using the excuse that valentine's day is only for unmarried people, i was allowed out of the house today. i have no idea what spine's excuse was but he managed to grab his car and we made the 45 kilometre drive out to the yenikent stadium for today's "home" match against kasimpasa.
dan the man showed up later on and said the stadium reminded him very much of kazakhstan. for spine, the farmers' field with the mountains in the background provided him an ocassion to repeat his, "not the baskent, but more like tashkent" allegedly funny remark.
anyway it was a surreal sight to see in the middle of nothing a stadium painted in the colours of ankaragucu.
a couple of thousand fans turned up for what was a lovely afternoon. the sun was out and it was extremely warm. then everything turned to crap as the footy started.
genclerbirligi 0 - 2 kasimpasa
i'm going to say anything much. we controlled most of the play in the first half without showing much up front. half-time was 0-1, a softish sort of goal from a free kick and for the second half kahe and hursut were brought on. neither did a lot and our defence in the second half was pretty bad, the attack was even worse. all up it was rubbish. many times was the comment made that we have no mid-field general. which makes the decision to send jedinak off to antalya at the beginning of the season a very stupid one indeed. kasimpasa weren't a good team but still we didn't even look like scoring. a depressing match with not a single positive point on which to base any hope for the future.
dan the man vowed never to come to another game of football in turkey again as stupid mistakes were being made by both teams, and the referee.
to think we went all the way out there for this crap.
and by the way spine, i have since discovered that the player we were told had the name eureka is in fact called vranjes, and the guy who replaced him towards the end was sebahattin.
oh, and finally. a little song for those girls left behind by their boyfriends/lovers/partners who went to the footy on st. valentines day.
) 
