Violence is killing Turkish football and no one is doing anything about it
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Version 0 of 1. There were only a few minutes to go before kick-off in the Fenerbahce-Galatasaray derby on 25 October 2009 when the assistant referee Tarik Ongun was struck by a lighter thrown from the stands of the Sukru Saracoglu Stadium. He crumbled to the ground, needing treatment. Miraculously, the game started on time and Ongun officiated the match with five stitches in his head. It was as if the incident had never happened. Just a few months later another Turkish official, this time Kemal Yilmaz, stumbled to the ground after being hit by a stone during the Super League game between Diyarbakirspor and Bursaspor. Diyarbakirspor’s next match, at Belediyespor, was suspended after a pitch invasion as several supporters tried to hunt down and attack the referee. Huseyin Gocek and his assistants only just managed to avoid the approaching hate mob. That was 16 March, 2010, and, of course, it did not stop there. The list of awful moments to tarnish the Turkish game is long and, somewhere along the line, the severity of what was happening got worse. The violence grew even more horrific; the attacks even more gruesome. During the 1. League game between Mersin Idmanyurdu and Samsunspor on 14 September 2010, the coach of Idmanyurdu, Yuksel Yesilova, was stabbed six times on the pitch. Somehow he survived. The next victim, however, was not as lucky. On 13 May 2013, Burak Yildirim, a 19-year-old student, was stabbed to death on the day of an Istanbul derby, just because he was wearing a Fenerbahce shirt. Seven months later and the former Everton player Manuel Fernandes was kicked to the ground by a pitch invader during the Besiktas-Kasimpasa game. Then Galatasaray’s forward Burak Yilmaz suffered a serious face injury when he was hit by a pocket knife thrown from the stands of Rize Sehir Stadium. In most other countries it would take just one or two of those incidents for the country’s football association to suspend play and start looking for ways of dealing with the problem. Not in Turkey. In Turkey it needed a gunman to attack the Fenerbahce team bus before anyone reacted. On 4 April 2015, in Trabzon, just a few hours after the win against Rizespor, the Fener bus was shot at. Ufuk Kiran, the driver of the bus with 41 passengers on, suffered facial injuries. Drenched in blood, he somehow succeeded in keeping the bus, which was going at 100kmph, on the road. If Kiran had lost consciousness, the bus would have fallen off a cliff, and 42 people, including former Premier League players such as Dirk Kuyt and Emre Belözoğlu, would not be alive today. After the shooting, a committee including the minister of sports, Cagatay Kilic, and the president of Turkish Football Federation, Yildirim Demiroren, met in Istanbul to discuss what action to take. In the end the TFF decided to suspend the Super League for one week, a decision that was insufficient from the beginning and made even more hollow by the fact that the game between Besiktas and Basaksehir was allowed to take place that same night and that the lower leagues were allowed to carry on playing. No one will be surprised to find out that the violence, together with the match-fixing scandal in the summer of 2011, has led to attendances falling. Thousands of fans have turned their back on the game. During the 2008-09 season the average attendance was around 14,000 but that had fallen to 9,000 last season. The supporters, referees and even players feel unsafe in our stadiums. The Juventus manager, Massimiliano Allegri, said recently that only “a madman would take children to a football game in Italy” and it is a similar situation in Turkey, only worse. So what can be done? What must be done? There are two things. First of all, there needs to be punishments that fit the crime. Any guesses what happened to Mustafa Ozel, the hooligan who ran on to the pitch and kicked Fernandes in 2013? Lifetime ban? Ten years? No, the court banned him for one year. Today, two years from the attack, he is free to walk into any stadium and watch any game, all because of the insufficiencies of Law 6,222, that deals with prevention of violence in sport in Turkey. The second action that is required is for the TFF to update its disciplinary sanctions so that it can deal with provocative club presidents, who do nothing to deal with the problems surrounding their clubs. In fact, in some instances, they incite their fans. Last month, one club president, Aziz Yildirim, told the media: “If the referee Ozgur Yankaya officiates a game of our team one more time, he probably won’t get out of the stadium that easily.” Of course Yankaya has not officiated a match in Kadikoy again. And how did the TFF deal with the president? He was banned from watching his team live for 60 days. That is it. Sad, but true. So there is the potential for it to get worse before it gets better. Foreign stars such as Demba Ba and Moussa Sow may join the Feyenoord-bound Kuyt in leaving the league in the summer and who can blame them? In the meantime, we are left to pick up the pieces from an awful season. Chaos is bound to happen in places where law is not enforced. As long as a criminal is not sentenced properly, that person may well repeat the act. I do not know what the sports authorities are waiting for in order to take serious action against the violence. Twenty-two players to be shot dead during a football game? A Heysel-style tragedy? We really do not have any idea. In the meantime we are left trying to carry on loving a game that can give us so much pleasure, but that is slowly dying while everyone just stands there watching. Ugur Meleke is a football columnist at Milliyet. He also works as a pundit for TRT Spor and Lig Radio. |