The 18-year-old entered the field in the 59th minute, replacing Simic, and became the second Turkish Cypriot in history to wear the green shirt
Tahsin Ozler got his first minutes with the Omonia first team jersey in the cup match against ENY Digeni Ypsonas.
The 18-year-old entered the field in the 59th minute, replacing Simic, and became the second Turkish Cypriot in history to wear the green jersey.
The first was Ibrahim Aziz, who played in four games in the 1956-57 season and was quite linked with Omonia, from which he was honored at an event in 2018 for the 70 years of the Nicosia team.
After his award he posted about his bond with Omonia and the reason he had to stop playing football.
"Tonight we celebrated the 70 years of Omonia. I was also honored as the only T/k who wore the shirt of Omonia in the distant 1956-57. "Talented centre-forward, left early due to studies…", was the reference in my short presentation at the award. I found myself in Omonia when I was just 18 years old, right after I graduated from the Turkish high school in Nicosia in June 1956. I started playing football in my village, Potamia, when I was only 15 years old in the village team, AETOS (Athletic Greek-Turkish Club).
The founder and leader of the association in Potamia was Saffettis, who was also the first secretary of the AKEL party group in the village. A man with excellent morals who together with football taught us principles and ideals. I grew up in the village with the leftist ideology and it was no coincidence that I found myself wearing the Omonia shirt.
But, "I left early…" because those years were the beginning of the dismemberment of Cyprus, even before the declaration of the Republic of Cyprus. The struggle of EOKA was in progress, while the underground armed Turkish organizations had begun their action to resist the struggle for the Union. In the first, I would say, division-dismemberment during that period, the Turkish Football Federation had withdrawn from the KOP and a serious climate of tension had been created.
All this did not touch me since I had grown up in a community where there was a spirit of common coexistence. We were Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, above all Cypriots and we functioned in the village as a family. So, being young, I didn't feel that with my decision to play in Omonia I would have problems. And when the TMT began in May 1958 to hunt down and exterminate the leftist T/k who had not listened to its order to stop having relations with the E/k, I had also become a target of the TMT. I was then "packaged" in Sofia to study with a party scholarship that Cavazoglou had secured for me. Since then I stopped playing football, but my soul remained tied to Omonia from then until today".