Soccer Week (6 of 8): Turkish Soccer Game Sees Seven Goals

Ali Adnan Kerim, who goes by Ali Adnan (pictured), is an Iraqi player who is a rising star in the Turkish Premiere. Kerim, who is known as the 'Asian Gareth Bale' scored one of five goals for Rziespor, located in the tea mecca of Rize, in the 12th minute of play. His Turkish teammate Sercan Kaya added two goals, including the game-winning penalty kick in the 80th minute, for Rizespor's electrifying 5-2 win over Gaziantepspor.

Sivasspor, located in the northwestern city of Sivas, defeated Eskisehirspor, located in Eskisehir, a western city where meerschaum pipes are made, by a 3-2 score. The game-winner for the Sivas side came from Moroccan player Aatif Chahechouhe, who somehow didn't make our players with long, long names list, in the 73rd minute of play.

Here are the complete results from Week 4 in the TPL and (Spoiler Alert!), we have some UEFA Champions League scores, including how GalataSaray, a traditional Istanbul powerhouse, fared at home against Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid.

Here are the Turkish domestic scores from weekend (actually Friday-Monday) play:

GalataSaray 1 Antalyaspor 1 (tie)

Erciyes Kayseri 1 Akihisar 0

Gaziantepspor 2 Rizespor 5

Trabzonspor 1 Karabukspor 0 (Goal came from Brazilian Paulo Henrique in 76th minute)

Ankara Genclerbirligi 1 Kayseri 1 (tie)

Sivasspor 3 Eskisehir 2

Bursaspor 0 Besiktash (Istanbul) 3

Elazig 2 Konyaspor 0

Kasimpasha (IST) 2 Fenerbahce (IST) 3

Here are some UEFA Champion League scores:

It was a good day for Cristiano Ronaldo, as he scored a hat trick, in Istanbul in Real Madrid's 6-1 win over GalataSaray. But, it was not a good day for Greek team Olympiacos as they fell at home in Piraeus (a city outside Athens) to French powerhouse Paris St. Germain by a 4-1 score with two goals (scored within minutes of each other) by French player Thiago Motta.

Here is the complete UEFA Scoreboard:

Manchester United 4 Bayer Leverkusen (Germany) 2

Sociedad (Spain) 0 Shktar Donetsk (Ukraine) 2*

Benefica (Portugal) 2 Anderecht (Belgium) 0

Plzen (Czech Rep.) 0 Manchester City 3

GalataSaray 1 Real Madrid 6

Olympiacos 1 PSG 4

Bayern Munich 3 CSKA Moscow 0

Copenhagen 1 Juventus 1 (tie)

*- Shakthar Donestsk's win was considered the upset of the day. Brazilian player Alex Teixeira scored both goals in the victory. This team is not to be confused with Shakter Karagandy, a team from Kazakhstan, which will play in the Europa League on Thursday.

For more information on Turkish soccer, we highly recommend our good friend Ahmet Bob Turgut's blog http://turkeyfootball.blogspot.com/

http://www.angelfire.com/nj/sivritepe/

http://www.turkish-football.com/

http://www.psg.fr/en/Accueil/0/Home (Paris St. Germain's web site, in English)

World Cup Players Worth Remembering

Today, since there are two quarter-final World Cup games to be played, we thought we'd share with you some of the players we will remember most from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

We have compiled 12 names, and we will post six of them here and six of them on our other blog "Politics, Culture and Other Wastes of Time," which just recently got over 25,000 hits (well considering how poor the ratings once were this is good for us!)

Most of this info on all these players came from Wikipedia as I am a casual futbol fan though I have seen quite a few World Cup games though admittedly I feel asleep watching the first half of the Slovakia-New Zealand first round game, which aired very early here in les etats unis, and I promptly went back to bed!

Here are the six soccer players we are profiling here:

1) David Villa. (pictured here). Spain. Age 28. Plays for Barcelona. Wears #7. Has scored an impressive 42 goals in 62 games, including both goals in 2-0 win over Honduras in the first round and the lone goal in 1-0 win over Portugal to put Spain in quarter-finals. They play Paraguay later today.

2) Landon Donovan. United States. Age 28. Plays for Los Angeles Galaxy. Born in Ontario, Calif. Wears #10. Has scored 45 in 127 international games. In World Cup play (2010), he scored goals against Algeria, Slovenia and Ghana, which was alas not enough to win the game.

3) Lionel Messi. Argentina. Age 23. Plays with Villa for Barcelona (wow!). Helped Barcelona win the 2009 UEFA Cup. Scored an amazing four goals versus Arsenal (English team) in a 4-1 win over them on April 6. In World Cup play, he has scored once versus Mexico and twice versus South Korea. Argentina has yet to lose a game in South Africa. They play Germany in less than an hour.

4) Cristiano Ronaldo. Portugal. Age 25. Plays with Real Madrid. With six-year $132 million contract, Ronaldo is the world's most expensive soccer player. Had a disappointing World Cup, though he scored an impressive goal in the team's 7-0 drubbing of North Korea.

5) Lucas Barrios. Paraguay. Age 25. Plays for Barrusia Dortmund (German team). Was actually born in Argentina, but has Paraguayan mother. Got Paraguayan citizenship in the spring to play for national team. Has scored three goals in first international appearances. Nicknamed The Panther. Paraguay plays Spain later today.

6) Asamoah Gyan. Ghana. Age 24. Plays for Rennes (French team). Club teammates with American national player Carlos Bocanegra, a UCLA alum. Ironically, the two teams met in the last round where Ghana prevailed thanks to an extra-time goal by Gyan. But, alas Gyan choked yesterday in the 121st minute of play by missing a penalty kick versus Uruguay. Gyan redeemed himself by scoring on a penalty kick in the final stage of the game, but ultimately Uruguay won the match to advance to semi-finals.

Quote of the Day- from Portuguese Writer Jose Saramago

Unfortunately, the famed Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, pictured here, died last week at his home in The Canary Islands at the age of 87.

Like many great writers, including the late Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet who lived in Russia and the late American writer William Burroughs who spent many years in Tangiers, Morocco, Saramago was an exiled man. This was mainly due to his political views for Saramago (like Hikmet) was a communist even though the Portuguese writer's exile (from what we gather) was a personal choice.

Saramago's novel "Blindness" had been made into a 2008 film with Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, and the writer won the first Nobel Prize for Portugal in 1998.

We are featuring Saramgo as one of the 32 people from the 32 countries in the World Cup.

The Portuguese team made headlines on Monday with a 7-0 thumping of North Korea, which assuredly did not go over well at the Kim Jong Il residence in Pyongyang.

As many soccer fans know (and I consider myself a casual one though I did watch virtually every game of the 1978 World Cup which host Argentina won when I was a child while we were living in Turkey), Portugal has a bonafide superstar in Cristiano Ronaldo, whom David Fellerath of "The Independent Weekly" in Raleigh, NC, called 'a glowering metrosexual.' Ronaldo is also starring in a series of tennis shoe ads with Homer Simpson?!


Here is today's quote from Saramago. It is, as one would fully expect, a political one in nature:

"People used to say about me: 'He's good but he's a Communist. Now they say: 'He's a Communist, but he's good."