An away point but still not brilliant from Gencler

A last minute goal against your team is always going to hurt. In Saturday's match Kasimpasa scored in the last minute of extra time. A kick in the trousers? Yep. Ultimately though I have to admit that a draw was probably a good result for Gencler.

Kasimpasa 2 - 2 Genclerbirligi

Up nice and early with plenty of time before the match to find @SpineSideburn having a fag outside our place. Jumped in his car and with Little Oz Kanka in the back we headed off to the stadium.  

What a location! The RTE with the Golden Horn in the background.

Listened in to the cricket (via Test Match Sofa) from India and five hours later we made it to Cihangir and said hello to our hosts for the evening. A few minutes later we said goodbye to our hosts and we walked off to the Recep Tayyip Erdogan Stadium for the 2pm kick-off.

Absolutely wonderful weather in Istanbul and what a lovely little stadium the RTE is. It is nestled just over the road from the Pera Palace and the British Consulate in Beyoglu but I doubt that any tourists would have a clue that it exists. I'd guess it would hold maybe 10,000 people and, except for the area where they placed us away fans, almost all the seating is right on the touchline. No running track stupidity.

Our mule Little Oz Kanka Matthew had our coins taken off him by the over zealous private security guards but the police at least realised that we were unlikely to riot. That decision may have had something to do with the fact that there were only 19 of us Gencler fans (and I'm pretty sure that one of them was a police undercover agent).

Certainly no animosity from the rather small Kasimpasa crowd either. Before the match had started one group of them started chanting at us "Hosgeldiniz" - "Welcome". During the match itself they rarely whistled and most of the time merely called out "yonetim istifa". I hadn't heard that one from our Gencler supporters for quite a while, so it made us all feel quite nostalgic.

40 bloody lira!

Onto the football and well, we couldn't see all that much as we were behind the goals and the view was not brilliant. And how much did we pay for what were the worst seats in the stadium? Forty-bloody lira! At least we managed to smuggle Little Oz Kanka in for free.

It was quite difficult to tell exactly what was going on but we took the game to the opposition and probably dominated play. We couldn't get many shots on though and actually we were very lucky not to concede on the couple of occassions that Kasimpasa ventured near our goal. Ramazan for some reason wasn't keeping and Ozkan made a good replacement, although I can't be sure of his positioning for the two goals that were to come later on.

0-0 at half-time and er... the sun was nice and warm.

Second half and all was change.

We scored off a corner I think with Jimmy heading home. All looking good but the goal waking Kasimpasa up. They scored and then we broke back again just a minute later. A good 25 minutes to go and Kasimpasa attacked and attacked and were extremely unlucky not to score. I have no idea what happened but our defence just seemed pathetic for such a long time. Being ahead, perhaps we allowed them to attack and sat back too much.

Little Oz and Big Oz.

Deep into extra time and Jimmy on the attack passed it to his left to Lekic (this was Lekic's best game so far by the way). Jimmy went down for some reason, and Lekic found himself in a bloody good position with no one to pass it to. Kasimpasa get the ball and the referee blows it up in order for Jimmy to be treated. Jimmy wasn't injured. he was wasting time. If he had stayed on his feet he could have helped out Lekic and could well have scored another goal. Instead, he limped about and Kasimpasa were rightly pissed off with what some people call gamesmanship, others call it cheating.

By the way, besides this I thought Jimmy had an excellent game. He seemed to be sending so many good crosses into the box. The hassle for a few too many of them was that there was no one at the receiving end. At the end of the match I mentioned to @SpineSideburn that perhaps we missed Herve Tum whose big bald head last year met so many of those sort of crosses.

Play resumes, Kasimpasa get the ball and score. 2-2 and quite frankly I think we were lucky to get the point.

The away crowd. Photo by @kirmizikara

No surprise when the police held us in for a bit and the wonderful Kasimpasa fans started chanting "Gençler". We chanted back "Paşa" and we all left in love and warmth. A great weekend away.