For Ninety Minutes

We were in Eskişehir for work when our manager produced football tickets and announced what we were doing that evening. There had been no discussion. He had already bought them, so the plan arrived complete.

The match was Eskişehirspor against the team we normally supported. Getting into the stadium took longer than expected, and by the time we reached the stands the game had already begun. We also discovered that we had entered a section occupied by some of the most committed home supporters.

Standing quietly was not an acceptable strategy.

At first there was tension. We were outsiders, clearly uncertain about where we belonged, and our usual football loyalty would not have improved the situation. One man in the crowd helped calm things down, but the local rule soon became clear: if we stayed there, we were expected to participate.

So we did.

The chants began to make sense through repetition. The crowd moved as one body, and after a while it became difficult to remain only an observer. A stadium offers worse information than television but much stronger emotion; you may not see every detail, yet when thousands of people react together, your own body joins before your judgment has time to vote.

Then Eskişehirspor scored.

We celebrated.

We celebrated a goal against the team we normally supported with enough enthusiasm to make our earlier loyalty look like a clerical error. Perhaps part of it was self-preservation, part of it was the crowd, and part of it was simply the pleasure of being carried by the moment.

By the end of the match, nobody had officially changed teams. There were no declarations, no new scarves, no permanent conversion. We were still ourselves.

But for ninety minutes, in that part of Eskişehir, the question of who we supported had received a very practical answer.