Gerets to reunite with Umit?

By: Musab | January 6th, 2009

Eric “Baba” Gerets will never be forgotten by the CimBom faithful after leading us to an amazing championship in 2006, despite the club being on the verge of completely shutting down after a huge debt was destroying the club from within. The players salaries were not being paid (which is how Franck Ribery was able to unilaterally cancel his contract with us), foreigners refused to play, and Hakan Sukur had no choice but to pay some of the players salaries out of his own pocket. During one particularly turbulent week, Gerets said that “I have been in football my entire life, but what I have seen here in the past week, I have never seen before”.

After resigning after a disappointing season in 2007, Gerets was soon picked up by the famous Fench club Olympique de Marseille, and began to work his magic over there as well, taking a club struggling at the bottom all the way to a very respectable place. This year Marseille are trying to do better by unseating Olympique Lyonnais from their thrones. All the best Gerets, you really are a CimBom legend.

For some time now the Turkish media has reported that Gerets would like to bring Galatasaray’s star forward Umit Karan over to France to bolster his squad. Gerets knows that in the championship winning season of 05/06, Umit was the lead scorer and at times scored some pretty amazing goals out of nowhere (including an absolute 1988 Van Basten like goal against Manisaspor). Today its been written that Gerets is looking at Umit as well as Brandao of Shakhtar Donetsk and Henrik Larsson.

My opinion? Quite frankly I would be disappointed to see such a great forward go, but if Umit himself wants to go, then the door should be open for him. After a harsh injury earlier, Umit has struggled to regain his old form, with only one goal this season. In addition Skibbe has only been playing a single forward up front, Milan Baros, so Umit, and Nonda for that matter, has struggled to find a place in the first team squad. Perhaps a change in scenery is just what Umit needs.