THE SMALL FIGURE IN THE HOTEL lobby is apologetic. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t greet you at the door but I was with my Mum,” he says. Emre Belozoglu, the talented Turkey and Inter Milan midfield player, is a very well brought-up boy indeed, polite, respectful of his elders, kind to those younger than him — every Turkish mother’s dream. He apologises again for keeping me waiting, and again when Umit Davala, his team-mate, interrupts the interview to ask him if he wants to come and choose a video.
It is the eve of the Turkish national team’s trip to England, where the World Cup semifinalists will meet Sven-Göran Eriksson’s men for a crucial European Championship qualifier on Wednesday, and everyone in the Istanbul hotel looks subdued — except, it seems, for Belozoglu, who is as cheery as ever.
He refers respectfully to his team-mates as abi or big brother — at 23, he is very much the baby of a team that has an average age of about 27. It doesn’t help that his diminutive size, his bright eyes and mop of hair can make him look like Frodo Baggins with a better hairdresser. “I get the feeling I’ll be the baby for a long time yet,” he says, depreciatively. “I’m the youngest, and I’m not going to get any taller. But I’m not complaining. My abis treat me well.”
Belozoglu, or simply Emre as he is known in Turkey, may be small, but his precocious talent is huge. He has the technique and elegance worthy of a Brazilian, and has scored many a goal or given a winning pass off a long dribble from the back of his own team’s defence. Thanks to his speed and dancer-like agility he can tackle, outwit and pass his much larger opponents. The penalty that he pays for this is the large number of fouls committed on him — the most recent put him out of action for three weeks.
Like the Turkish players of old, Belozoglu started in the streets. As one Turkish magazine put it: “If you see a dirty, snotty little kid playing in the dusty street corner, don’t turn your nose up at him — he could be the new Emre.”
He used to hang around a local club near his father’s workplace in a poor district of Istanbul, enviously watching the juniors train. One day, around the age of 9, he was asked to come in and take a penalty. “I scored,” he said. “It was all just luck. Then I started training with them.”
By the time he was 15 he had been taken on by Galatasaray. By the age of 21 he was an experienced international, had lifted the Uefa Cup and felt that he had gone as far as he could at home. He moved to Inter Milan, along with Okan Buruk, a Galatasaray team-mate and himself a promising youngster ten years ago whose early career was hampered cruelly by serious injury. Belozoglu has great respect for the older player. “There is no one whose technique I copy,” he said, “but as a person I really admire Okan abi — I hope I can be like him one day.”
Buruk is as small as Belozoglu and, as a brace, they are called the “Mighty Shorties” by the Turkish media. Having left behind a year on the bench in Italy for a regular first-team place, Belozoglu has acquired a series of Italian nicknames, including “mosquito”. But the most flattering is “Maradona of the Bosphorus” which, in the ruthless Italian football press, is praise indeed.
His experience has been quite the opposite of earlier Turkish transfers abroad. They often ended in tears, with the player leaving in a sulk, having missed the kebabs and the mollycoddled atmosphere of the Turkish league. “I learnt to be a professional in Italy,” he says, and, certainly, he has lost that fatal but typical Turkish flaw, a card-magnet of a temper. “I learnt things here at 22 that I wouldn’t have learned until I reached 28 in Turkey,” he says. “I raised the stakes. At this stage in Turkish football, people following behind need someone like me to represent them and show them the way.”
Their players now have ambitions beyond dating models, a big house and free invites to top nightclubs. The rigorous, meticulously planned training that has brought steadily improving results since the early 1990s, when Jupp Derwall, the German coach, and Sepp Piontek, a Dane, were called in to overhaul the game, contrasts sharply with the system — if it could be called that — of the past. As Señol Gunes, the Turkey coach and former goalkeeper, put it: “They told me to stand in goal and if I made saves they said ‘great, you’re doing the right thing’, and when I didn’t they said ‘oh, something’s going wrong’ and took me off. It was as scientific as that.”
Belozoglu’s natural talent has been shaped by a sound training system, but also key to his success is his strong character. When he was enduring a prolonged bad patch in Italy, Hakan Sükür, the Blackburn and veteran Turkey striker, said that it was the player nearly ten years his junior who helped him pull through, encouraging him and helping him to put his problems in perspective. It is a trait that Belozoglu has needed himself on more than one occasion, having caused the death of a pedestrian in a traffic accident in Istanbul three years ago and stood trial along with Sükür for alleged links with the leader of a religious sect (they were acquitted).
His devout bent is no surprise, given his conservative family background.
But this hasn’t stopped him succumbing to the lure of designer gear in Milan. Now he is wearing the standard team tracksuit, but out of their work clothes, the “mighty shorties” have become mighty fashionable. “We do what’s right by fashion,” he says, grinning. “We’re in Italy, after all.” He recounts gleefully how his mother makes him exchange his ripped jeans and other trendy togs for more “decent” clothes to visit his grandmother. “She says, ‘oh, we used to sew patches on ripped clothes in my day’.”
For his almost childlike air, Belozoglu has a grown-up head on his shoulders. Part of a generation to earn its stripes playing, and beating, top European teams as youngsters, Belozoglu and his team-mates are not fazed by the big names. He makes an effort not to sound too blasé about the World Cup, but you get the feeling that he took it all in his stride. “Well, I wasn’t nervous exactly . . .
I was excited, of course, but you know . . . I’ve been around a while now.”
About England he is cautious, saying that a combination of youth and the experience of players such as David Beckham and Michael Owen makes them dangerous.
But every Turkish player knows that, for the first time, Turkey stand a chance of avenging some humiliating defeats (8-0 — twice) from a time when they were the sick men of European football. Since the start of the World Cup, Turkey are unbeaten except by Brazil. A win now would crown a decade of clawing their way into the top flight. “To go to the European finals, Turkey must put England out of the running. It’s difficult, but this team is capable of doing that,” Belozoglu says, simply.
He gets up to leave, apologising yet again for keeping me waiting. A young woman asks for an autograph. “It’s for my mother,” she says. “She thinks you’re great. Whenever you play she sits there, shouting ‘go on my son!’” Belozoglu signs, grins, and goes back to his family.
