Trabzonspor vs Samsunspor: The Black Sea Drumbeat and a Training Session Without Spectators

The grass at the Mehmet Ali Yılmaz training facility still held morning dew that day. I stood behind the familiar fence, watching the blue-and-red shirts of Trabzonspor walk onto the pitch in silence. No spectators, no loudspeakers, only the steady bounce of the ball on the turf — a rhythm you must sit with long enough to hear. When the new media knocks loudly, I can still hear the old drumbeat from the stands; and in Trabzon, that drumbeat has a name of its own: the Black Sea. That session was unremarkable if you only read a short bulletin. The club announced it neatly: the team continued preparations for its away match against Samsunspor in Süper Lig week 7, under the guidance of Thomas Reis. The content was a technical warm-up, rondo drills, narrow-area games, and finally a double-goal match. That was all. A hurried reader could skim it in ten seconds. My profession does not allow me to skim. In forty-nine years of carrying a notebook, I have learned one thing: most football stories do not live in what the bulletin says, but in the gaps between the lines. The bulletin says "preparations continue." But preparing for what, and under what circumstances, is where the real sitting-down begins. Samsunspor is not an ordinary name on the map of Turkish football. Both Trabzon and Samsun sit along the Black Sea, a few hours' drive apart on the northeastern coast. A regional derby like this carries a kind of pressure that never shows on the league table. It lives in the voice of the ticket seller, in the way mothers at the market ask each other "where are you going on Sunday," and in the feeling of a young player stepping onto an away pitch for the first time with ten thousand screams pouring into his ears. Thomas Reis walked out last. He called his players into a circle, spoke briefly, then kicked the first ball himself. That detail is small, but to me it says this was the head coach's session, not the assistants' session. Responsibility for match preparation rests entirely in his hands. Rondo. Outsiders hear those two syllables, nod politely, and move on, treating it as an eternal warm-up drill. But rondo is not only about warming up muscles. It is a drill about rhythm — about the speed of decision-making under siege, about passing when only half a second remains, about staying calm when someone is breathing down your neck. A team that trains rondo carefully is usually preparing for a situation of being pressed. And pressing is precisely how a home side in a regional derby wants to greet its guest. By the narrow-area game, things become clearer. Within a cramped space, the Trabzonspor players rehearsed one-touch combinations, short movements, and escaping the trap through quick passing rather than long dribbles. This is the weapon of a team expecting to be closed down in its own half, not of a team planning to push high across the board. The double-goal match at the end of the session was the part I watched most closely. In open training sessions before away matches, a two-goal game is rarely about fitness alone. It is the moment when the coach assembles the lineup, tests set-piece situations, and — more importantly — gives his players a sense of the intensity they are about to face. A session that ends with real football usually means the team has already entered match mode. What is worth noting is that all the reasoning above stops at the level of assumption. There is no injury list, no data on session intensity, no projected lineup. There is no xG, no PPDA, no minutes split per half. The bulletin only tells me where the team trained, what it trained, and under whose hands. The rest is the work of someone who comes to the ground and watches. I remember another evening. The silent dressing room that day still carried the smell of grass and the tears of someone — a young player sitting alone after his team lost in an empty home stadium, whispering that he did not know whom he was playing for. Since then, whenever I watch a training session, I always ask myself: within those steady footsteps, who is carrying what inside? Stadiums may change their names, but the songs of the stands can never be copyrighted. In Trabzon, that is even truer. People may argue about formations, about expensive signings, about sponsorship deals. But when two Black Sea sides meet, those arguments pause to make room for something older: regional pride. For that reason, I want to swim against the crowd a little. This week's bulletins — not only in Turkey — all revolve around "Trabzonspor continues preparations." That phrasing makes readers picture a flat, calm process. But that very flatness is the blind spot. A team that is theoretically stronger, forced to travel to a regional derby, faces a real danger that lies not in technique. It lies in psychology — in the opening minutes when the opposing stands roar, in a rushed touch when pinned back, in a corner kick that makes a young player's hands shake. I once mispronounced a player's name on live television, and that lesson still follows me today: a wrong name is a disrespect to an entire person. The same holds true for a derby. Treating a regional derby as an ordinary match, reading it as a line on a fixture list, is disrespecting decades of history on two shores. So what will decide the match at Samsun? Not the rondo drills I just described. Rondo merely shows what the team prepared for, not a guarantee that it can execute under real pressure. What decides is the ability to hold shape when the ball is lost, the courage at set pieces, and the cool head of a captain when the entire stadium is against him. In my profession, people usually wait for a match to draw conclusions. I wait for the signs before it. For this week 7 fixture, I will keep an eye on three things. First, the injury and suspension list the club publishes before kickoff — if a key player is absent, Thomas Reis's tactical intentions will change entirely. Second, the starting lineup: a surprise in personnel will reveal whether he intends to control the game or to absorb pressure and counter. Third, Thomas Reis's own press conference — how he speaks about Samsunspor will reveal how highly he rates the opponent. I come to the ground not to score goals, but to keep the rhythm for the stories. And the story here, to me, is not a dry training bulletin. It is the story of a club carrying the expectations of an entire coastal city, traveling away to a place where every touchline can turn into a small battle. Young readers may ask me: with only a few lines of a training notice, what can you write? I answer this way. Football does not begin with goals. It begins with silent mornings, circles in the middle of the pitch, balls bouncing steadily when no one is watching. Whoever sits long enough to hear that rhythm will understand the match before it happens. And whoever only reads the results will forever know only the results. The night before the match, I still believe that what decides at Samsun will be character, not drills. And if Trabzonspor can carry the slow, calm rhythm of that training session into the storm of the stands, they will have a chance. If not, the sea will swallow them — as it has swallowed so many visiting teams before.