Good News/Bad News for Hakan Şükür
By: Daryl | May 13th, 2008
Good News: Galatasaray went into the final weekend of the Turkish Super Lig season three points ahead of Fenerbahçe. A point was enough to take the title. But Hakan Şükür scored the first gola in a 2-0 win that gave Galatasaray all three points at home to Gençlerbirliği. And Fenerbahçe lost 2-0 away to Trabzonspor, so Galatasaray took the title by six points. Great moment for Şükür.
Kral, as he’s known, is in his third spell with Galatasaray and this is is his seventh Turkish title with the club. Join the victory celebrations over at Galatasaray Offside.
Bad News: Tukey coach Fatih Terim named his 26 man preliminary squad for Euro 2008 after the game, and Şükür’s name was nowhere to be seen. Huge surprise, given that Şükür played eight and scored five in qualifying and was captain of the team.
Sure, he’s 36, but he’s both a legend and in decent form and Euro 2008 would have very likely been Şükür’s international tournament bow. We’d written a Hakan Şükür Player Profile on the Euro 2008 blog and everything.
Apparently Terim deliberately delayed announcing the squad so as not to snub Şükür before the big Turkish Super Lig finale. So in some ways it was a classy move. In other ways, once everyone knew the squad would be delayed, the Turkish media quickly figured out the reason why.
I’m sure Terim knows his business, but I don’t see how leaving the captain and all time Turkish top scorer (both internationally and domestically) out of your squad is a good idea. Especially when he’s just proved his still capable of scoring important title winning goals.
Category: Europe
Tags: Europe, Fatih Terim, Fenerbahce, Galatasaray, Hakan Sukur, Tukry, World Football, World SoccerSubscribe
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Comments
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I really hope for Turkey’s sake that this was a football decision and not some Seedorf-like clash of personalities. Unless there’s an injury or serious drop in form, leaving out your captain and multiple-goal scorer from the qualifiers seems a bit classless. He did a huge part of the work to get them there - he deserves to be there as well.
Posted from
United States
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actually sukur was a bit player even during the euro qualifiers with nihat and tuncay preferred over him. He is a decent player but really even if he was selected he would be a bench warmer. Turkey needs a decent squad because for them their group will be difficult to get out of.
Posted from
Australia -
Captain + 5 goals = bit player? Erm. If it’s my squad, I want a guy on the bench that can do that for my team. If Turkey fails now, there will be a lot of people pointing to this and wondering if Sukur could have helped. I’m never a fan of having that sort of excuse. I hope they do well.
Posted from
United States
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