Can you hear that? That’s the sound of us heading closer and closer to Kadikoy

When the season began many a moon ago, I declared that this year our only goal was to win the UEFA Cup at Kadikoy. For those of you that may not know, Kaidkoy is the part of Istanbul (on the Asian side) where Fenerbahce’s stadium, the Sukru Saracoglu Stadium, is located. To win the UEFA Cup in their own stadium is our God-Given duty, something that we will probably never have the chance to accomplish again. With that in mind, our team stepped out into the Ali Sami Yen with only one goal in mind; To defeat Bordeaux and continue on our path to Kadikoy. I expected the team to win, but I didn’t expect the heart attack that was to come.

GALATASARAY-BORDEAUX 4-3

Goals: Bellion (min. 1), Arda (min. 42, 65), Kewell (min. 45), Chamakh (min. 73), Cavenaghi (min. 75), Sabri (min. 90)
Yellow Cards: Mehmet Topal, Baros, Barış, Diawara, Chalme, Cavenaghi

Since I wasn’t home today (stupid afternoon German class), I tried soooo hard to not learn the score so I could catch the 6:00 Setanta replay. But despite me warning everyone not to tell me about the goals, i recieved a flood of text messages at half time ranging from “So how are we gonna beat Hamburgers?” to “4-3 we win”. So I guess I was a bit more analytical when I was watching the match.

We played very poorly in the first half. Baros was lost in the Bordeaux defense and Lincoln was nowhere to be found. All of this after Meira’s failure to deal with the simplest of through balls led to a Bellion goal. Turks: 1 Foreigners: 0. What provided the crucial breakthrough was a lucky goal from Golden Boy Arda Turan. His shot bounced along the pitch and found the net after Wendel failed to clear the ball in time. A couple of minutes later late in the first half, Harry Kewell pulled off a piece of absolute magic after shooting a powerful left footed shot into the top right corner of the net (from the right side of midfield mind you) from over 35 meters out. Harry’s technique and class has done wonders for this team. With a core of Turkish youngsters that fight for the ball and gain possession, and the likes of Lincoln and Kewell to add that little bit of extra technique to get the ball for Baros who in turns expertly finds the back of the net, we should be able to defeat any team before us. However as the season passes, we see it’s not all that easy.

The second half saw a more effective Galatasaray that still possesed the desire from the first half to get out there and win. Another master pass from Lincoln allowed little Arda to find the back of the net from close range. It seemed everything was going our way until another horror show by the defense saw Cavenaghi feed the ball to a wide open Chamakh as the Morrocan international calmly passed the ball into the back of the net. Three minutes later De Sanctis and Emre Asik decided to give a lesson to little kids everywhere as to what NOT to do when a cross is played to the penalty box. They collided and Cavenaghi was there to finish the dirty deed.

At this point Galatasaray was expected to go out crashing after throwing away a two goal lead. And yet it was just not to be. The Football Gods decided to allow Galatasaray to live and continue on their path to Kadikoy after allowing Sabri’s fantastic shot from outside of the penalty box to find the back of the net. At this point, I think it’s safe to say that the 40,000 footy fans inside the 23,000 capacity Ali Sami Yen tore the stadium apart.

And so ends another European Night at the Ali Sami Yen episode. Did we tear apart our hair? Yes. Did we curse in front of little children? Yes. Were we left breathtakingly proud of our team? Yes. Then I guess it was a good show.

Man of the match award goes to Arda Turan whos desire to win was the driving force that led us to defeat Bordeaux. In defense of Bordeaux, they didn’t seem to want to defeat us all that much. Their goals came after defensive blunders on our side.

Our opponents now are Bundesliga winners Hamburg, who possess the likes of Olic, Mathijsen, Petric, and Lell. It will be hard seeing as to how we won’t have Baros who will be serving a match ban after today’s yellow card. Let’s not forget that we defeated Hertha Berlin, who are also high up on the Bundesliga table, at Berlin. Surely we can manage to get past Hamburg over two legs, with the second match at the Ali Sami Yen.

Bulent’s first match in charge of us resulted in an absolute goal fest and showed him what this team is about all in one 90 minute period. We score, we also concede. If we can just get this defense in order, then there’s no reason why we can’t win the UEFA Cup and why we can’t still get back into the title race.

Category: Postmatch

Tags: Arda Turan, Bordeaux, European Night at the Ali Sami Yen, Galatasaray, Postmatch, UEFA Cup

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