Turkey v England: Arminta Wallace joined Turkish fans in the Sukru Saracoglu Stadium on Saturday night

Sieges are nothing new in Istanbul. Three thousand years ago, Byzantine traders helped themselves to a series of sleepy fishing villages on the shores of the Bosphorus and built a city with one foot in Europe and the other in Asia - and a procession of would-be invaders has been attacking it ever since. Arabs, Bulgarians, Romans, Greeks and Ottomans have taken it in turns to ransack the place to celebrate their various victories.

This weekend's Siege of Sukru Saracoglu was rather different. On paper, the statistics added up to a foregone conclusion. Home fans, 40,000: away fans, nil. Home team all present and correct: away team reeling from injuries, scandals, rumours and internal bickering. Foregone conclusion? It looked as if the stage was set for a massacre.

"No way out of Sukru Saracoglu," the Turkish tabloids had been screaming all week.

As it happened, they were right. But - as so often in the past - it was the guys sitting pretty on the hill who had to concede defeat, and the visitors who emerged victorious.

Being a visitor in 21st-century Istanbul - even if you aren't an English soccer hooligan decked out in a false moustache - can be a tricky business. Sure, there are maps - but the maps don't warn you about the hills, the higgledy-piggledy jumble of turnings and blind alleys and the fact this is a city where most of the streets have no name.

So imagine the plight of the visiting hackette who is trying to get to a football match from which foreigners have been told to stay well away. First you must take a ferry to the Asian suburb of Kadikoy, bastion of Fenerbahce football club and a destination so firmly off the beaten tourist track it doesn't figure on the maps at all.

As Istanbul is more water surrounded by land than land surrounded by water, if you get on the wrong ferry you can easily end up half way to Romania - and given there were upwards of 7,000 uniformed police on duty in the city by match day, foreigners asking directions to Kadikoy on Saturday afternoon were likely to be, let's say, misunderstood.

But after a mildly worrying but absolutely typical kerfuffle where, having settled comfortably into our seats, we all had to get off the ferry, run around the pier and scramble on to another one - no reason given, à la Dublin bus - we sailed across the Bosphorus in glorious style, the gilded domes of Istanbul's mosque-laden skyline glinting like liquid sunshine - and disembarked 20 minutes later to find a party in full swing.

Talk about painting the town red: Kadikoy had blossomed into red and white bloom, its pavements festooned with stalls selling replica shirts, tracksuit tops, scarves, banners and flags, all waving gently in the breeze.

Inside the stadium, however, the sound was the thing. Turkish janissary bands have been scaring foreigners witless with drums, horns and chanting for centuries - but even they would have quailed before the aural onslaught which accompanied Beckham and co on to the pitch and rendered God Save the Queen null and void.

A high-pitched scream which was like nothing else on earth - except maybe an up close encounter with the undercarriage of a jumbo jet - it seemed to have broken the sound barrier even before kick-off but was, incredibly, cranked up a few notches every time Beckham touched the ball.

As for the match itself, well, it was exactly like Christmas - an awful lot of fuss leading only to severe anticlimax. Turkey fiddled nervously about in midfield while England responded with sudden, often serious, counter-attacks.

When referee Pierluigi Collina awarded a penalty to England there was a deafening silence - followed by gasps of disbelief as Beckham's shot ballooned wildly over the top of Rustu's goal.

Maybe the English captain wasn't feeling as cool as he was acting; though he was certainly acting a lot cooler than the Turkish centre-half Alpay, whose niggly nonsense as the teams went off the pitch at half-time almost caused the conflagration everyone had been praying wouldn't happen.

Whatever Collina said to the team captains at half-time averted any full-on clashes thereafter, though enough ugly gestures were batted back and forth to make the large English press contingent at Sukru Saracoglu speculate none too politely about what sort of reception will greet Alpay and Tugay on their return to Aston Villa and Blackburn.

Of the beautiful game, there was little or no sign: the silky skills displayed by the Turks at last year's World Cup - and, indeed, at last month's friendly against Ireland at Lansdowne Road - were nowhere to be seen.

A couple of flashes of skill from Emre, a single strike from Hakan Sukur's famous head, and that was about it. By the time Fenerbahce favourite Tuncay Sanli was substituted for a weary Sergen, this was a team which definitely looked to have skipped on the Weetabix, reduced to half-hearted lobs from miles out which - as the English newspapers will no doubt have noted - rarely troubled goalkeeper David James.

As the minutes ticked away the Turkish fans, convinced the stadium clock must be wrong - "85 minutes? No way" - consulted their watches over and over and, to give them credit, sang louder and louder. But it was no use.

When the final whistle sounded Beckham, as magnanimous in victory as Mehmet the Conqueror had been when he entered Byzantine Constantinople in 1453, offered the assembled throng a round of applause - the most effective gesture he could have made using more than one finger.

And on the ferry back to the Galata Bridge, the only sound to be heard was the rhythmic throb - or should that be sob? - of the engines.