Giresunspor welcome Kayserispor to the Cotanak Stadium as the Turkish top flight resumes on Saturday after the devastating earthquakes in the area.
The relegation-threatened hosts were supposed to face Kayserispor on the first Monday of February but have had to wait three weeks for this Super Lig encounter, all the proceeds of which will be donated to the victims of the natural disaster.
Match preview
Vukan Savicevic scored his first goal of the season to nudge Giresunspor ahead in their most recent league match before fellow strugglers Kasimpasa emphatically responded with five unanswered goals.
Giresunspor have been in a woeful run of form since the turn of the year; no team has scored fewer goals, conceded more or collected fewer points in 2023.
Ahead of the initial scheduling of this match Hakan Keles seemed to be on the brink of leaving the club after nearly three years in Giresun, weighed down by dreadful results and increasingly infuriated by external factors which he refused to explicitly outline.
The club will hold presidential elections at the general assembly this week but no candidate had officially stepped forward just days before the ballots were supposed to be opened, clouding the entire institution in uncertainty.
The plight of Keles's team on the pitch has not been aided by captain Onurcan Piri's struggles between the posts, with the 28-year-old goalkeeper recording the worst save percentage in the entire division, letting in two out of every five shots on target.
Kayserispor signed off before the enforced hiatus with an impressive 1-0 victory over high-flying Istanbul Basaksehir at the start of February thanks to a second-half goal from Ali Karimi.
Since arriving in the summer, Cagdas Atan has steered Kayserispor to the heady heights of seventh place, 11 points and 10 places better off than Giresunspor.
The steep improvement under Atan - the yellow and red striped side finished 14th with the Giresun-born Hikmet Karaman last season - has undoubtedly been aided by a glut of good finishing; only one team in the Turkish top flight can better Kayserispor's record of converting 37% of their shots on target.
Onur Bulut opened the scoring in a 3-0 win for Kayserispor in the August reverse fixture but the full-back has since joined Besiktas, eventually, after a muddied transfer saga which almost forced the player to take legal action against the team he was departing.
These two clubs have only met seven times in the history of the Turkish Super Lig, with Giresunspor waiting for their first top-flight victory in this fixture since 1975.
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Team News
Giresunspor's regular substitute Kadir Seven may not be able to take up his familiar spot on the bench this weekend while he continues to nurse a back problem.
Arda Kilic rejoined the club in January but did not have the chance to make his second debut before suffering a season-ending ACL injury this month, hampering a stop-start senior career for the 18-year-old.
Kayserispor's victory over Basaksehir at the start of the month came at a cost, as Atan lost Olivier Kemen and Lionel Carole to suspension-inducing yellow cards in the first half.
Nurettin Korkmaz, who ruptured his cruciate ligament in October, was joined in the treatment room in Kayseri by centre-back Dimitrios Kolovetsios before the mid-season break.
Both Mario Gavranovic and Bernard Mensah are doubts for Saturday's match while they nurse a pair of back injuries.
Giresunspor possible starting lineup:
Piri; Bilazer, Saglam, Perez, Uludag; Mejia, Campuzano; Sergio, Savicevic, Sainz; Bajic
Kayserispor possible starting lineup:
Bayazit; Hosseini, Dinc, Kocaman, Arikan; Campanharo; Bassan, Karimi, Ackah, Mane; Sazdagi
We say: Giresunspor 0-2 Kayserispor
If Keles's job was in the balance at the start of the month, the 51-year-old may be on his way out of the door after this weekend if Kayserispor earn the win we are backing them to claim.
For data analysis of the most likely results, scorelines and more for this match please click here.
