After doing the usual household chores, I settled down to watch Galatasaray beat Juventus. Juve are in the last 16 anyway, so it doesn’t matter. It’s been ages since I watched my World Cup favourite Hasan Sas play.
As expected, fouls were committed, the usual tempers erupted, and numerous awards for ‘best soap opera’ should have been dished out, along with the yellow cards. Looking at the sea of yellow, red and white, I thought the match was played in Turkey, despite security problems, then learnt it was in Germany. 60,000 of the 65,000 members of the audience were Turkish!
Anyway, ESPN made a boo-boo in post-match analysis. They tried to be clever and looked up the meaning of ‘Hakan’, the first name of the veteran striker who scored both goals in this match, and also scored the world’s fastest goal in the final match against South Korea last year.
So now we know ‘Hakan’ means strong and fiery in Turkish. But the commentator just had to add that when you have TWO Hakans on your side, that’s really something. The second Hakan, was apparently ‘Hakan Sas’. This is not the first time that commentators have got his name wrong.
In other news, my favourite Leeds striker, Alan Smith, might be sold to Newcastle if a certain Sheikh doesn’t pump in enough money to keep it from going into Administration mode. If you sold Smithy, it would be like sawing one of their legs off. Newcastle would turn into a Leeds alumni, what with Lee Bowyer (hissss) and Jonathan Woodgate already there. Just keep those plastic bottles off the pitch.