What a difference a week makes

Coming off last week's 3-1 victory I was confident that Gencler would put newly-promoted Akhisar to the sword. In the end it was only the heroic efforts of Ramazan that kept us from having our arses whipped.

Akhisar 0 - 0 Genclerbirligi  

It was Spine, Emin, the Alkaralar crowd and me at the Beer Bus on Saturday night, all of us looking forward to a hat full of goals. Throughout the match, it was always "just around the corner" and "Akhisar are doing well but they won't be able to keep it up".

Bloody frustrating in other words. Genclerbirligi weren't terrible but they weren't very good either.

I think the possession stats ended up about even but the big difference was that Akhisar seemed to have so much time on the ball whilst our boys had milliseconds to make their choices. Akhisar pressed and pressed and forced mistakes. We seemed to just lay off.

We had a few chances during the match but most went flying out or straight at the keeper. One especially horrible shot was from Zec, I think, a great chance just inside the box and he hit it with all the strength of an injured Girls Under 6s player. Pathetic.

One other position where we should have at least got a shot on target was when Jimmy Durmaz (whom I learnt last night is an Assyrian) got past a few players near the post and no one, no one was there to take the obviously coming pass. Last week Zec scored from being in that same now vacant position. Hopeless.

No one played very well last night, except for Ramazan in goal. As I said before we were bloody lucky to come away with the draw. Hopefully we will pick up a bit for next week's home match against Ordu.

UPDATE: Just watched the "highlights". Worse than I thought.