A hard earned away victory for Gencler

The end of the Indian summer and onto crap. Cold, wet and windy. I was glad I was watching in the pub. Pity the poor Gaziantep fans who had to travel a couple of hundred kilometres to Urfa for their "home" match. As far as I know their home ground is being fixed up.

Gaziantepspor 2 - 3 Genclerbirligi

A whole heap of the Alkaralar boys and girls went off to the "Former Gencler Players Association" to watch today's match. Thing was though, they only serve tea. A lovely invitation from the old boys but I'd like something a bit stronger.

There were a few fans down at the Beer Bus in any case and it wasn't long before we were up and shouting.

Two minutes in. Hursut on the right sent a perfect ball into the box. Lekic chested it down to Petkovic who managed to turn it round and shoot low into the goal.

One-nil up and this was going to be easy.

Er... except it wasn't. All the play was Antep's. At around the 20th minute the possession stats were against us something like 65-35.

We weren't playing that badly but then some extremely bad defending allowed Anrep to come back in about the 25th.

About this stage @spinesideburn showed up and Gencler started to play a bit better. It was much much better stuff and then Azofeifa scored a loverrrrly goal as Hursut found him unmarked outside the box.

1-2 at half-time and all was well.

The rain must have really come down at half-time as the pitch just collapsed. It wasn't a quagmire of mud but the ball was certainly not going anywhere.

So we got some quite stupid football really. Not the players fault, but hey.

Antep continued to dominate possession but Ozkan in goal (if you remember our regular keeper Ramazan was sent off last week) was excellent.

Considering the circumstances, the bad field, the rain, the sheer misery of it all, most of our players were pretty good. I particularly liked Zec, Hursut, and Aykut.

Anyway, the game sort of descended into farce as the rain made it a bit of a bath. Then Tosic scored. It was a perfectly place shot which the Antep keeper had no chance of getting. 1-3 up and the match was surely ours.

Tosic is congratulated after scoring the final goal. Photo by @kirmizikara

Then in extra time they scored. deservedly so. But then with about 30 seconds on the clock and Antep attacked like hell. I have no idea what happened but mu heart was in my mouth until finally the referee blew his whistle.

Phew. All up a good victory after all, it has been more than 20 years since the last time we beat Antep away..