CAF Champions League final: Pyramids look to write new chapter in African football history

Egyptian side will lift trophy for first time if they can overcome Mamelodi Sundowns over two legs

Congolese forward Fiston Mayele has scored 19 goals in 40 games across all competitions for Pyramids this season. Reuters

The Confederation of African Football (CAF) unveiled the new trophy for their leading club competition on Thursday, silverware sculpted to symbolise a new era for a prize that has been handed to the champions of the continent for 60 years.

Recent recipients of the old cup have tended to be the familiar grandees, but for the first time since 2016, there’s a strong chance a new name is about to appear on the roll of honour.

At the Johannesburg ceremony where the trophy was presented were representatives of Pyramids, the upstart Egyptians who on Saturday contest the first leg of the CAF Champions League final against Mamelodi Sundowns in Pretoria. It is Pyramids’ first such final. They intend to take first ownership of the gleaming new cup.

In a packed end-of-season agenda for Pyramids, they will in between the away leg and the Cairo return on June 1 play their last match of a domestic campaign in which they have also set a championship pace.

That race, though, faltered enough that they would need to both beat Ceramica and hope Al Ahly falter against Pharco to seize that crown ahead of Al Ahly.

But the fact that the Pyramids challenge has been sustained this far, and that it is they and not Al Ahly – 12-time African champions – nor Zamalek the five-time winners – who are upholding their country’s great tradition in CAF’s biggest annual showpiece is a startling novelty for the region.

Pyramids are barely seven years old as a sporting institution, and in common with several of elite football’s most upwardly mobile clubs – from Abu Dhabi-backed Manchester City to Qatar-funded Paris Saint-Germain – the impulse for their sudden rise has been substantial financial backing from the Gulf.

Pyramids’ ascent began when Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and very visible driver of boxing’s boom in the kingdom, took over Al Assiouty, from Beni Suef, rebranded them and moved the new entity to Cairo.

But the momentum to make them genuine challengers to the established giants of Egypt has been overseen by the Emirati businessman Salem Al Shamsi, who took over control in 2019.

Recruitment has been ambitious and mostly shrewd. And, in being a young club, there is still plenty of room for the fan base to grow - those who have watched Pyramids over the last seven months have been richly entertained.

They were the leading goalscorers in the regular Egyptian Premier League season – its championship play-off phase is now nearing completion, with Al Ahly two points ahead of Pyramids at the top – and have comfortably outscored everybody else in the CAF Champions League.

There have been memorable cliffhangers: a rollercoaster 4-3 win over AS FAR in the quarter-finals, in which, because of the away goals rule, Pyramids had their nerves shredded when the Moroccan club reduced the 4-1 deficit they had taken home from the first leg. One more goal would have put FAR through.

The semi-final against Orlando Pirates of South Africa would be a slow-burner that turned into an epic. After a goalless draw in Soweto, Pirates twice took the lead in Cairo, both times after poor clearances from the Pyramids defence.

The Egyptians equalised twice, ahead of the indomitable Fiston Mayele snaffling a winner for 3-2, erasing Pirates’ away goals advantage with six minutes left on the clock.

“My most important goal,” said the striker. And also his fourth in as many CAF matches and his eighth in 11 of a pan-continental odyssey that began with Pyramids’ first-round thrashing of JKU of Zanzibar, Mayele the first name on a 9-0 aggregate scoreline.

The run stumbled momentarily when Pyramids fell behind in both legs against Rwanda’s APR but they emerged 4-2 victors.

Since then, their effectiveness in their Cairo fortress has been key. “We have a record of not losing at home and that’s a strength we know how to leverage,” said Pyramids manager Krunoslav Jurcic.

Jurcic is an old hand in Mena football, previously in charge of UAE clubs Baniyas and Al Nasr and with spells in Turkey and Saudi Arabia on his resume.

But his impact in Egypt has been as great as anywhere he has worked since he guided Dinamo Zagreb to three league titles in his native Croatia. Last year, Pyramids lifted their first major title, the Egyptian Cup, a threshold moment.

Since the 2018 takeover, they had ruffled feathers, notably at Zamalek and Al Ahly, the behemoths on Egypt’s sporting landscape, but had only a series of silver medals to show for it – three times runners-up in the Premier League, three times in domestic knockout tournaments and, five years ago, losing finalists in the CAF Confederation Cup.

The team Jurcic takes to Pretoria has the worldliness to claim gold. Goalkeeper Ahmed El Shenawy, 34, has been playing CAF Champions League football for well over a decade and was in goal for the first leg of Zamalek’s defeat to Sundowns nine years back, the final where the South Africans claimed their one and so far only Champions League title.

Mayele is 30 and at the peak of his powers as a centre-forward with a powerful physical presence and nimble movements on and off the ball.

He too has unfinished business with Sundowns, or at least the large core of Sundowns players who make up much of the South African national side. Mayele was part of the DR Congo team who were last year edged into fourth place by South Africa at the Africa Cup of Nations.

He has thrived at Pyramids partly because of the quality of the passes played into him, be they crosses from the zippy attacking full-backs, Moroccan Mohamed Chibi and Egypt international left-back Mohamed Hamdi. The pace of Mostafa Fathi behind opposition defences and the deft touches of Ibrahim Adel open up helpful space too.

“We have a good balance in the attacking and defensive parts of our game,” said Jurcic ahead of the squad’s departure for Johannesburg, and at their stab at writing a new chapter for African football. “We want to put our names in history,” added Mayele.