until ankaragucu or hacettepe get back into the top flight, hopefully sometime soon, the closest us genclerbirligi fans get to a derby is when we play es-es. they even have the same colours as us (how's that for superficiality). so in order to get gencler fans to go to the away match, the tff put the match on a friday night with the match finishing after the final train has left eskisehir for ankara. so even if i had a passolig card it would still be one heck of a pain to go to the footy. thanks tff.
eskisehir 0 - 2 genclerbirligi
the weather has turned a bit cold in the last few days and faced with watching with the alkaralar crowd at the beer bus or joining karakizil at the su'dem pub i went with the sitting inside without cigarette smoke option, thus abandoning my alkaralar comrades. karakizil had also abandoned their boycott of lig tv. it seems that last week's decision to listen to the radio broadcast of the match in protest at the industrialisation of football was made by one drunken fan with access to the @karakizil twitter account. he was certainly given a lot of stick for the tweet... but ... one out, all out!
get to the pub to find spine and to find that eskisehir were all over us. this was a team possessed and for the first 15 minutes of the match i wasn't sure if we had the ball for more than 10 seconds at a go. our keeper thomas dahlin was forced to make some very good saves and on one occasion we had the post to thank. scary stuff, especially for a number of youngsters who had come through the ranks at gencler and were playing their first match.
we had a sort of attacking run at about the 30 minute mark which an eskisehir defender seemed to have got control of. he attempted to blast it out of the box only to whack the ball straight into ugur ciftci. the ball bounced off ugur and looped over towards the goal where their keeper seemed to keep it out. the goalline referee then called it as having gone over the line. it was the correct decision and one that silenced the small crowd.
second half and it was again all eskisehir. attack after attack, desperate defence from us and great goalkeeping by dahlin, oh, and another ball hit the post.
then, right towards the end, an eskisehir player made a rare mistake and had the ball stolen by ugur ciftci. he threaded it through to stancu who somehow managed to lose the ball, get it back and then make what was probably genclerbirligi's only shot at goal all night. goal!!!
totally and utterly unfair for eskisehir, but for us... quite a laugh.
it was one hell of a good match. really nice football. we were outgunned but still somehow managed to get the win. how, i have no idea.
at the pub, orcan explained karakizil's new political stance towards the club: "we don't like the chairman, but we like the manager."
