Kokcu Sits Out Turkey's Final Training Session at Riva: The Midfield Puzzle Before France

Riva, 17:40.

The iron gate of the Hasan Doğan National Teams Training and Education Facility closes behind our small group of reporters. Inside, the pitch lies still under the tree line; the only sounds are studs biting into damp ground and short whistles drifting over from the Ebubekir Uçar area. No stands, no loudspeakers, no singing. When the ground is empty, I hear the breathing of the match.

Two names were missing from that session.

Orkun Kökçü did not train. Muhammed Şengezer did not train. One has ongoing toe pain, the other a minor injury. The messages moved through the Turkish press group faster than any pass on the grass, and I knew that within hours both names would be on every front page in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.

That is how a match begins, before the ball moves.

Context: an afternoon behind closed doors

Türkiye are preparing for a UEFA Nations League fixture in A League Group 1 against France. The match will be played at Kocaeli Stadium, a ground designed to funnel sound toward its tightest corner. For a side treated as underdogs on paper, that crowd is part of the tactic, not decoration.

Vincenzo Montella ran the session. He stood near the centre of the pitch, arms folded, watching groups rotate through stations. The workout opened with a warm-up, moved into short and medium-range passing, then finishing, then tactical organisation, and closed with a full-pitch tactical match. The whole session was closed to the press.

Outside the fence stood three Turkish Football Federation officials: Deputy President Mecnun Otyakmaz, General Secretary Abdullah Ayaz and Chief Advisor Yusuf Yerkel. They stood a few paces apart, taking no notes, simply watching. Their presence creates no direct pressure, but it says what everyone in the industry already understands: the France match is not an ordinary date on the calendar.

Per the published schedule, the team will inspect the Kocaeli pitch at 21:00, and Montella will hold his press conference at 20:15 alongside a player. Mustafa Eskihellaç joined camp around midday and trained with the full squad.

All of that ran to time. And all of it was overshadowed by one question: can Kökçü play?

Core: why one midfielder's toe matters this much

I have covered Italian football long enough to know that a creative midfielder is not in the team merely to pass. He is in the team for tempo. The whole side runs to the rhythm he sets.

With Kökçü, that rhythm shows up in three specific places, and all three depend on his standing foot.

The first is the transition from defence to attack. When Türkiye win the ball in midfield, Kökçü is usually the first receiver. He takes it with an open body, turns once, and carries it past the opposition's first midfield line. For a side that must counter-attack against a stronger opponent, that first action decides whether the team escapes up the pitch or drops back under pressure.

The second is set pieces. Kökçü takes direct free kicks, corners, and dead balls on the edge of the box. That is the delivery Türkiye need to score against a team like France, because in open play the space simply does not exist.

The third, and the least discussed, is his holding of the ball in exactly the places where the team needs to slow down. When the side needs to kill tempo, Kökçü is the one who takes it, turns his back to the defender, absorbs contact and waits for runners. That work never appears in a goals column, but it appears in the rhythm of the match.

The standing foot bears the load for all three.

I saw this in Serie A, at a Roma session in Trigoria in November 2026. I filmed a three-minute clip of a then-emerging Nicolò Zaniolo and posted it to the newsroom's Facebook page. It reached half a million views within an hour. What I remember is not that figure but the fact that he repeated one turn on his left foot for twenty minutes until the foot hurt enough that he walked the touchline grimacing.

A sore toe does not break a leg. It just makes everything half a beat slower. For a playmaker standing in front of the French midfield, half a beat is the entire difference between a line-breaking pass and an interception.

That is why Orkun Kökçü's absence from training was the most tactically significant signal of the day, more significant than the squad list Montella will publish, because that list depends on it.

If Kökçü is not fit, Türkiye lose their creative axis. Montella then faces two routes. He can drop a purely defensive midfielder deeper into a flat double pivot, accepting that progression will run mainly through the flanks. Or he can keep the shape and hand creative responsibility to another player, who would be filling a role he has never held at international level.

Both routes share one problem, and this is where I want to pause.

No back-up is ever a copy of the original

At club level, when a playmaker is out, a side usually has two or three rehearsed alternatives, drilled over weeks or a full season. At international level, that time is compressed into days.

A national team assembles for roughly seven to ten days per window. Most of it goes to recovery, to re-establishing structures built in previous camps, and only a small share to testing new solutions. When a key player drops out immediately before a match, the coach must experiment inside time that should have been spent refining. A closed session makes the information picture harder still. We know the team warmed up, passed, finished, worked on organisation and played a full-pitch tactical match. We do not know who stood where. When a session is closed, the closure itself is the biggest piece of information we have.

One other scenario should not be excluded. Montella may have deliberately kept Kökçü out of most of the session as load management, saving him for the match while still naming him in the squad. If that happens, Kökçü enters from the bench for the final twenty or thirty minutes, and the tactical problem inverts: he is no longer there to open the match, but to rescue it.

Muhammed Şengezer and the depth question

The second absentee, Muhammed Şengezer, has drawn far less attention. His injury is described as minor.

For a goalkeeper, the impact of an injury depends entirely on one question: is he the number one? If Şengezer is Montella's first choice, this is serious, because goalkeeper is the one position where the alternative is not prepared through shared minutes. If he is the back-up, this is a squad-depth matter.

The training report does not specify his role. I will leave that open and follow official federation updates.

What I can say with confidence is that a back-up goalkeeper with a minor injury during preparation rarely changes a tactical plan, but it does reduce rotation options if the match runs long or if the starter is cautioned.

Mustafa Eskihellaç and a signal pointing the other way

Eskihellaç joined camp around midday and trained. That is the only positive personnel note of the day.

A player added the day before a match is usually framed as a reaction. The common reading is that you only call someone when you have lost someone. There is another reading, and I lean toward it. Eskihellaç's presence in the tactical session suggests Montella is weighing every available option before finalising, rather than fixing a framework early. Against France, where Türkiye will struggle for the ball, the ability to change both wide channels in the second half carries more practical value than a second playmaker on the bench.

A contract is only paper; a team is signed by the rhythm of feet. And the rhythm of a newcomer's first session tells a coaching staff more than any scouting report.

Contrarian angle: this may be good news read badly

The media read the session in one direction: bad news for Türkiye. Two absentees, France approaching, and the story becomes anxiety.

I think that reading misses two things, both of which point the other way.

The first is that a key player being rested from training does not automatically mean he loses his starting place. Load management is part of coaching, and holding a playmaker out of a closed session before a match is routine. The cases that pass without consequence are forgotten; the small number that go badly are remembered forever. Media remembers the small number.

The second, and more important, is the way Türkiye build around a single creative hub rather than spreading creative responsibility. That is a structural problem, not a medical one. A team whose entire attack depends on the condition of one toe needs to revisit the system, whatever happens against France.

On that point I want to raise something I have tracked from Italian stands for years. Over roughly fifteen years, the inverted winger has displaced the traditional winger. It is called modernisation, and in individual cases it works. Structurally, it produces a consequence rarely discussed: when both wide players come inside, the team loses the ability to generate difference from a starting position near the touchline. Deliveries from wide become more predictable, and the burden of invention collapses into the centre.

Collapsing into the centre means collapsing into the central playmaker. For Türkiye this is not abstract. Whenever a match turns bad, the ball drifts central, and once it is central, every creative route runs through one man. When that man has a sore toe, the whole team limps.

Developing and using wingers who hold real width, men who treat the touchline as a position rather than a waypoint on the road inside, reduces that dependence. Several football nations discarded this profile for two decades, and I believe that was a mistake to be corrected with people, not with diagrams.

What the session said and what it did not

The separation matters. The session established that Kökçü and Şengezer did not take part, that the reasons were toe pain and a minor injury, that Eskihellaç trained with the squad, that Montella ran the workout, that it ended with a full-pitch tactical match, and that it was closed to the press.

It did not establish the starting eleven, the formation, who replaces Kökçü if he cannot play, or the true severity of Şengezer's injury. The report also names no specific source, which I treat as a real limitation when assessing the reliability of the injury information.

Screens flash continuously, but the ball still rolls to the old rhythm. News arrives fast, and so does bad news.

In my own tracking file on national-team camps, I always record the press conference and pitch inspection times, because those are the moments official information appears. Here, Montella speaks at 20:15 and the Kocaeli pitch inspection is at 21:00. Before those two moments, every squad conclusion is speculation.

I learned this in March 2026, when Italy lost to Sweden in the play-off and I flew to Moscow with a group of supporters. That night, in Red Square, twelve thousand Italian fans held each other and wept. They wept for a lost World Cup ticket, and for something larger: longing for their own national team. I sat there a long time and carried one lesson away. A match does not belong only to the eleven who start. It belongs to everyone waiting for a signal to believe.

And that signal is usually one name on a team sheet.

Signals to track next

Five things matter in the coming hours. First, the final session before the match: if Kökçü returns to full training, his starting probability rises sharply and the story flips from worry to lift within hours. Second, Montella's press conference: however he answers on Kökçü, confirmation or downplaying, will reset the day's narrative. Third, the official UEFA squad list, the only truly definitive piece of data. Fourth, France's selection: a full-strength France widens the quality gap and burdens Türkiye's midfield regardless of Kökçü. Fifth, the atmosphere at Kocaeli Stadium, where a full, loud crowd can offset part of the class gap, and in international football that offset is often larger than assumed.

Takeaway

I am nearly sixty, but a kick-off whistle makes me young again for ninety minutes. I still sit near the technical area, still write every phase into an old notebook, and still believe the most worthwhile thing to write is never the scoreline.

Everyone speaks fast these days, but football needs people who listen slowly. If Montella uses the France match to test a system that spreads creative responsibility, the result will matter less than I expect. If he loads the entire weight onto one sore toe, the question facing Turkish football will outlast the final whistle.

A team that wants to grow has to answer that question, not just win a match.