder to build than pressing – the muscle of staying calm when winning.

Look at how Witan chooses his words. He does not speak of emotion, he speaks of responsibility. He does not speak of savouring the win, he speaks of continuing. The language of a man who has just won a derby and already turns his head toward the next match is the language of a collective coached to separate emotion from outcome. That is something small clubs rarely possess, and something big clubs lose the moment they begin to believe in their own aura.

There is one detail I consider more important than all the numbers we do not have. The match was described as a tight, hard-fought affair. Persija had to work, had to endure, to keep their edge and finish 2-1. In such an affair, the likeliest thing is for emotion to explode when the final whistle sounds. An ordinary team would shout. A team coached to go the distance would breathe.

We love a team the way we love a poem – not for its meaning, but for its rhythm. And Persija's rhythm after this derby was slow. That rhythm is not indifference. It is discipline. A team that has just taken its first sweet sip of the season will grow thirsty again very soon, and one must prepare for that thirst before it arrives.

There is a paradox the media rarely mentions. Precisely because Persija broke their scar against Persib, they have placed themselves in a new trap. The match immediately after an emotionally charged derby win is always the most dangerous fixture in the calendar of a big club. It is where energy dips, where a team that has just done something difficult finds everything else feels lighter than it really is. Witan perhaps sensed this when he stressed that consistency must be maintained, that holding form is harder than reaching it.

I call it the glory trap. A team walks out of a perfect night and meets an ordinary opponent in the next match. In their heads the echo of the shout remains, while on the grass the new game has already begun. People call that football, but I call it a manuscript that is always being rewritten.

That is why I do not rush to believe in a perfect start after two matches. Six points out of six is a beautiful number, but two matches is far too small a sample to say anything about a season. What matters more is that Persija drew their biggest lesson as early as their second match, the lesson of how to keep a cool head after the heart has raced.

Questions remain unanswered. Indonesian football is a highly competitive league, where the title tends to rotate among several clubs rather than being dominated by one power. In such a league, draws are the most common outcome, and converting tight matches into wins is a lower-percentage strategy than overwhelming opponents. A 2-1 win in a laboured game can be a signal of character, but it can also be a sign that a team is living on thin margins.

Every summer has a god, and every god has a price. For Persija, that god is the belief they have just created in the hearts of their supporters. A derby win raises expectation permanently, and expectation is a gift that carries interest. If the winning run stalls at a few draws, the pressure will fall immediately on coach Shin Tae-yong, on the coaching staff, and on players like Witan. At a club with a publicly declared title target, the distance between a perfect start and a crisis can be compressed into three or four winless matches.

Fascinatingly, the very choice of who fronted the media after the match carried a message. It was a player, not the coach. In the opening weeks of a season, when expectations run high and questions abound, letting a player take the questions is a way of shielding the coaching staff from early questions about expectation. The team is saying that this is the story of the collective, of the men on the pitch, not of one individual on the bench.

So how should we read this victory? As a psychological milestone rather than a tactical one. Ending the five-match winless run against Persib is a durable, luck-independent gain, because psychological pressure in derbies weighs heavily on performance and removing it releases energy for the whole season. But at the same time, it is an expectation-inflating event, and the distance between the story the media is telling and the actual evidence is only two matches.

If I had to keep one image from the night of 12 September, I would not keep the goal. I would keep the moment after the whistle, when a young player stood before the microphone and spoke of responsibility rather than of victory. In a football culture where emotion is often sold by the second, one team is practising speaking in a low register. That way of speaking may not make anyone cheer tonight, but it is the only way to still be able to cheer in May.

Football does not reward the teams that celebrate most beautifully. It rewards the teams that understand every joy must be repaid with something the following week. Persija have just settled an old debt to themselves. A question remains open, and it is the question I carried out of Jakarta: can a locker room that has learned to hide its joy also learn to keep it across a long season?

The grass still grows after every match. But this time, the people sowing it at Gelora Bung Karno chose to sow with a slower hand.