Shock, horror, and no mistake: what with Bill Clinton, Bertie Ahern et al in town for the OSCE security summit yesterday and Turkish seismologists predicting another major earthquake for the Istanbul region any day now, the mere matter of the Turkish soccer team's qualification for next summer's Euro 2000 finals was relegated to the sports pages, rather than the front pages, of yesterday's major Turkish dailies.

And while the tone of the reporting was understandably upbeat, there appeared to be little banging of drums or patriotic fervour; the final whistle was greeted, mostly, with a sigh of relief. Of the apres-match fisticuffs which dominated Irish press coverage of the game yesterday, there was simply no sign. "The match seemed endless," confessed the daily Hurriyet, while its sister paper Milliyet ran the headline "Yuzum uz guldu" ("We smiled") over a picture of two teenage boys, faces painted, arms around each other's shoulders. The accompanying strapline, however, pointed out that it was a case of "after all the recent bad news, a bit of good news at last".

Inside, the veteran columnist Kahrman Bapcum was at pains to stress that it hadn't been an easy victory; and while he went out of his way to acknowledge both the strength of the wind and the strength of the Irish team, he was severely critical of Turkey's missed goalscoring opportunities. "If we go to the tournament next summer with a performance like this one, we'll definitely die in the first match."

Another columnist, Togay Bayatli, praised the plucky Irish performance but commented acidly that it was a pity both teams hadn't done better at the group stage - the countries could then have played each other under happier circumstances, in the championships next summer. Appropriately, perhaps, the Islamic newspaper Zaman took a more serene view: "Dalga dalga sevinc," it proclaimed, a traditional Turkish expression which translates - or maybe fails to translate - as "Waves and waves of happiness".

And in a report on the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern's attempt to persuade Star TV of the injustice of its three-million dollar demand from RTE, Hurriyet outdid itself in its efforts to convey the flavour of Mr Ahern's admonitory remarks, using the delightful word "zorbalik". Which carries more than a whiff of scandal and which, literally, means "difficult fish".