Always quote your sources!

I sent the following e-mail to Sir Eski Kanka yesterday:

Just checking on how people get to the blog and saw that someone had put the words - ankaragucu kenan evren - into Google. We are number two in Google UK for that search. I then looked a bit deeper at the person doing the search and found that their ISP was Hurriyet Gazetecilik Ve Matbaacilik A.s - Istanbul. Mmmm. Checked a bit deeper and saw that the person read the "Real reason we should be scared of a President Erdogan" post. The person also checked out the "For Turkish Journalists" story and the "English in Gecekondu" post. So keep your eyes open, we might be getting a mention in Hurriyet soon.

That soon was in fact today, although in a slightly different form than what I was expecting.

Reading the article "Fortis Cup seeks its new owner" by Ozgur Korkmaz in the Turkish Daily News today I was particularly interested by the follıowing:

In the 1980-1981 season, Ankaragücü was fighting to get promoted from the second division while Ankara's other professional team Gençlerbirliği was in the third division. Kenan Evren, who headed the National Security Council consisting of five generals formed after the September 12, 1980 coup d'état, said the capital of the Turkish Republic should be represented in the first division with at least one team.

The opportunity arrived when Ankaragücü advanced to the final of the domestic cup, called the Federation Cup at the time. After Ankaragücü clinched the cup with scores of 2-1 and 0-0, The Turkish Football Federation (TFF) made a change to the regulations allowing the cup winner to play in the first division regardless of which league it plays in and Ankaragücü was automatically promoted to the first division.

Most of the above is true. It is in the mistake that Mr. Korkmaz gives himself away as the person who googled "kenan evren ankaragucu". The give away being that he names Genclerbirligi as being in the third division.

If you look at our story named "Real reason we should be scared of a President Erdogan" you will see the following line:

Genclerbirligi were down in the 3rd division or somewhere or other.

The "somewhere or other" was of course my way of showing I didn't bother to actually check where exactly Gencler were in those days. Today I decided to do some checking and looked up Tanil Bora's excellent book "Ankara rüzgarı", a history of Genclerbirligi. By the way, we see Tanil quite often at Gencler matches.

In the statistics section of the book it clearly shows that Genclerbirligi were in the second division in the 1980-1981 season.

So it seems that Mr. Korkmaz took our blog as being gospel. Sure is flattering but one thing that all good journalists should have banged into them is that you should say where you got your information from. Mr. Korkmaz didn't mention our blog in his story today. If he had it would have been us that looked stupid.