TURKIYE CHANNELLED THE manic energy of a magnificent occasion in Dortmund to open their European Championship with a blood-thumping, brain-scrambling win over Georgia. They took the lead through Mert Muldur’s gorgeous volley, but Georgia, determined to approach their tournament debut boldly, equalised before half-time. Teenager Arda Guler, however, broke the game with a stunning curled finish in the second half and Turkiye then lived on frayed nerves before giving the scoreboard an unjust gloss by tapping into an empty net in the game’s final play.
The sultry air and surly skies gave the whole occasion a brooding, diabolic quality, and two hours prior to launch the heavens broke and soaked Dortmund in a rat-a-tat-tat artillery of rain. Fans sprinted in all directions outside the stadium, not knowing where they were going but certain that they had to move. A giant waterfall then materialised in one corner of the Westfalanstadion; water barrelling down on a couple of damned stewards who were heroically but unsuccessfully whooshing water away from beneath it.
Fans clashed in another corner, squaring up to each other and hurling objects before police rushed in. The day’s anarchical energy then soaked into the game itself. This was virtually a home game for Turkiye, given there are roughly seven million Turkish people living in Germany, many of them descendants of the the guest workers invited to rebuild the Germany economy after the war.
They created an atmosphere of extrao.