Andy Gray said “This is the best I have seen seen Turkey play.” Me thinks he held back a bit. It would not have been awry if he had said that this was the best any team could have played. In the second half the sea of red breached the white shores time and time again. The 25,000 Turkish fans raining down Turkiye Turkiye provided a lifeline to their players, and not even Jaroslav Plaisil’s goal could snuff out what now looks like destiny. Tuncay Sanli embodied the Turkish renaissance. There he was blasting a 20 foot piledriver, running back to tackle Jans Koller, laying a pass for Nishat to score a goal. And so when Volkan Demirel was red-carded, Fatih Terim without hesitation gave the goalie jersey to his most omnipresent player. By the time the match ended, Tuncay had played every position known to soccer.
Tuncay was magnificent. So was Nishat. So was Turan. So was Altintop. The Turks tore up the Czech defense in the second half reducing them to bystanders. Aeons had passed since the Jan Koller and Jaroslav Plasil goals gave Bruckner’s team a comfortable 2 goal lead. The Czechs were well on their way to the Geneva pubs to cement their reputation as the hardest drinking nation.
Two things took place to derail that celebration. The Turks kept coming in suffocating waves mostly down the right where Marek Jankulovski and David Rozenhal gave away generous clumps of real estate which Sanli and Altintop exploited to feed Nishat and Turan. And under the unrelenting pressure the normally adroit Petr Cech crumbled.
Cech barely caught a whiff of the Turan goal. And minutes later he had an even more unforgivable mistake as he dropped an Altintop cross and an opportunistic Nishat cashed in on the mistake. The Turks had stormed back. This match was going to PKs. Or so everyone thought. Tuncay Sanli had other thoughts and lofted a pass that Galasek waffled on. The result was an onside Nishat who smartly angled the ball to the right of Cech. In a short span of 14 minutes the Turks scored three goals to turn conventional wisdom on its head.
And the other match saw Hakan Yakin, a Swiss player of Turkish origin, score two goals against Portugal as the hosts ended their Euro run on a positive note. Everyone is talking about the obligatory Brazilian in the national side. How about the obligatory Turk?
So I ask this question. Turkey is unwanted by the EU. Why would they want membership when they perform best with that chip on their shoulder?