Shock: Referee has shocker: Gencler grab a point at home to Besiktas

I'm not about to say we were robbed, Besiktas were clearly the better team... but there was some dodgy stuff happening out there last night.

Genclerbirligi 1 - 1 Besiktas

Just Spine and me down at the Beer Bus before kick-off (a sentence I have a feeling I will using a lot of this season. Thanks Passolig). A lovely warm Monday night right before the bayram had the pubs in Kizilay chocka-block. Beers and kofte and off to the stadium.

In years gone by a Gencler-Besiktas match would mean having to get to the stadium a bit early but in today's Passolig-era the queue at the gates was about five people long. Even then the ushers were saying that the other gate had no-one waiting.

So managed to get in with plenty of time to spare and saw that the famous Middle East journalist (copyright Round ball in Ankara) Patrick Keddie had found his way to the top of Section C.

Crowd-wise I'd say we had a couple of thousand, maybe three... while Besiktas had four to five thousand. The Besiktas turnout was impressive. They filled the entire Saatli away section and sang wholeheartedly for the full match. I'm guessing that the reason there were so many is because last season Besiktas played a lot of their home games just outside of Ankara, in Yenikent, and so all these fans would have already owned Passolig cards.

Post-match beers.

Onto the match itself and ... oh shit. Besiktas came out flying and within five minutes I had decided that we were going to lose 5-0. Thing was though, they completely dominated but yet weren't getting any shots on goal. Still it was scary as hell and then Gencler, playing with three up front (Djalma, Stancu and El Kabir) started sending balls through. Counterattacking opportunities were taken and it was us who were getting all the shots on goal. Then in the 23rd minute Irfan Kahveci took a short corner, Ahmet Oguz sent in a cross that was headed for El Kabir's head but instead found our old friend Tosic who expertly sent it into the back of the net. Unfortunately for Tosic  he no longer plays for us and it was counted as an own goal.

The rest of the half was good stuff and had it all ended then I would have been a happy man.

Second half though... bllluuurghhh.

📢 Aydınus'un kırmızı kart göstermesi için ne olması gerekiyor? http://t.co/pvD07qCyrt pic.twitter.com/fljGd7eGhl

— Ankara'da Spor (@ANKARADASPOR) September 21, 2015

Ankara'da Spor asks "What more does it take for Aydınus to show a red card?"

     
Gencler seemed to dropped a couple of gears and Besiktas finally got some shots off. Some desperate defending saved us time and again and Hopf pulled off some nice saves. It was pretty much inevitable that Besiktas would score and eventually they did. There was some talk afterwards that their goal was offside. I think we are talking centimetres here and in any case with the sort of football Besiktas were playing... I can't complain.  

The second half also saw the referee pretty much lose control of the match. There was some serious rough play out there and the ref just couldn't stop it. All of the 50/50 decisions were going Besiktas' way. There was at least one direct red that wasn't given and we had a bizarre yellow given to Hopf for time wasting. The thing with the last one was that Besiktas were making a replacement at the time. Weird.

There was some handbags after the match between the Besiktas keeper and Skullason (I think)... but nothing will come of it.

Match over and off to Eski Yeni for a beer to celebrate the point.    

EDIT: I forgot to add that it was great to see Ante Kulusic back in defence. Welcome back to the club.