This is serious — Turkey is threatening to pull out of EuroBasket if this situation is not dealt with to its satisfaction.
Philadelphia guard Furkan Korkmaz was ejected from Turkey’s EuroBasket loss on Sunday when he and Georgia’s Duda Sanadze got into an on-court altercation.
However, the real fight reportedly came when Sanadze and several Georgian players not suiting up for the game attacked Korkmaz in the hallway as he tried to get back to the locker room after the ejection (Georgia is hosting Group A games). Here is the official comment from the Turkish national team, via EuroHoops.net.
Turkish federation vice-president and former player Omer Onan described the incident: “While Furkan Korkmaz was walking in the hallway to the locker rooms with our trainer, Georgia’s players who were not in the active roster attacked him together with the ejected player (ed.note: Duda Sanadze) and the police. There should not be an attack on the player that goes to the locker room. At the end of the match, 30 policemen each pushed us into a fight. We got into a fight with Georgia’s official police. I am calling out to FIBA and I have also told FIBA’s officials. Let no one deceive themselves or think that we are stupid. They will bring us all the camera footage from that corridor minute by minute without anything missing. If those cameras do not come to us, we will leave this tournament.
Wherever you look it, there is nothing to hold onto. The non-competing player, Shengelia, and three people sitting on the bench went to the locker room. At the end of the match, the police were in front of our locker room. Supposedly they were protecting us but they pushed us all the time. We were going to hit each other with our fists”.
There have been no reports of if Korkmaz was injured in the alleged attack.
Turkey is 2-1 in Group A with two remaining games on their EuroBasket schedule (Tuesday against Belgium and Wednesday against Spain). They are poised to advance to the tournament’s knockout stage, but are threatening to walk away from that to protect their player.
We will see if FIFA investigates and if it does anything about it. To call FIFA’s handling of investigations and handing out punishments “inconsistent” would be a gross understatement.
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76ers Korkmaz ejected, attacked by Georgian players walking to locker room at EuroBasket originally appeared on NBCSports.com