"The round ball in Ankara" blocked by Turkish court

Dark days in Turkey as "The round ball in Ankara" blog has been blocked by court order! Our overseas Kankas can reach the blog no worries but for those of us in Turkey we just get the following message: "Access to this website has been suspended in accordance with decision no. 2008/2761 of the TR Diyarbakir First Criminal Court of Peace."

My immediate thoughts were: "what the hell has Sir Eski Kanka been posting?" I tried to remember if he had posted any separatist Scottish stuff (after all I wouldn't be surprised if a court in Diyarbakir mixed up Scottish and Kurdish separatism), but then I remembered Sir Eski Kanka is a unionist.

My next thought was that it was that annoying Beşiktaş supporter who has been giving us shit for the last week or so just because we rightly denigrated his team as Sekiztaş.

Maybe it was my calls for decent toilets at the 19 Mayis Stadium, perhaps these were conceived as being an attack on a state institution. Maybe it was the call for civil disobedience at the stadium when I urged everyone to light a fag in defiance of the anti-smoking laws?

It seems though that the ban is a little bit wider than just us at "The round ball in Ankara" and all blogspot blogs have been banned in Turkey.

I shall be getting in touch with Freaky Deaky Dutch Kanka Niels in the next day or so to try and get the blog out of the all-encompassing net that is the Turkish court system protecting us from the evil of football blogs.

In the meantime, one way of accessing the blog, and also posting for the blog, is to use a proxy site called vtunnel.

How does it work?

Put www.vtunnel.com into you browser.

Once it has loaded up and popped up a couple of annoying advertisements, cut and paste http://ankarafootball.com into the appropriate box.

That should get you around the ban, at least until I have sorted out another way.

In the meantime, can you Ankaragucu supporters on Sunday sing to the tune of the Beatles song Yellow Submarine "We want to live in a free democracy, free democracy, free democracy".