Coaches of the Egyptian national football team have some things in common. They all make a lot of money, they don’t last too long on the job and they and their mothers are called all sorts of names when they string together a few losses.
What brought up the subject was this week’s appointment of Egyptian Mohsen Saleh as the new coach of Libya. Like those who came before and after, Saleh was a hero at first, steering Egypt to the 1996 African Cup of Nations (ACN). He later turned villain when he and company were shown the door after only the first round in the ACN in Tunisia in 2004.
The most famous of our coaches is undoubtedly the now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t Mahmoud El-Gohari. El-Gohari took charge of the Pharaohs on four different occasions since his first appointment as national coach in 1988. He’d be knocked down, you’d wince at the punishment he would take in the press, but invariably he’d come back for more.
El-Gohari took Egypt to the 1990 World Cup, only the second appearance in their history, the first being 1934, and won the 1998 ACN in Burkina Faso. He was the only man to have won the ACN as both a player and a manager, the first African to manage a team in the finals of a continental competition outside of Africa.
But there was another superlative: he was at the helm of an Egyptian team during its worst defeat by an Arab brother, Saudi Arabia, 5-1, in the Intercontinental Cup in Mexico in 1999. But the Egyptian federation showed it was not a sore loser, though lacking sorely in coaching choices, when it brought back El-Gohari within months of that debacle for his fourth spell with Egypt, leading the side through the qualifiers for World Cup 2002.
Senegal s progress thwarted Egyptian dreams of going to the Far East and El-Gohari left, this time for good, to take a new challenge with Jordan, a team of modest means, which suddenly found itself in the Asian Cup finals for the first time and tantalizingly close to a World Cup appearance for the first time.
Italian Marco Tardelli was the most famous player to be Egypt’s coach, and its most unsuccessful. Tardelli was one of the toughest defensive midfielders of his era but he is most remembered for the goal of a lifetime. Perhaps no man has enjoyed scoring in a World Cup final as much as Tardelli. For a few seconds after lashing home the second goal in Italy s 3-1 win over West Germany in Madrid in 1982, the Juventus hardman seemed to lose his senses. With tears running down his face, Tardelli shook his head as if trying to wake himself from an impossible dream, mouthing incomprehensibly to himself before his teammates dragged him to the ground to share the celebrations.
Twenty-two years later, in Egypt, Tardelli was probably talking to himself unintelligibly again after being summarily dismissed following just five games as the boss. After the halfway mark in the 2006 World Cup qualifiers, Egypt was already five points behind, largely because Tardelli refused to stay put in Egypt, opting to spend more time in Italy than Egypt. The Egyptian federation decided he should remain in the motherland full time.
Tardelli had arrived in Cairo in April 2004; he never made it to Christmas of that year. Too bad, because he could have bought tons of gifts with his $40,000-a-month salary.
Egypt’s foreign coaches who were ex-star players have not been particularly impressive. Ruud Krol of the famed total football ideology so eloquently expressed by the flying Dutchmen of the 1970s, was previously in charge of Egypt in the 1996 ACN, only to be dumped 3-1 by Zambia in the quarters.
Another out of town flop was Gerard Gili, the first Frenchman to lead Egypt. It was Gili’s job to retain the 2000 ACN that Egypt won in 1998. He came with impressive credentials, guiding Marseilles to the French league championship in 1988 and both the league and cup titles a year later. In 1993, he took over Montpellier, which ranked seventh that season, leading it to the cup final. In 1997, he was selected one of three assistants to head-coach Aime Jacquet, whose squad won the 1998 World Cup.
But the Pharaohs quarter-final exit at the hands of a modest Tunisian squadunleashed furious media attacks on Gili, his $35,000-a-month salary, his cellular phone bill, his residence at a five-star Cairo hotel and not least his competence as a coach. He had been hired in November; he stayed four months on the job.
Gili is no longer with us; figuratively. He was back in Egypt for the recent ACN. He was sitting on the opposite bench, assisting coach Henri Michel of Cote d’Ivoire, which ultimately lost to Egypt in the final.
The one foreigner who did something useful was Michael Smith of Wales, who presented Egypt with the 1986 ACN. Despite the failure of most foreign coaches, the Egyptian federation still looks to them as saviors. On various occasions it has targeted former French midfield maestro Jean Tigana; Bruno Metsu, the former Senegal coach who lead the Teranga Lions to the quarter-finals of the World Cup; Roger Lemerre, the man who led Tunisia to the 2004 ACN glory; former English coach Howard Wilkinson; and Philippe Troussier, who took Japan to the second round of the World Cup in 2002. Coaches from Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Croatia have also been included on the Egyptian wish list.
But these days, the association has settled on a local, Hassan Shehata, who surprised everybody by winning the recently concluded ACN. Shehata’s contract extends to 2008, when Egypt tries for a repeat in Ghana. And Shehata tries to remain in a job whose turnover rate is exceptionally high.
