Spare a thought for the poor Turks. They were minutes away from qualification for the last 16 of the Euros last night until Robbie Brady nodded in THAT goal, which meant Ireland took Turkey's spot as one of the best third-placed teams in the group stages and sent Fatih Terim's packing from France.
While the world's footballing press has been full of praise for the Ireland performance last night, this is a sentiment that is absolutely not shared in the Turkish media one little bit this morning.
The newspapers in that part of the world are absolutely disgusted with Italy for fielding a team without a host of their big-name players, with some sections of the media even calling for UEFA sanctions on the Italian FA.
Below is a taste of what's being discussed in Turkey this morning.
Posta, one of the biggest newspapers in Turkey, is leading with claims that Italy somehow broke UEFA rules by losing to Ireland last night. Not sure you have a point there lads, but fair enough.
Zaman, on the other hand, is laying the blame squarely on the Italian team and, in fairness, aren't calling for UEFA to kick Italy out of the tournament. We're not entirely sure what the byline of 'He Tried To Ireland!' means, but we have Google Translate to thank for that one.
Hurriyet, meanwhile, seem to be flat-out furious at Italy for having the temerity to lose to Ireland. The above translates to 'They Burned Us! They Broke The Rules! Italy, UEFA - The Penalty Debate'.
To be fair to Sabah, they're not pulling any punches here. The above loosely translates to 'The discussion is about the replacement staff' and then, capitalised, 'ITALY SHOULD GET THROWN OUT OF THE TOURNAMENT'.
Haberturk seem to be one of the few Turkish media outlets who aren't blaming Italy and seem to be a lot more measured in their reaction, actually (from our impression of this at least) blaming Turkey for not being good enough to advance to the knockout stages. Our best translation of the above is 'Turkey Wash Results', which we think means that they're actually calling out their own team for not being good enough, rather than calling for Italy to be kicked out of the competition.
Sure, the next thing you know Turkey will be campaigning to be granted entry as the 17th team in the knockout stages...
All we can say is, that's for all that bullshit in Bursa back in 1999. We're playing France on Sunday, see if you can stop RTÉ from showing that one.
