It has stopped being a mood in the stands and started being something organised. Boards can ignore a bad atmosphere for a long time; they cannot ignore this stage of it for very long at all.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Ankaragucu will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
At 19 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
“A point is a point and I will take it, but we should have had all three.” Mahmut Dervisoglu after the 0‑0 draw, and the sentence every manager in the country said at some stage this weekend.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 18 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Ankaragucu will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Position 17 and 7 points, and the table gets read bottom-up in this part of town. The calendar has stopped being a schedule and started being a countdown.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ankaragucu this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
“Some mornings you wake up and you are still a long way from everything you know.” It is not the football and it never was; Ankaragucu are dealing with a man who wants a different country.
Minute 90, against Trabzonspor, and a goal that felt like a win to everybody who had stayed. It was a draw. Nobody leaving the ground will describe it as one.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 10 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
Fenerbahce go through and Ankaragucu go home, 0‑7 the scoreline that did it. The dressing room will call the league the priority now, because that is what dressing rooms say.
0-7, and long before the end the away end had switched from encouragement to something considerably more pointed. Nobody rings a phone-in about losing narrowly.
Ricardo Ryller was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Match18 Nov 2026
Nobody could stop scoring
7 goals. Both benches spent the second half looking at each other rather than at the pitch. Purists will complain about Ankaragucu and Fenerbahce in equal measure; everybody else had a wonderful time.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Richard was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Ankaragucu have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 8 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ankaragucu this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad2 Nov 2026
Words at Ankaragucu training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Richard is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Mahmut Tekdemir and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
Squad12 Oct 2026
Words at Ankaragucu training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Richard is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Squad12 Oct 2026
15 new faces, and Ankaragucu are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
Kasimpasa next, and one man in the Ankaragucu dressing room knows their training ground better than his own. The reception will tell him what they thought of him.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Ankaragucu, and both men came out saying it was fine.