Shirzanan: Last week New York Times had an article in its Sports section covering women’s soccer in Turkey and their struggle for acceptance by people. YIGAL SCHLEIFER reports from Istanbul: “Turks are soccer mad, with games regularly attended by tens of thousands of boisterous fans. But at this game, between host Kartalspor and Ankara’s Gazi Universitesispor, the 22 players on the field outnumbered the people shivering in the stands.”

Besides the bad weather the short attendance is most probably is because of the players. It was a matche between two women’s soccer teams and Schleifer writes, “although Turks may be soccer fanatics, there is a deep ambivalence in this socially conservative, predominantly Muslim society about women playing the game.”