Justinus Lhaksana a.k.a Coach Justin: When a Pandit Becomes a Comedy

On July 28, 1967 in Surabaya an influencer in the field of sports in particular named Justinus Lhaksana or who is familiarly known as Coach Justin. The journey in Indonesian football has been around for a long time, starting with coaching Adjie Massaid's futsal club called AMFC (Adjie Massaid Futsal Clinic) before finally flying to Netherlands for taking coaching education.

After returning from Netherlands, the license that he brought from the KNVB (Dutch football federation) made PSSI interested in appointing him as the main coach of the Indonesian futsal national team. There are at least two achievements that he recorded while leading the Indonesian futsal national team, namely ranking 3 in the AFF Futsal Championship (2005 & 2009) and ranking 2 (2006 & 2008). Finally, Coach Justin's career in the coaching world was recorded in 2019 as the technical director of the Indonesian futsal national team.

His career in the world of Indonesian football did not end in the coaching chair, with his track record Justin tried a new adventure to become a football observer and he made his career debut as a sports broadcaster in 2007 at Lativi as a commentator on the Dutch league (Eredivisie). After that, his appearances on television became more frequent, both for local and international stations, until recently, Coach Justin was chosen as a commentator for the Euro 2020 competition at one of the domestic television stations.

Not only on television, Coach Justin has also expanded his wings on Youtube with his personal channel whose content also reviews football worldwide in depth and his personal social media, especially Twitter. However, with Justin's background growing up and taking football education outside, his statements seem to go against the axis of the mindset of most Indonesians. Not infrequently he is involved in debates in discussing a topic between fellow broadcasters or with Indonesian netizens.

This eventually became the public spotlight and turned it into comedy material such as his content on Youtube which was used as a meme, his photo which was used as a meme, etc. One of the football enthusiast, Rafli has his own opinion about how the figure of a Coach Justin is, "in my opinion, coach justin as a football observer (pundit) is a pundit who "goes against the flow" with other pundits, the assessment of football does not look at the final score but see the team play as a whole. Besides that, his demeanor is quite "eccentric" with the words he makes such as "chicken vegetable" (totenham) "kardus" (fans data) which makes him talked a lot, especially on social media" He said.

From this fact, it is actually a bit unfortunate that the Coach Justin phenomenon has developed into a joke if you look at his personal nicks for this country. But at the same time sometimes it becomes a separate entertainment for football connoisseurs or fans in Indonesia in enjoying chat shows about the world of football, maybe a phenomenon like this can be a new chapter for Indonesian netizens to also express ideas or be critical of soccer specifically in Indonesia.