trabzon 0 - 1 ankaragucu denizli 3 - 2 genclerbirligi
what an absolutely weird day for sport. india all out against bangladesh for a measly 191. pakistan getting belted by the irish bowlers, (i bet ed joyce wishes he had stayed with the irish team), france win the six nations in the very last seconds of their match against scotland, ankaragucu win in trabzon for the first time in more than 15 years (i think i heard that on the radio) and gencler go down to second-last placed denizli.
okay, that last one wasn't so amazing gencler are pretty good at losing games we have to win, but you get my drift.
in fact i'm so amazed at the results today that i'm going to nick an idea from the guardian's coverage of the cricket today. red smith on bobby thompson's world series winning home-run said: "there is no way to tell it. the art of fiction is dead: reality has strangled invention."
sir eski kanka is in northern britain at the moment, no doubt down the pub with hibee kanka, as he is off to go and see his beloved hibernian playing in some mickey mouse final on sunday. so i've been left with the duty of doing the reports for both of ankara's teams.
so let's start off with the good news, ankaragucu's win over trabzonspor.
started off well enough for ankaragucu with tita coming close in the third minute and it wasn't long after that bebbe sent in a pass from the right to ex-genclerbirligi captain mustafa ozkan who shot the ball past the trabzon goalkeeper.
i won't go into too much more detail as the match stayed at that score but looking at the anatolian news agency report the rest of the match was all trabzonspor trying to get back in. ceyhun (whom ankaragucu sold at the winter break) and ayman (whom genclerbirligi sold at the winter break) both feature prominently in the report but obviously none of them scored.
so well done to ankaragucu, a tough away match and they came up trumps. by the way i will edit this at some stage once i find out when exactly was the last time ankaragucu won away to trabzon.
now onto the depressing news that gencler lost.
let me firstly point out that galatasaray only managed a draw last night, as did kayserispor today. a win would have put us into a great position in the fight for a champion's league place. instead, they blew it.
back to normal for this blog's favourite player, isaac promise, who seems to have missed a couple of chances at the beginning of the match, then missed when one-on-one with the keeper towards the end of the first half.
denizli scored at the death of the first half and then promise made amends of sorts at the beginning of the second by sending a pass in to engin who shot from 30 metres out to score. 1-1.
a couple more good chances to gencler failed and then mehmet nas, he who has been playing well lately but who also seems to be prone to giving away silly fouls, brings down a denizli player in the box. penalty awarded and converted. 2-1
then a bloke who seems to have gone missing in the last month or so decides to have a go, good old mehmet cakir scores for gencler. 2-2
no real description of denizli's third and winning goal in the anadolu report, pretty much just that it happened. 3-2
denizli had a player sent off at 80 minutes and the last 10 minutes, plus extra time, was all gencler but no goal was to be found. depressing.
denizlispor: souleymanou hamidou, tomas abraham, ahmet çağıran (dk. 59 fatih egedik), julio cesar mendes moreira, roman kratochvil, yusuf şimşek (dk. 78 süleyman görgün), bülent ertuğrul, erman güraçar, ibrahim ege, adriano padilha nascimento (dk. 89 fatih yiğen), serhat gülpınar
yedekler: süleyman küçük, selahattin kınalı, murat karakoç, karel kroupa
teknik direktör: ?
gençlerbirliği: recep öztürk, lamine traore, erkan özbey, mehmet nas, okan öztürk, mehmet çakır, promise isaac (dk. 77 sandro da silva mendonça), draman haminu (dk. 50 erhan güven), eren aydın, ayhan tuna üzümcü, engin baytar
