- FROM AFP NEWS
Armenian football fans gathered on Saturday for the Euro 2024 qualifier match with arch-foe Turkey in Yerevan, years after the two countries first resorted to "football diplomacy" to heal their historical animosity.
Shouting "Armenia, forward!" some two hundred members of the local fan club, Red Eagles, gathered in central Yerevan before kick-off later in the day.
Fans then lit coloured flares, threw firecrackers and beat drums as they marched towards the Vazgen Sargsyan Republican Stadium.
In the crowd forming outside the 14,000-capacity stadium under the pouring rain, many blew vuvuzelas and waved Armenia's red-blue-orange national flags.
"We are in a fighting mood, we have come for a victory," a Red Eagles' member Karen Antonyan, 36, told AFP.
"The spirit and passion of our players will help them to prevail over the strong and experienced adversary."
Another fan, 20-year-old Mane Zurabyan said she was confident in her team's win.
"We will help our team with our crazy energy, the stadium will tremble from our shouts and applause," she said.
All tickets were sold for the match, but citing security concerns, the governing body of football in Europe, UEFA, has banned Turkish fans from attending the qualifier in Yerevan.
Armenian fans were equally banned from the return fixture to be played in Turkey in September.
Hovik Arustanyan, 46, said he believed his team's success depended on "whether our footballers will manage to forget politics and concentrate on the game."
Armenia and Turkey have never established formal diplomatic relations and their shared border has been closed since the 1990s.
Their relationship is strained by World War I-era mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, atrocities Yerevan says amount to genocide.
The two countries first played each other in Yerevan in 2008 in attendance of Turkey's then-president Abdullah Gul.
In 2009 Armenia's leader Serzh Sarkisian travelled to the Turkish city of Bursa to watch a second game between the two countries.
Commonly referred to as "football diplomacy" the matches marked the beginning of a diplomatic normalisation process, which has yet to bring tangible results.
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