a simple victory for gencler if there is one good thing about this play-off malarchy it is that us fans actually sort of care a bit concerning the arrangement of the mid-table. as spine pointed out today, by this stage of the season us gencler fans are normally singing "no one can stop us from coming eighth."
genclerbirligi 3 - 0 manisaspor
there was rarely any doubt that gencler weren't going to come away with the three points from this one. manisa have already been relegated and we still gave a damn. it was also gencler's last home match of the season - although if we make the play-offs i guess we will have a couple more.
manisa started out the better side. they controlled the ball better and the referee seemed to give them quite a few dodgy fouls. this was nothing to get angry over but it was frustrating. after deflecting the initial forays gencler started to attack. there wasn't a lot in our attacks, at one stage it seemed as if the game plan consisted of "put it onto herve tum's head" and not much else.
it isn't the worse plan in the world, tum has scored a damn lot of headers this season, but a bit of variety would have been appreciated.
that variety came just before half-time when hursut meric had a shot which came off the top post. it came back into play and one of our players (i'm not sure whom) controlled it and was going to have a shot when he was clearly pulled down. the referee wasted no time in pulling out the red card and pointing to the spot. hursut took the penalty and we went into the break 1-0 up.
second half and it was all gencler. manisa were a deflated side. down a man and their coach pulled off kahe who was playing up front.
it was really only a matter of time before we scored again and this time. ermin zec had come on for yasin and we seemed to be crossing the ball in from the left to players in the box only for them to completely miss with their shots. finally zec was one of the recipients of one of these crosses and he put the ball away.
at times i really am amazed we don't use zec more often.
anyway the match was pretty much over when the icing on the cake was delivered thanks to great pressure from the gencler forwards forced the manisa defenders to pass back to their goalkeeper. herve tum kept going, managed to steal the ball off the keeper and the ball dribbled over the line.
all up a good result which puts us into fifth place. a draw next week away against istanbul bbs will guarantee us a place in the play-offs. we might not even need that.
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