Anyone been there at that time of year? All English club final? Bucket list stuff - assuming we're are able to travel? Think I'll take a City flag and do a Souness !
I'll fake a Scottish accent then. Definitely not a Scouse job. Watched that final in Nice in S of France - great night - lots of Turks in the bar - cheering on Milan naturally. I pretended I was Canadian - my Scottish mate pretended he was English, but the wise Turks didn't take the bait - thank fxxk. I have a few Turkish mates ( football) who have family there. They'll set me up ok. Always fancied a visit there. Lots of culture & other good stuff.
The night of the Liverpool v Juventus game in 85 at Heysel Stadium I was in Milan, I went with my customer to a bar to watch the game, when we went in the situation on the TV was awful, and he quickly said to me say you are American if anyone asks. We left soon after that.
I used to go regularly to Istanbul (still do occasionally), it's pretty nice and you shouldn't have any problems outside of a Galatasaray match day, particularly if you're with some Turks. I generally go to Izmir now though, which is much, much nicer. They've got big problems there at the moment though, with COVID. The government has just limited all business opening hours and extended two national holidays from two weeks to four weeks over June and July, to keep people out of workplaces. All my production is now running a month late.
The lockdown is until May 17, final is May 29. It's conceivable that they'll decide not to let fans in.
At the moment, the government have announced that everywhere will close 29th of April to 17th May (extended religious holiday) and then again from 16th July to 26th July (again an extended religious holiday), but they are expecting more closures to be announced between those dates.
During the first lockdown, they were held up as a great example of how we should have been handling the pandemic. A journalist mate who works there said then it was absolute crap, and that their figures were total lies.
