WC Qualifier: Armenia - Turkey

DF:
Gökhan Gönül (FENERBAHÇE)
Uğur Kavuk (ANTALYASPOR)
Servet Çetin (GALATASARAY)
İbrahim Kaş (GETAFE)
Mehmet Polat (GAZİANTEPSPOR)
Gökhan Zan (BEŞİKTAŞ)
Hakan Kadir Balta (GALATASARAY)
Çağlar Birinci (DENİZLİSPOR)

Brilliance!

I dont know about the formation, but the players below will probably be in the starting 11 (if fit). I would prefer Gokdeniz or Topuz on the right wing instead of Kazim though.

-------------------------Semih---------------------------
---------------Tuncay------------------------------------

Arda-----------Emre--------Aurelio------------Kazim--------

Hakan---------Servet-------Gokhan----------Gokhan.G------

----------------------Volkan--------------------------------

(And whats the deal with Emre, he missed out on the Partizan match because he was injured and then I saw pictures of him training with the team like 2 days after...........is he alright now or if he just doing light training?)

The key is for the Turkish NT to keep momentum, something they have almost never done in the past. The great step forward at Euro 2008 can't be followed up by a step back in this first WC qualifier match.
A match in Armenia will be a good test of the squad's mental toughness...and the specific player to be tested is Kazim Kazim. If he gets all caught up in the activities that are sure to be happening on the way to the stadium, at the hotel, and in the stands, he will fail. And that will tell me he is not mature enough for top class football.
The rest of the squad just needs to stay calm if things aren't going perfectly. Someone like Ayhan is the wrong kind of attitude for this match, and can spark an absolute riot.

On paper the overall talent in the Turkish squad is better than the Armenian squad. It's all a matter of who can play football and block out the rest of the crap that is sure to be flying around this match...

Now the match is at hand, I'm very vary, we're very susceptible to losing points against the worst teams away from home, Moldova, Malta from last qualifiers immediately comes to mind, now Armenia....these people live, breathe, eat to hate us...I'm not saying anything controversial, it's a fact. So think of all the poor results we've had over the recent years..Latvia? Switzerland? Malta etc. now add on to that this massive hostility(to put it mildly) we'll face, AND on top of that, our again well proven loss of momentum(as mentioned already) after any sort of success, I'm not even talking about 02 where we took back years of our progress afterwards, I'm talking of this up and down from matches we always suffer from...eg 4-1 Greece, than starting with Bosnia that horrendous run of results(how did we ever even qualify, looking back it was a small miracle)

Allright, to cut it short, this will be one of the hardest games we have played in many a year and one of the most important since it'll tell us if we're to repeat our mistakes of the past... for me this game is crucial, not only because of the opposition.

We start from a clean slate, I just hope the whole Turkish football establishment has that mentality...we didn't last time, I wonder if we learned anything.