CLUB FOOTBALL HAS the sportswashing but international football will wash you in the sport.
To live through Turkiye’s heady, adrenal victory here was to be drenched in the whole damn thing: the rain and the beer; the screams and the jeers; and the great long wail of desperate whistles from the Turkish fans.
And if club football can sometimes feel like a rinse and repeat, this was the equivalent of being tossed into a spin cycle.
In the end the ersatz home team of this tournament stagger, dreamily, further down the road, to a quarter-final meeting with Netherlands.
The Dutch were one of two quarter-finalists to finish behind Austria in the group stage and yet they are going home. Amid the frantic flush of this game they ultimately lacked the quality to score the second goal their overall play deserved: this was a tournament too far for the striker on whom they relied, Marko Arnautovic.
This may not have been the best game of the tournament but it had the best opening minute and the best closing minute.
Turkiye took the lead in the first minute and goalkeeper Mert Gunok protected at the very end, somehow throwing himself to his right to claw away Christoph Baumgartner’s point-blank header, Banks-on-Pele style.
At the end the devastated Austrian players trooped to their supporters to soak in their applause, while the Turkish players arranged themselves for one last shot of bedlam: they stood around the centre circle and conducted the crowd to erupt, which they duly did in a mass of seething, writhing joy.
The last-16 has thus far had the peacocking roars of Jude Bellingham, the wild laments of Cristiano Ronaldo and the stifled yawns of anyone who was at France/Belgium, but this game promised to be a crescendo exercise in primal screaming.
This was Ralf Rangnick’s high-pressing, hard-running Red Bull-fuelled Alpine men against Turkiye, who have needed only three group games to be an instance of all human emotion made flesh. First came the rollicking joy of the opening win against Georgia, followed by the full-blooded collapse against Portugal and then the nostril-flared fury of the win against Czechia.
And you’d have to say the game began at a pitch so loud it might have shattered glass.
Austria almost got in behind the Turkiye defence after 15 seconds; Turkiye almost got in behind the Austria defence after 35 seconds. The latter earned a corner from which they took a comic lead, Austria fiddling with the ball like it was a ticking package before Merih Demiral slide-tackled the ball into the net.
Austria came again. Christoph Baumgartner flashed a shot outside the box just wide, Marcel Sabitzer forced a corner that was sent skidding across the goal-line and somehow both missed by Baumgartner and then swiped and mis-hit by Demiral just badly enough to go behind for a corner rather than into his own goal.
At this point the game was four minutes old.
From there, however, the smoke of the furious start cleared and you could admire Turkiye’s set-up. Without captain Hakan Calhanolgu and defender Samet Akaydin through suspension – together they accounted for four of Turkiye’s sixteen group-stage yellows – they swapped to a back three but pressed Austria man-for-man around the pitch, dropping off into a deep 5-4-1 whenever it was needed.
The pressing was a high-wire act that could fall apart at the moment an Austrian player could skip by his man, but only Baumgartner showed the capacity to do so.
Teenage sensation Arda Guler, meanwhile, started as a false nine and somehow found some clarity amid the game’s hectic clamour, goading Austrian defenders toward him and knitting the play through the gaps they vacated.
Guler characteristically kept his cool beneath a hail of beer as he lingered over a corner on the hour mark before, with a languid whip, putting the ball on the forehead of Demiral to score again.
The goal came utterly against the run of play: Rangnick made a double switch at half-time to revert to his traditional 4-2-2-2 and Austria took control of the game, fashioning a series of chances for Arnautovic who was either offside, missed, or missed from an offside position.
But moments after Guler’s goal Austria held up a mirror and found one of their own looking back at them. This time it was Marcel Sabitzer standing over a corner and beneath a shower of beer, and this time it was substitute Michael Gregoritsch who turned the ball in at the back post from Stefan Posch’s header.
The rain sheeted down and Turkiye’s tactical plan was overtaken by the desperate need to hold on. The last thing to fall from the sky was the ball itself, but Turkiye, led by the magnificent Demiral, cleared everything that came their way until they could nothing to prevent Baumgartner at the back post. But it was at that point their goalkeeper materialised from nowhere.
The Dutch, however, have been warned about Turkiye. Their momentum is something rather irresistible.
