See there was a bit of a brawl in the womens game Villa v West Ham One sent off I imagine it was just handbags
Interesting article on the state of Turkish football. Hannah Lucinda Smith The sorry state of Turkish football 15 October 2022, 12:45am Pity the fans of Trabzonspor, a football club from Turkey’s Black Sea region. In May, the team was crowned champions of the Super Lig, Turkey’s answer to the Premier League, for the sixth time in their history. Three months later, they lost to FC Copenhagen in the Champions’ League play-offs meaning that, for the first time in 27 years, no Turkish team will play in the tournament. Trabzonspor’s defeat was a drop in a wider malaise. The Turkish game has been in decline for a decade, battered by mismanagement, political interference and the devaluation of the Turkish lira, which is worth just one-eighth against the euro what it was in 2012. Turkish clubs are deep in debt – 1.9 billion lira (£90.75 million) in Trabzonspor’s case – and still borrowing money, while others are relying on wealthy patrons. Fenerbahce is 6.4 billion lira (£305.75 million) in debt, yet has signed an average of 30 players each season since Ali Koc, scion of one of Turkey’s most famous business dynasties, took over the presidency of the club in 2018. This downturn is very bad news in Turkey, where football is quasi-religion. Istanbul’s ‘big three’ clubs – Galatasaray, Fenerbahce and Besiktas – serve as a kind of retirement home for star foreign players at the end of their careers, and the quality of the Turkish game lags far behind the big European leagues. Yet the passion of Turkish fans eclipses anything you will see in better-off leagues. Taraftarı – football partisans – let off flares and bang drums inside their stadiums, wait in their thousands at the airport to greet new signings, and throw huge impromptu street parties when their side wins. In 2011, Galatasaray fans broke the Guinness world record for the loudest crowd chants recorded at a sports stadium. In previous years, European club matches have brought the world’s biggest clubs – and their fans – to Turkey, boosting both the economy and the country’s profile. Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a former semi-professional footballer, has overseen the reconstruction of stadiums around the country during his 20-year tenure, many of which ran far over budget with construction contracts seemingly awarded to cronies. The Passolig card ticketing system, introduced in 2014 to tackle hooliganism, has mostly benefitted Aktifbank, which issues the cards and is owned by Calik Holding, a conglomerate once headed by Berat Albayrak, Erdogan’s son-in-law and former economy minister. Erdogan has declared himself a fan of Basaksehir, an Istanbul team that came from nowhere to win the 2019-2020 Super Lig, having benefitted from close links to the country's ruling AKP party. In 2019, Erdogan was best man at the wedding of Mesut Ozil, the German-Turkish midfielder and ex-Arsenal star who was the target of anti-Turkish abuse when Germany crashed out of the 2018 World Cup. In 2021, Ozil transferred to Fenerbahce, where he played just six games last season and is reported to have not been paid for six months. This season, Ozil has transferred to Basaksehir. 'Basaksehir’s success is directly connected to politics. On the other hand they have done many correct things in terms of team building,' says Bagis Erten, a sports journalist and lecturer in sports and media at Istanbul’s Kadir Has university. 'But they have zero fan base. None. That is their failure. Everyone expects instant success in Turkish football, but never plans for the next step. They have no connection with the society.' Stadiums are packed again at the older clubs after the disaster that was covid. But Erten says that clubs are teetering closer to bankruptcy. A place in the Champions’ League finals would have handed Trabzonspor an extra 10 million euros (£9 million) – a significant sum for the club – as well as bringing big crowds to the city. For Trabzonspor’s fans, it has been a six-month rollercoaster: from partying on the streets across Turkey in May to coming to terms with sitting on the sidelines of the Champions’ League, deep in debt. 'I have a friend who lives in Munich who spent four weeks in Trabzon in April, just to be able to celebrate the championship in the city,' said Mert Ozgen, a fan of the club. 'The mood changed after disqualification. The self-confidence we won is lost.'
Fatih Karagumruk play in a 76,761 seater stadium, but have an average attendance of 671 . Funny how fate works, because their manager is on our list, perhaps because they somehow managed to finish 8th last season.
David: Leeds United v Arsenal. Have they tried turning it off and back on again? Jon: They should play on without VAR like the good old days. ............ Players had to leave the pitch due to a VAR glitch.
For those interested Premier League games start tonight live which are included with your Prime subscription.
Lovely stuff Snack bars galore: the wonder of football food please log in to view this image A Thursday morning in July and tourists gather outside the birthplace of the Patron Saint of Football Snack Bars. There are seven such visitors in all – a family of four, a pair of bronzed pensioners and a lone lady in a floral bucket hat. She ponders a segment of paper, the family point at phone screens and bicker like starved hens, and the couple battle to open an umbrella as if calculating how to assemble an AK-47 rifle for the first time. It is gently thrilling to find these disciples of our game’s culture here, outside 29 Main Street, Roslin, in Midlothian. They too must have come to see where John Lawson Johnston, genius inventor of Bovril, was born. Except, they don’t look very interested in the plaque that boasts his name. Then all seven drift away distractedly, and I realise they are looking for the chapel: Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code, Knights Templar and all that. Theirs is the wrong kind of holy grail. please log in to view this image Number 29 is a quietly handsome sandstone cottage with dormer windows protruding from its roof like frog eyes. That plaque – above and to the right of the front door, this house’s beauty spot – proclaims Johnston’s birth here, in 1839, and offers the simple epithet: “Founder of Bovril Beef Tea.” The young Johnston apprenticed in his uncle’s butcher’s shop on Canongate in Edinburgh, while also studying chemistry and focusing on the science of food preservation. Continuing the family business into adulthood, in 1874 Johnston won a contract to supply rations of canned beef to the French army. While visiting Canada to source supplies, he founded a tomato-canning firm that quickly began manufacturing an invention he had conceived: Johnston’s Fluid Beef. The entrepreneur sold it as a hot drink at Montreal ice carnivals and born was a tradition of outdoor imbibing that would one day stray to Montrose and beyond. By the early 1880s, Johnston’s invention was being made and slickly marketed in London. It was rebranded Bovril, a name, he said, that “came to me over a cigar”. Its two halves sprang from dual origins: bos, the Latin for ox, and Vrilya, a vigorous, lifeforce character in a Bulwer Lytton novel, The Coming Race. Advertised as an alternative to booze, it thrived during the late Victorian and early Edwardian era of Temperance, gratifying the teetotal Johnston. Bovril was also pushed as a patriotic choice, a cure for medical ills and a sporting fillip – liquid snuff for the moustachioed Victorian all-rounder. please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image In 1900, Johnston died while aboard his yacht, in Cannes, a millionaire. Later, his invention would become a culinary and then cultural staple of football. Now, though, it seems as if references to Bovril far outweigh matchday sales. This is a symbolic totem of our game: something we say rather than do. And yet, a tuckshop of the terrace whose menu does not offer Bovril is seldom encountered. That would be like an art gallery without paintings. Always the tabards and always the Styrofoam cups. Beyond Bovril, these are the vitals, the prerequisites, the circumstances. These are the components of the very best snack bars. A working-class tonic otherwise confined to the church hall or the ancient parochial hair salon; and a springy chalice in snow white made with materials from yesterday’s future. Encountering this duo is a homecoming no matter where you are. There are kindred elements that can also spark this glow. A pie cabinet in the chrome grey of scratchcard foil, its contents queued like an army about to charge; colossal squeezy sauce bottles with congealing ketchup lava at the rim; fluorescent stars slapped on walls offering “Mars 70p” or “Monster Munch 50p” in marker pen letters; tea urns that look like space rockets in a child’s imagination; a beige Formica tray smothered by orderly rows of Kwenchy Kups or Topics or other lesser-spotted trimmings of delight. They are the kind of places where “Multipack: not to be sold separately” is not a warning but a badge of honour. please log in to view this image The catering hatch at Lochee United’s ground Thomson Park in north Dundee meets most of these heavenly criteria. “Shall we put up the shutter?” ask the kindly committee men standing at the gates as we arrive and explain ourselves an hour-and-a-half before kick-off. In their impeccable shirts and ties and with their thermal grins, they immediately summon affectionate thoughts of long-departed grandads. It is agreed with nods towards the hatch that “they” will be prepped by now and so one of the men taps the shutter’s metal folds: “Moira, could you roll up for these two gentlemen, please?” please log in to view this image The shutter hurtles open, a guillotine reversed. Behind the counter, Moira and Jeanette are wearing tabards. Pies huddle and stay warm in the silver cabinet. Bovril is £1.20. Moira has worked here for 32 years, Jeanette just over a decade. They never see any of the game; once the public is served, it is time to make the players their off-menu post-match meal of chips in curry sauce. There is never any trouble at the hatch, apart from rightful grief meted out to children who drop their manners. Reprimands are given, magic words requested and Haribo or Irn Bru duly delivered. please log in to view this image Moira and Jeanette are witnesses to routine, that linchpin of supporters. They see their Lochee versions of the typecast fans sprinkled across every ground in the land. There are early arrivals trotting up, same time, same pie. Then come those cantering in just prior to kick-off, when anything will do to sponge up the lager. Half-time begins with the gallopers, racing away before the whistle to beat the queue and in dread of the words: “We’ve run out of those.” When that scenario unfolds and their usual refreshment cannot be ingested, any defeat in an hour’s time is blamed on this catastrophe. The Scotch Pie or the Twix are a superstition. please log in to view this image To the hatches and the sheds, to the huts and the repurposed vehicles we go. For fans, visiting is another ritual, another staging post of matchday. For clubs, here is another room in the house, its Moiras and Jeanettes another part of the family.
this weekend liverpool player trent alexander-arnold could become the first player to play a premier league match next to a river that shares his first name since don hutchinson in 1999 when he played next to the river don against a team from sheff
