Al-Ahram Weekly | Sports | From the press

As part of its bid to host the World Cup, Egypt's 2010 committee invited an international delegation of senior sports editor and writers to assess the national mondial potential for themselves. This is what Ron McKay of the Sunday Telegraph had to say

If he had time to cash in his air miles Hisham Azmy would be lounging on a dhow on the Nile watching the sun begin to set over the pyramids. Instead it's Paraguay, Paris, Vienna ... Brechin! Last week the man leading Egypt's bid for the 2010 World Cup was in Scotland, trying to persuade our man on the FIFA's decision-making committee, David Will, that he should not vote for the people's favourite but for the fast-rising outsider.

South Africa, having been robbed by one vote last time, are so confident they will win the beauty contest this time around that three weeks ago they stopped lobbying the 24 men who will make the decision. Morocco are most sages' second favourite, with Egypt, whose bid started later than the rest, narrowly behind, but some distance ahead of Tunisia and Libya, whose joint bid has been vetoed by FIFA, who are now judging the countries separately.

Azmy is used to saving situations, he is a former Egyptian international goalkeeper -- as is the new president of the Egyptian football association who was his contemporary and rival for the No 1 shirt.

He trots out the statistics in support of the bid. Ten fine stadiums in eight cities, three new ones being built, a fourth if the bid is successful, three more under renovation, ample training pitches and leisure facilities, an over-abundance of hotel rooms -- "we have 115,000 hotel rooms, FIFA wanted 35,000," he says -- a temperate climate, easily reached, "Egypt is at the heart of the world," six million tourists a year, the only underground railway in Africa, a communications city, two dedicated satellites -- the only one of the bidders able to reach the USA, Europe and Asia directly, where the main broadcasting dollars lie -- a track record of hosting major events, plus a footballing heritage second to none in Africa.

Egypt are the highest-rated footballing nation in Africa, they were the first African country to establish a football association and the first to join FIFA, a quarter of a century before the second African nation. Plus -- and there are many more pluses, believe me -- the headquarters of CAF, the Confederation of Africa Football, are situated in a plush, strangely quiet, building just outside Cairo.

Azmy, who has a photograph of himself making a save in an international on the face of his mobile phone -- "a lot of goals passed me," he jokes, in perfect English -- is an inexhaustible advocate of the cause. "Football, it's our food, it's our oxygen," he enthuses -- he stops short of libido -- before playing a clip from the launch of the bid at FIFA which features Omar Sharif, Egypt's most famous son glamming it up for Sepp Blatter and crew.

The decision-makers arrived in Cairo in January and Azmy and the local bid committee played what they hope will be a trump card. They invited the men, after the usual visits, to wander the capital alone in the evening to sample the safety of the streets. The contrast being, of course, South Africa, where the bolts are rammed home and the chains rattled on the curs at sundown.

If the favourites do have the prize snatched from them at the last minute on May 15, when the final vote is taken, it will have been won, or lost, over security. By gruesome coincidence, that vote comes exactly one year after suicide bombers struck in Casablanca, the heartbeat of Morocco, killing more than 30 people. And although they won't say it out loud, the fact that five of the alleged Spanish bombers are also Moroccan aids the Egyptian case.

Hossam Hassan, the most-capped player of the 20th Century, with 162 appearances, has played in most of the world's football-playing countries. Celtic fans will remember him as the man who knocked them out of the Uefa Cup in 1991 with four goals in two legs for Neuchatel. He's 38, but still playing for Egypt's leading side Zamalek. "Egypt is not too hot, not too cold, and that is something you cannot find too much in the world," he says. "In South Africa I just trained, played the match and stayed in the hotel. It's a beautiful country, I admit, but I couldn't go out of the hotel."

His teammate, 28-year-old Hazem Emam, has played in Europe with Udinese and De Graafschap. He is alternately known as "The Desert Fox" or "The Del Piero of the Nile". He puts it this way: "In the movies, especially in American movies, even before the Bin Laden attack, they always put the Arabs on camels in the desert. And if they showed the cities they only showed them shooting and in very bad areas. They never show the middle or the high areas in Egypt or in Morocco or Tunisia or anywhere in Arabia.

"When I first went to Italy the players were always kidding me about the camels because they think that is Egypt. I said 'no, here we also have Porsches'. I think our stadiums are very, very good compared to the rest of Africa. We always suffer when we go to the rest of Africa. There are no aeroplanes, so you have to drive six or seven hours. Johannesburg is very nice, but you cannot go out in the street after seven o'clock -- there is no freedom. It's always hard in the African Cup of Nations -- in Mali, in Burkina, in Ghana -- we always suffer with the stadiums, the hospitality, the transportation. It's very bad."

Egypt, of course, had its own terrorism outrage, in Luxor in 1997, but the sheer uniformed presence of police -- the secret police, the mukhabarat, also penetrate every area of life -- is daunting. At a midweek African champions' league match involving Zamalek and the Tunisian side Sfax, there were police of every sort, mounted and on foot, including hundreds of riot police in helmets, shields and long batons who formed a cordon sanitaire through the crowd, three seats up from the pitch, and who rattled the sticks ominously off the concrete when the punters became overly-exuberant at the end.

Egyptian police know how to deal with demonstrators. Peremptorily. But, as Minister of Youth Alieddin Hilal, points out -- sport, and the bid, is part of his portfolio -- the country is used to dealing with massive influxes of sometimes obstreperous visitors. So, the can-clutching England fans won't present a problem? "We'll greet them at the airport with a bottle," he says, perhaps not entirely joking.

As he points out, in flawless and idiomatic English, the bid has unconditional support, not only from the president, Hosni Mubarak, and the official organs of state, but, as any conversation will testify, throughout the country. There are flags and banners everywhere and the street, as the Arabs put it, seems entirely behind the huge investment -- just how much Egypt won't say -- involved. Indeed, most Egyptians appear bemused at the suggestion that the imprimatur on the bid isn't a given.

The country has only ever been to two World Cup finals, in 1934 and 1990, both in Italy and, with FIFA's policy now to rotate between continents, it will be a generation at least before the country can even bid for another. Hence the feverish enthusiasm and the further round of plane tickets for Hisham Azmy as he attempts to pluck the one or two votes Egypt believes could be crucial to success. He tells an apocryphal story of the FIFA committee's visit, where the itinerary, naturally, included a visit to the pyramids at Giza and the Sphinx. "The Sphinx told them," he says, "that 'I have been waiting three or four thousand years for this World Cup'."

While a few more years may be neither here nor there for the country's famous symbol, it would be catastrophe for its 75 million citizens.