Marukawa and 49 Minutes of Silence in Banten: When Dewa United Learned to Win with Patience

On Sunday afternoon, September 20, 2026, at the Stadion Internasional Banten, I sat in row twelve near midfield, right as the opening whistle blew. For the first twelve minutes, there was nothing to write about. The ball moved across Dewa United's half, short passes between the two centre-backs, the coach's brief shouts, and studs scraping on grass already dried by the afternoon sun. After forty-five minutes, the score remained 0-0. Not surprising. But what I recorded in my small notebook was not the number. It was the silence.

There is a peculiar silence in football before the first goal arrives. Not the quiet of a sparse stand. It is the silence of a collective learning patience. Dewa United began with a dominant posture, superior ball control, but PSS Sleman erected a two-tier wall in front of the box. Everything unfolded slowly, as if the match was bargaining with itself over when to fire.

This fixture fell within matchweek three of the BRI Super League 2026/2027 season. Dewa United entered as a side still searching for rhythm after an imperfect start. PSS Sleman, by contrast, were mired at the bottom of the table and had yet to collect a single point since the season began. The gulf in standing led many to predict an easy win for the hosts. But football does not read ahead. And I, after thirty-two years standing on the stadium's outer ring, have learned that it is precisely the seemingly easy matches that most clearly reveal a team's essence.

The first half ended 0-0. I remember a fan sitting beside me, somewhere past sixty, clutching a scarf that had faded with age. He did not shout, did not clap. He merely looked down at the pitch and muttered: "One beat is missing." I asked him what beat was missing. He replied: "The beat of someone willing to take responsibility."

The goal came from a rhythm nurtured across forty-nine minutes, not from a moment of improvisation. That is what made it tactically different.

In the 49th minute, after a combination down the right flank, the ball was delivered into the box. Taisei Marukawa moved intelligently, chose his position ahead of the defender, and finished cleanly. The score opened: 1-0 to Dewa United. The roar surged and then cut off at once, as though rehearsed. What I noticed was not the goal, but the way Marukawa turned: he did not run toward the coaching staff. He simply stood still and exhaled a long breath. The man who supplied him the ball, a right-back, had made a diagonal run through three lines in the preceding ten seconds. His name will not appear on the score sheet. Yet he was the one who lit the spark — the storyteller no one remembers.

People remember the goal, but I write about the one who offered that goal to the world through a fumbled touch. Here there was no fumbled touch at all, only correct touches executed by names never carved on the electronic board. But the principle holds: the material that makes a moment always comes from the smallest strokes, not from the final strike.

Nine minutes later, in the 58th minute, Carlos Iury doubled the lead. This goal carried a very different spirit. It did not come from patience, but from confidence inflated by the opener. PSS Sleman were now forced to push their line higher, and that very space opened a path for Iury. He received the ball at the edge of the box, took one touch, and fired into the far corner. 2-0. I heard applause far more buoyant than the first goal. The stands understood the match was settled. But football is never settled before the final whistle.

In the 72nd minute, from a corner, Christophe Nduwarugira headed home to cut the deficit to 2-1. The mood in the stands shifted instantly. I heard a collective gasp from thousands. In football, a goal from a set piece always carries an implicit message: that your defensive structure has a hole, and you have just let the opponent see it. Nduwarugira is not the brightest star on the pitch. He is a centre-back, the kind of player normally mentioned only when his team concedes. Today he scored. And in my eyes, that was a more interesting moment than Marukawa's goal, because it restated an old truth: in football, villain and hero are often separated by a single header.

An own goal is football's way of reminding us that legend does not choose whom to sacrifice itself for. There was no own goal in this match, but there was a subtler variant: a defender from the side considered the league's weakest suddenly became the only scorer for his team. Football always operates this way — it cares nothing for the table, only for who is in the right place at the right time.

From the 72nd minute to the 90th plus five, the match shifted into a state I often call "jual beli serangan" — an exchange of attacks. Dewa United had at least three clear chances to kill the game, but their finishing lacked precision. PSS Sleman also had two dangerous counters, one of which nearly produced an upset in the 88th minute. I could not sit still. Beside me, the old man with the scarf muttered again: "Don't win through fear."

That sentence occupied my thoughts for the remaining minutes. A match without spectators is not without sound; there are footsteps, the coach's shouts, and the sound of frightened hearts. In Banten that afternoon, the stands had people, but fear was plainly present — the fear of losing a win already within reach. Dewa United won, but they won trembling through the final twenty minutes. That kind of victory reveals more about character than a 4-0 rout ever would.

At the final whistle, Dewa United claimed all three points and climbed to the top of the table with 10 points from four matches. PSS Sleman remained 16th, still without a point. But the numbers do not tell the whole story. What I carried home from Banten that afternoon was a question about rhythm: can Dewa United sustain the patience of those first forty-nine minutes, when the season will bring matches where they no longer have the time to wait?

I hunt transfer news like an open ending: knowing this is a farewell, yet never knowing the conclusion. In Banten today, I was not hunting transfers. I was hunting a silence — the silence before Marukawa struck, the silence when Nduwarugira headed home, the silence of PSS Sleman fans who understand their club has yet to find a way out. Silence is where I find the real story.

The 222 million does not sit on the balance sheet; it sits in the hearts of millions. In this league, there is no contract worth 222 million euros. But there are hundreds of thousands of people in Banten, in Sleman, across Indonesia, carrying a piece of their heart tied to matches like this one. To them, three points are not merely three points. They are belief recharged for another week, for one more hope. And that is why football — the sport I have observed for thirty-two years — remains Empty Football, meaning the football that exists beyond the main spotlight, where the smallest stories carry the greatest weight.

In my notebook, beneath the line "20/9/2026, Banten, 15.30 WIB," I added one more: "Dewa United won by learning patience. But the real test has not yet come." That is a thought moving forward, not a closed summary. Because in this league, every victory is only a chapter, and the next chapter will open somewhere no one can predict.