CLUB FOOTBALL HAS the sportswashing but international football will wash you in the sport. To live through Turkiye’s heady, adrenal victory here was to be drenched in the whole damn thing: the rain and the beer; the screams and the jeers; and the great long wail of desperate whistles from the Turkish fans. And if club football can sometimes feel like a rinse and repeat, this was the equivalent of being tossed into a spin cycle.
In the end the ersatz home team of this tournament stagger, dreamily, further down the road, to a quarter-final meeting with Netherlands. The Dutch were one of two quarter-finalists to finish behind Austria in the group stage and yet they are going home. Amid the frantic flush of this game they ultimately lacked the quality to score the second goal their overall play deserved: this was a tournament too far for the striker on whom they relied, Marko Arnautovic.
This may not have been the best game of the tournament but it had the best opening minute and the best closing minute. Turkiye took the lead in the first minute and goalkeeper Mert Gunok protected at the very end, somehow throwing himself to his right to claw away Christoph Baumgartner’s point-blank header, Banks-on-Pele style. At the end the devastated Austrian players trooped to their supporters to soak in their applause, while the Turkish players arranged themselves for one last shot of bedlam: they stood around the centre circle and conducted the crowd to erupt, which they duly did in a m.
