Reasons to be cheerful, but not reported in the Turkish press

This post was supposed to be an extended review of the Ankaragucu and Gencler victories yesterday but I can't find anything in any of the papers.

Zaman ran the minute by minute reports that the Anatolia news agency generates for all matches.

Hurriyet had a compacted version of these reports for the Ankaragucu 5-1 win of Diyarbakirspor. But at least mentioned that there was a good homeside crowd.

In the online editions of Milliyet, Vatan and Yeni Safak I couldn't even find the scores, let alone a report.

In the end the best effort came from Fotomac which gave very brief reports on the matches, ie who scored the goals but which actually went one further than the rest and quoted Ankaragucu coach Hikmet Karaman.

"We've performed well in the last few weeks but we haven't goals to show for it. This week we experienced a goal explosion. I'm very happy", Karaman said.

Some have accused this blog of being wrong to criticize the Istanbul teams so much. Well, at least we actually bother as the Turkish press doesn't even seem to care at all.

For the record. Isaac Promise scored again for Genclerbirligi in their 3-1 away win to Malatyaspor, as did Mehmet Nas and Ali Cansun.

For Ankaragucu: the scorers were Stavrevski, an own goal, Umut with two goals, including one from the penalty spot, Cordion with one and Abdurrahman topped off what could possibly have been a good game with a goal three minutes into extra time.

The moral of this story is that we are going to have to actually get to the matches more often. I'm pretty sure I can make it on the weekend but I don't have any details yet of when or who Genclerbirligi are playing. I'll post the details when I'm certain.

Just before pressing the "publish post" button I decided to take the good advice of Adiyaman deputy Husrev Kutlu and I had a cigarette for medical reasons to relieve my stress (see story "Civilization going to pot" below) .

While doing that I realised I should be very happy, the wins over the weekend were excellent results for both teams. Genclerbirligi are still in the hunt for Europe (although it would have been better if Fenerbahce had beaten Kayserispor) and Ankaragucu are slowly but surely pulling away from the drop.

I feel much better now.