By Selcuk Bugra Gokalp
ANKARA (AA) - Turkish club Galatasaray beat Azerbaijani club Qarabag 2-1 on Sunday in an aid match for Turkish earthquake victims.
Bafetimbi Gomis brought the lead to the Lions in the 4th minute at Baku Olympic Stadium.
Albanian Redon Xhixha leveled the score for Qarabag, then Argentine star Mauro Icardi secured the final score of 2-1 with a penalty goal in the 87th minute.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his wife Mehriban Aliyeva were in the audience.
"We didn't think about the result when we started the game. We were here today just to show that we’re together, our brotherhood," Galatasaray head coach Okan Buruk said after the game.
Qarabag manager Gurban Gurbanov said, "The match with Galatasaray gave us experience, but we all know the purpose of the match. It was a match to help earthquake victims."
In a statement to club television, Galatasaray President Dursun Ozbek stated that they want to play a friendly match with Qarabag in Istanbul as well, and added, "We will combine some of our activities as two sister teams from two brotherly countries. I invited them to play a friendly match in Istanbul."
Ozbek also said the two clubs will also sell each other's jerseys.
All revenues of the match, with more than 60,000 tickets were sold, will be donated to people affected by last month’s earthquakes.
On Feb. 6, magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 quakes struck 11 Turkish provinces – Adana, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Elazig, Hatay, Gaziantep, Kahramanmaras, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye, and Sanliurfa.
More than 13.5 million people in Türkiye have been affected by the quakes, as well as many others in northern Syria.