Turks kick around Erdogan conspiracy
When the pro-government media discovers a political conspiracy in a soccer game, it is not time to be amused, but to be worried.
On Feb. 22, international news reported an interesting piece of sports news from Turkey: A soccer player had shown a red card to a referee. It was a kind of man-bites-dog story. Normally, of course, referees show red cards to soccer players to throw them out of the game due to a serious breach of the rules.
This incident took place during a match between Galatasaray and Trabzonspor, two major teams of Turkey. Throughout the match, the referee, Deniz Bitnel, angered Trabzonspor fans for his perceived pro-Galatasaray decisions. Toward the end of match, Bitnel called a controversial penalty against Trabzonspor, which gave an advantage to Galatasaray. In return, Salih Dursun, an angry Trabzonspor player, grabbed the referee’s card that Bitnel was showing to one of Dursun’s teammates and waved it in Bitnel’s face.
This creative form of protest got Dursun kicked out of the game, but it also made him a hero among his team’s supporters, who carried him on their shoulders after the game. Soon, hundreds of Trabzonspor fans also marched with red cards in their hands, and a local governor in the province of Trabzon announced that a statue of Dursun should be erected.
So far, this was only sports news and there was nothing political about it. However, daily Fotomac, one of the popular sports papers of Turkey, thought differently. The day after the red card affair, the paper came out with a banner headline that read, “Chaos Over Football: The Gang of Treachery Wants to Destabilize Turkey.”
