From The Cut Of The National Anthem To The Wrongly Printed Flag, Indonesia's Unpleasant Moments At World Sports Events

JAKARTA - The Indonesian basketball team experienced an unpleasant incident ahead of the meeting with Lebanon in the 2023 FIBA World Cup qualifying round on Saturday last week. The national anthem Indonesia Raya was not played completely.

In that event, the song composed by WR Soepratman was played only until 'let us shout, Indonesia is united'. The management and players immediately responded by looking at each other in confusion. They were disappointed.

Although it doesn't sound like a big problem, such a moment shouldn't have happened and the organizers could have anticipated it. Because, the national anthem is one of the implementations of the nation's self-esteem that must be treated properly.

This is not the first time Indonesia has experienced such an incident. In previous years in other sporting agendas, similar incidents had occurred. It's not about playing the national anthem, but writing the name of the country wrong, playing the national anthem wrongly and printing the flag wrong.

In 2017 during the 29th SEA Games in Malaysia, there was an incident of misprinting the Indonesian flag. At that time, Malaysia as the host mistakenly printed the Indonesian flag in the guidebook that was used as a souvenir at the opening ceremony, even though the book would be distributed to all invited guests.

On page 80 of the manual, the Indonesian flag is listed upside down: White-Red. Yes, even though everyone knows that color is the Polish flag.

Still from the same event, Malaysia again made a mistake. This time when displaying the flags of the participating countries of the 2017 SEA Games in the rankings and medals.

In the infographic that was displayed at that time, the flags of the eight participating countries were interchanged with each other, one of which was the Indonesian flag.

Shifting to 2019, this kind of incident was felt again by Indonesia, precisely at the SEA Games event in Manila. At that time there was an error displaying the flag and name of the Indonesian national team.

The first unpleasant moment occurred during a floorball match that pitted the Indonesian national team against the Philippines on 26 Nov 2019. At that time, the committee did not display the Indonesian flag but instead the Thai flag.

In addition to the flag error, the organizers of the 2019 SEA Games Manila also wrote down the country code of Indonesia incorrectly. They should have written the INA code for Indonesia but instead it was written as IDN.

Actually, the IDN code is indeed used by the world football federation, namely FIFA to refer to Indonesia. But in other sports, the writing of the Indonesian code is INA because it refers to the regulations of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Olympic Committee.

Not only that, in 2021 Indonesia again had an unpleasant incident. Precisely during the last match of the 2022 World Cup Qualification Group G on June 11.

At that time, Indonesia was scheduled to face the United Arab Emirates. Before the match started, the organizers played the national anthem. Unfortunately, instead of the Indonesian national anthem, the Malaysian national anthem was played instead.

Hopefully things like this don't happen again.