A guy in front of me jumps out of his seat and shouts at the Fenerbahçe offense (via the television) for failing to convert a golden opportunity into a goal.
Sometimes in football, favorable odds, home field advantage, momentum and high hopes lead to anticipation and even expectation of a victory. In this case, the majority of İstanbul expected Fenerbahçe to totally embarrass Galatasaray and their new coach with a strong win. Instead, there was a scoreless game which featured many chances from both sides. To summarize, Galatasaray played much better in the first half, Fenerbahçe better for most of the second half, the reffing was at time questionable and there were a lot of yellow cards. Fenerbahçe's goalie, Volkan Demirel (which means "Volcano Iron-Hand"), was phenomenal. Pino from Galatasaray really helped carry the team.
I watched the first half from inside a very smokey bar. If you're thinking hey wait a second, I thought smoking inside public places was illegal in Turkey, you're right. Like in the Matrix, some rules can be bent, others can be broken. I could hardly breathe, and I felt like a victim of a kind of societal stupidity. You're hurting the economy! I screamed in my head. It's true, the thing that annoys me the most about smoking is how much it hurts the economy and the overall quality of life in a country. Anyway, I left at halftime and watched the rest from outside a different bar.
One other cool thing worth mentioning is that I was listening to the game on the radio via my cellphone. By doing this, I could know that the cable TV signal in the smokey bar was about 1 second behind and the satellite signal in the other bar was 2-3 seconds behind. It was kind of nice knowing what was going to happen before the huge crowd knew. That's actually how I snapped the photo above. I knew they'd be disappointed! Also, listening to the game like that was good practice for my Turkish.
That's all for now!
visits since march 2010
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