After nearly 200 matches at the sharp end of international football, you get to recognise defining trends in the sport. Hossam Hassan, capped 176 times as a player with Egypt and about to take on his 21st match as their head coach, knows as well as anybody how far the rivalry with the Pharaohs’ next opponents in the Africa Cup of Nations, South Africa, has shaped the modern axis of power on the continent.
Hassan won the first of his three Afcons as a player almost four decades ago, in the spring of 1986, as a young up-and-coming striker with Al Ahly and a junior member of a talented squad. A magnificent career had been launched, one that would make Hassan the Pharaohs' most prolific all-time goalscorer.
But the Cup of Nations was smaller back then. For one thing, the vast nation on Africa’s southern tip was still excluded from it, banned by Fifa, football’s governing body, because of the then South African minority government’s racist apartheid policies. Afcons were more exclusive, too. In those days, they involved just eight teams, a third of the number of participants in Morocco for the current, 35th edition of the continent’s showpiece.
Hassan bore close witness to the gradual expansion while his own legend grew. By the time he was preparing for the 1998 Cup of Nations, as the 31-year captain of Egypt, South Africa had become a democracy, Nelson Mandela elected as its president, and the liberated country had started to flex its muscles as sporting giant.
They hosted and won the 1996 Afcon, a few weeks after Orlando Pirates of Soweto claimed the African club Champions Cup. Suddenly, the south was presenting a fresh and substantial challenge to the northern stronghold, Pirates’ success breaking an 11-year sequence of Champions Cups passing only between clubs from Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
Three decades on, the African Champions League finds itself in a similar cycle. If a club from a nation without a Mediterranean coastline is to be a candidate to win it, it is usually one from South Africa’s Premier Soccer League.
Thus the terms on which Hassan’s Egypt confront South Africa, aka Bafana Bafana, in Agadir: A clash of the heavyweights of Afcon’s Group B, the record seven-time winners, coached by a great whose playing career spans three of those titles, medals collected in three different decades between 1986 and 2006; up against a South Africa with real momentum, unbeaten in 27 games, fresh from qualifying for a World Cup for the first time since 2010 and with a bronze medal from the last Afcon.
It’s a rivalry with standout Afcon moments. When South Africa won their first and so far only Cup of Nations, the one team that beat them – in the group stage – was Egypt. Those of us who were in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, two years later, on the sweltering day of the 1998 final, recall how efficiently Egypt and their canny centre-forward, the 31-year-old Hassan, took the wind out of Bafana Bafana’s sails in a 2-0 victory to restore the old continental hierarchy.
Even more vivid in the memory of many Egyptians would be the eerie silence around the Cairo International Stadium in 2019, when a partisan audience of 75,000 were left stunned as a far more ordinary South Africa team than the present version ambushed Egypt with a late goal, eliminating them from the tournament they were hosting at the last-16 stage.
It is the contest of the two countries with the highest GDPs in Africa. And wealth matters in club football. Egypt and South Africa can viably claim to have the continent's top two domestic leagues. Hugo Broos, the veteran Belgian who coaches Bafana Bafana, could if he wished field an entire starting XI from talented players employed only by Mamelodi Sundowns and Pirates, finalist and semi-finalist respectively in the 2024/25 CAF Champions League. Hassan’s Afcon squad includes 12 who are either from Al Ahly or Pyramids, clubs who have, between them, won the last three Champions League titles.
Not that Hassan would dream of selecting only home-based players, not when he can pick two of the most highly valued forwards in Morocco this month, Mohamed Salah, of Liverpool and Omar Marmoush, of Manchester City.
That pair have already put three points on the board at Afcon, to the relief of their head coach. The Pharaohs had gone 1-0 down against underdogs Zimbabwe in their opening Group B game on Monday, recovering to a 2-1 thanks to the expert finishing of first Marmoush and, in the 91st minute, Salah.
The late suspense left Hassan a little uncomfortable. “Luck wasn’t with us," he said. "We were the stronger side but we missed a few good goalscoring chances. Our performance level will get better. Opening games are always challenging.”
To which the South Africans would bear witness. They let a lead slip against Angola in their first fixture and restored it only through Lyle Foster with 11 minutes remaining. “Too slow, no passion,” said Broos of South Africa’s opening 45 minutes, admitting that at half-time, with Angola having pulled back the score to 1-1, his team-talk had been angry. “My voice was a little louder than usual. We fell asleep and Angola came back into the game.
“But this is a tough tournament and it was a good wake-up call for us. We’ll go into the game against Egypt under different circumstances. I know these guys. It will not happen again.”
