a normal friday evening in ankara. a young man walks arm-in-arm with a beautiful girl, strolling through sanitised genclik park, oblivious to the blind drunk activities that used to take place there at the sahil restaurant where sir eski kanka used to pay through the neck for some weird soda/champagne thing for the not very good singer in a short skirt.
"canim," she says. "why don't we just pop over the road and get a ticket and see the beautiful football that i'm told genclerbirligi are world-reknowned for?" the young lady said to her man.
and so they dodged the taxis and entered the 19 mayis stadium area.
"we would like a ticket to the match please sir," she asked.
"have you got a passolig card?"
"er... no..."
"no fucking football for you then. fuck off you fucking fuckers..."
genclerbirligi 1 - 0 bursaspor
an absolutely wonderful friday evening for football. the weather was in the hole, on the wall, curling upwards, spinning nicely, lickedly splittedly ace! pretty nice really.
so down we went to the beer bus. we had a few of the regulars ... oz kanka (me!!!!), little oz kanka, spine, flying dutchman kanka. and we had melih, his son and a small relative.
so we had seven people, but just six tickets!
it was easy enough as they let us squeeze through the turnstyles with the kids.
first potential explosive encounter avoided!
with day tickets not allowed to be on sale anymore the crowd was definitely smaller than usual. of course, this meant that everyone in maraton was a season ticket holder and therefore passionate for gencler.
kick off and ...
everyone was sitting.
no one was singing.
as soon as we had an attack that was half decent and people like myself would naturally scream support, we would be shushed by the crowd. we were quiet. we were sitting. we did not sing. this was a wonderfully weird protest. we were quiet...
no sounds at all. everything was quiet and then at the sixth minute all of the gencler fans start shouting against the passolig cart.
all quiet again until the 16th minute when the same anti-passolig card screeds were shouted.
this was a match with thousands watching and besides those small points we were all quiet. the atmosphere was brilliant! this was a crowd united in silence.
and then again in the 26th and 36th minute the crowd chanted against the passolig.
but for most of the time we were quiet... the football seemed okay. we had most of the ball and i was fairly confident that we go ahead.
half time and time to start singing!
it was time to stand up and sing all the songs and the chants that we were supposed to do when they were actually playing.
we had exhausted our songs and the teams started to come out onto the pitch. for the fans... it was time to leave.
"we are not customers, we are fans!" was the chant of the fans as they filed out.
so it was that we left the stadium just as the second-half had kicked off.
i don't know for sure how many people left. my guess is about 60 percent of the crowd in maraton (a crowd already massively reduced thanks to the new ticketing procedures). there were a whole heap of people sitting on the left-hand side who didn't leave their seats.
in the taxi on the way to the red lion club i learnt that ermin zec had scored.
