Not pretty but Gencler get the three points

From left to right: @SpineSideburn (on Twitter now!), Matt (possibly on Twitter) and @RobinSderberg (on Twitter now!)

"Rubbish"

That was the subject line of the e-mail that @SpineSideburn sent me. The photo above was all that was in that e-mail... no text, no context... no apology.

It was sent to me some time during this afternoon's match...

From left to right.

@SpineSideburn: "Wow. This is a great start" 

A few minutes pass

Matt: "We have gone ahead!"

Pretty much any time after that.

@RobinSderberg: "This is the worst match I've ever seen in my life"

Genclerbirligi 1 - 0 Akhisar Belede... spor

It has been forever, well a month or so since us Gencler fans were able to get together and so it was great to get down to Kizilay and say hello to our friends at the Beer Bus. They aren't really our friends, but they give us beer and pretend that they are interested in Genclerbirligi.

It was a who's who of Ankara society joining us on Saturday as I, your loyal and trustworthy chronicler was joined by none other than my own son! And you else? Yes, it was @SpineSideburn, and @RobinSderberg and our Erasmus friends Dan and Paddy, not only them but also Matthew's mate Tom!!!, and his Dad,... Simon... and that's not all we also had Oguz!!!! And er... Matt from the Australian embassy who was there to make Hursut not feel so sad. Been quite a while since we have had to squish into two taxis.

A half decent crowd on a mild Saturday afternoon. According to @kirmizikara the attendance was 4,556. Not huge but we were rather loud today. The amazing thing is that the attendance figure was even announced. I've never seen such a stat announced in Turkey.

Gencler started off nicely. Seemingly following on from last week's good performance against Antalya. Ermin Zec got a shot on early on and Bjorn was looking nice up front. Hursut and Jimmy were getting a few "sort of" decent crosses in. Then after a dangerous attack from Hursut we got a corner. Hursut sent it in and our defender Ante Kulusic headed it.... IN!!!!

Celebrations after Ante scores. Photo from Genclerbirligi facebook page.

That was about 20 minutes in.

The rest of the match was pretty much rubbish from us.

Basic passes were being buggered up. We seemed to give their attackers a lot of time on the ball. Luckily for us most of the shots were either straight at Ramazan or out. At one stage in the second half it was the post that spared us blushes.

In attack we seemed to go for Hursut on the right almost every time even though there were quite often big spaces in the middle. Hursut was getting his crosses in as good as he was last week and Zec seemed to be playing too far back.

Add to that some silly slipping over and most of the crowd was groaning away at the total uselessness of the afternoon.  

Finally the whistle blew and quite frankly Akhisar deserved to win it. The Gencler players knew it as well as they took forever to come over to accept the congratulations from us. A sheepish celebration... but hey, how many many times have I reported that we were the much better team but came away with nothing.