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Beşiktaş Eagles refuse to throw in the towel
Champions never die, they say. And the Black Eagles proved this fact beyond doubt when they beat the Kayseri Anatolian Tigers 2-1 away in their thrilling Turkcell Super League week 23 encounter at the Kayseri Kadir Has Stadium on Saturday night.
Two goals in the first half by Chile leftie Rodrigo Tello in the second minute and by Mardin-born right back Ekrem Dağ in the 30th gave the Eagles a well-deserved 2-0 lead in the first half.
The Beşiktaş Black Eagles missed several glaring chances in the second half, allowing Kayserispor to get a consolation goal from top scorer Ariza Makukula eight minutes from time.
Eagles remain a force to reckon with
The Eagles, with a game in hand, still remained fifth in the 17-team Super League but they have considerably narrowed the gap between themselves and the frontrunners as the title race heads down the home stretch.
The doomsayers in the local sports media, who had already sharpened their swords before the match to scalp under-fire Beşiktaş coach Mustafa Denizli and his Black Eagles, must have been very disappointed with Saturday’s results -- to say the least. But there is little the naysayers can do now except continue to lay in ambush for the Eagles to slip or stumble again.
“The fact that we started with seven defensive players did not mean that we were going to resort to negative football [catenaccio],” a visibly relieved Denizli said in his post-match press conference.
“For us, the Kayseri match was indeed the climax in the league and in the season as a whole. And facing a must-win situation, we had to take certain precautions for it would almost have been mission impossible to recover if we had slipped,” he further noted.
Kayserispor coach Tolunay Kafkas, a former Trabzon and Turkey midfielder, put the blame on injuries. “We could not fill the gap created by the absence of our key players,” he said. “We conceded a shock early goal and then went two goals down. We scored, however, but it was too little, too late,” he lamented.
Crocs aim for greater heights
The Bursaspor Green Crocs ran riot in the other match on Saturday as they crushed relegation-bound Sivasspor 3-0 at the Sakarya Atatürk Stadium because the Turkish Soccer Federation’s (TFF) Professional Soccer Disciplinary Committee (PFDK) had ordered the Crocs to play their week 23 “home” match on neutral ground and behind closed doors.
But the rampaging Crocs made a mockery of the PFDK decision with Argentine midfielder Pablo Batalla scoring in the 30th, Vienna-born midfielder Turgay Bahadır doubling the score in the 48th and newly discovered goal machine Ozan İpek slotting the ball into the back of net in the 50th to put the game beyond reach.
“To be frank and candid, we are seriously thinking about taking over the top spot in the league,” said Ozan whose Crocs now have 40 points with a game in hand. “We aimed at garnering 10 points in four matches [starting from week 23]. One hurdle has been cleared; three more to go,” he further stated.
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