Fenerbahce rely on the ref... again!

I'm not going to say we were the better team. If it wasn't for some heroics by Dahlin and one of the weirdest line clearances I've ever seen we could have been crushed. But still... the decision to give that first penalty was appalling.

Fenerbahce 2 - 1 Genclerbirligi

Off to the Red Lion Club last night with various Kankas to watch some footy. On the big screen was some match from Europe but for us it was the small screen with sound down.

It seems normal now to start the report with the fact that hardly anyone showed up. The biggest club in the country can only get about 10,000 to a match on a Saturday evening? Thanks Passolig.

Match kicked off and from the start we were under the kosh. Fenerbahce are a good team and speed-wise they were in a much higher gear than our lot. It was pretty clear to us that this was going to be a difficult 90 minutes.

We could have been a couple down but Dahlin, back from a week off, pulled off two blinding saves. We had a couple of attacks but no real shots. Half-time and Damon commented that Gencler should be happy to have held off the giants of Turkish football. He was right.

Second half and, well, more of the same really. And then, and then (let me just cut and paste from my report of the last time we faced Fener) the referee "pointed to the spot. 'No!!!!!!!!' we cried. 'That was a dive you moron.' Replays proved it was indeed a dive. In fact a bloody obvious dive in my opinion."

History repeated itself as Alper went down in the box. Frustrating as hell. Emre scored it.

Fenerbahce continued to look very dangerous when Alper got one-on-one with the keeper. Alper then did what comes naturally to him and attempted to score dived. This time the referee was actually looking and gave Alper a yellow card.

Then what was one of the best line saves you will ever see. Fener's Sow had the ball, Dahlin had to come out to smother it but Sow managed to lob him and the ball was heading towards goal. Tosic was running towards the goal and attempted to sort of bicycle kick it out... he almost got it right but kicked it straight up where it hit the cross bar, bounced on the ground in front of the goal and was clearly spinning back towards the goal when another one of our defenders chested it off the line. At any stage of all this had the ball gone a inch further it would have been a goal. Amazing stuff.

We then annoyed the couple of people watching the match from Europe, I think it was a Spanish, when Gencler managed to score from open play, Fenerbahce have now scored four times against us in our last two matches... all of them penalties.          

Mervan stole a ball, got it into the box, a bit of scrambling then Antal, one of our new signings this year, bashed it in.

Fener continued their attacks and then again the referee pointed to the spot. I think Sow dived but our defender had gone down with legs out and well... probably a penalty. Kuyt stepped up and bang.

That was that. On balance, the right result but the way it came about was definitely not right.