Arrrrgggghhhhhh

Dear new people to Ankara. This weather is not normal. Watching a footy match in the warm sun, jackets off, just the t-shirt... in February? This is only ever done in the southern hemisphere ... or in Newcastle, England. But this is a very weird year.

I've taken the time to check out the weather from the past seven years... not from some biased parallel state Meteorology Department
but from a trusted source... this very blog!

Feb 17 - 2013
... and so it was with gloves and scarves and jackets and thermal underwear and other stuff that @Spinesideburn and Bernard joined me at the Beer Bus for today's match...

Feb 19, 2012
A feeling of deja vu for lonely Eski Kanka (the Lone Ranger) as he braved a very cold (but snow-less) afternoon yesterday to witness another goal-less match by Ankaragucu.

Feb 21, 2011
A pretty miserable day on Saturday for Ankara in general. The weather was cold and wet and our two teams both went down.

Feb 21, 2010
As I write this, it is pissing down with rain in Ankara and so there will be no kankas at the uncovered Stadium from Hell today. (this was rthe horror season when both Gencler and Ankaragucu played out at Yenikent) 

Feb 22, 2009
The (Red Lion) club was filling up nicely for the (beer) festival but some of us had more important things written down in our agendas... well except for Emin and Spine who decided that they preferred to stay in the nice warm club drinking English ales rather then venture out into the snow to watch Genclerbirligi.

Feb 23, 2008

The week started with snow and freezing temperatures

Feb 26, 2007

A perfect sunny day in Ankara saw the Kankas come out in force. Down at the Chopin we had Arja, Roger, Spine, French Kanka Hande, Scott, Rob and young son Stephen, Flying Dutchman Kanka Carlo, Genc Kanka Eddie and of course Eski Kanka Jim.

You know which post those climate change deniers are going to pounce on? Don't you?

Genclerbirligi 2 - 2 Konyaspor

Can't be bothered reading about the first half? Spine's face says it all.

Carl, Spine, myself and Little Oz Kanka enjoyed a fine half-hour session down at the Beer Bus. Did I mention it was nice and warm?

First half and well... that was all a bit crap.

But we do have a new scoreboard. Doesn't do much more than the old one and it took them ages to figure out how to do some of the more complicated graphics stuff, like updating the score, but still, I guess it meant the Sports Bakanlik weren't completely shameless in putting up posters around the ground boasting how many stadiums the AKP have built around the country. Guess how many of those were in Ankara. None? Correct.  

Konya came out firing and it took us two minutes before we even got the ball. Admittedly when we did we were immediately dangerous. Tomic was looking good and Zec was getting some great runs down the left. But we couldn't get the shots on goal.

We seemed to be flaffing around a bit when a defensive stuff up opened up Konya's first shot... Unlike us, they made no mistake and bang 0-1 down.

The second Konya goal came in injury time of the first half. I was all a bit of a stuff up. We should have done much better.

But we had some bad defending and quite frankly we deserved to be down... even if we had been creatively the much better team.

Second half and it was completely different. Tosic and Yunus were off... Mervan and someone else were on... and in general we looked a lot better.

Almost straight away. Petkovic free kick, onto Stancu who just tapped it in. Nice stuff.

And then the attacks came and came and came. At times we were unlucky. At others, shots were going straight to the Konya keeper, Mr. T. It was all very frustrating until Zec was bundled over in the box. Ref pointed to the spot and gooooaallllll. 2-2.



This was now a winnable match. We were all over Konya. We had at least two chances that you would bet the wife on but .... arrgghhh. The first was when Stancu did brilliantly to get around the keeper and shoot into an empty goal (at a slight but not much of an angle). He hit the post. Right towards the end Jimmy was free, just him and the keeper and not far out and Jimmy blasted it halfway to where the military were practicing their parachuting.

The Konya fans were from Konya, and therefore dickheads in the main, and at one stage they decided to compare us to Ankaragucu and I'm proud to say that the Gencler crowd, that's the whole crowd including the various leftist groups, sang their support for Gucu. There have been the odd small groups shouting pro-Ankaragucu stuff for years at Gencler matches but this was the first time all of us were singing.    

Extremely frustrating match. The coach Mehmet Ozdelik said later that we should have won five or six - two. I'd have to agree with him. We have a very difficult end of the season... we have away matches to Besiktas, Galatasaray, Trabzon and Fenerbahce. Not taking the full three points from teams like Konya could be fatal.