i missed the first 15 minutes or so of wednesday night's bucaspor - genclerbirligi quarter-final second leg thanks to a friend of little oz kanka refusing to change the telly from the disney channel. when i finally got on buca were 1-0 up and things looked a little frightening. all was well at the end though.
bucaspor 1 - 2 genclerbirligi (over two legs 1-4)
it was a pretty big crowd for the izmir home side and at 1-0 up they were singing there hearts out dreaming that they could overcome the 2-0 deficit they went into the match with.
for us gencler fans it was scary stuff as a free kick was only just kept out by serdar diving low to his left. we could have sealed it not long later when jedinak had a shot that was cleared off the line.
then serdar stupidly got a yellow card for wearing a necklace. wtf! doesn't someone check these things?
buca decided to start playing rough and were committing fouls all over the place. their coach samat aybaba then got sent to the stands for arguing a bit too much on the sidelines.
gencler were stepping up their attacks and were looking the better team when the incident of the match happened.
azofeifa took a corner which their keeper got a hand to but didn't manage to clear. jedinak poked it to serkan whose shot on goal was saved by the arm of a buca defender. ref pointed to the spot and the buca defender was red carded. it was unlucky but those are the laws of football. aussie fans will remember the same thing happening to harry kewell in the world cup.
azofeifa stepped up... and missed!
still, they were now a man down and it was clear that this was going to be gencler's night. just a minute or two later in stoppage time for the first half the ball was bobbling around in the box, someone poked it to zec who kicked it into the open goal just a couple of yards from where he was standing.
match over really, buca now needed three goals to go through, and they were a man down.
second half and we were clearly on top and it was no surprise when we scored again after azofeifa sent a lovely ball through to jedinak who had made a break. one-on-one with the keeper and the ball went through. buca 1 - 2 gencler.
it was all a bit of a waste of time from then on and even more stupidly was when mustafa pektemek, who came on after jedinak's goal, decided to argue with the ref and got a yellow for his troubles. silly fellow.
in the 85th things got even more stupid when another buca player was sent off having received a second yellow.
with everyone bored to death the referee decided their was precisely two seconds of stoppage time as he put us all out of our misery.
all up a good performance by genclerbirligi. in the sem-finals we will be up against either istanbul bbs or kasimpasa who play their quarter-final match thursday night.
