Hassan Shehata's Egypt were lambasted during the past few days after the 2-1 friendly defeat in Qatar, with some prominent papers claiming the result was actually fixed! A shocking headline on the cover of Al-Ahram Al-Riyadi, one of Egypt's top sports magazines, was something which summed up how harsh the media is on the national team. “Did Egypt get paid to lose in Qatar?” it said. The outrageous, yet unjustified, criticism from the media concerning any relapse by the national team has become a silly stereotypical habit, regardless of the circumstances. Playing without seven key players, virtually more than half the team, is a fact that most people in Egypt tend to ignore when assessing the performance of Shehata's team. Ahmed Hassan, Amr Zaki, Emad Meteb, Hosni Abd-Rabou, Sayed Moawad, Essam Al-Hadari and Mohamed Zidan have all been instrumental in Egypt's continental success in recent years. But have all been unavailable for the past few months as well, mainly because of injury. It was a setback which prompted Shehata to look for alternatives and subsequently introduce the likes of Walid Soliman, Ibrahim Salah, Ahmed Ali and Ahmed Abdul-Zaher recently. However, the media, along with a portion of impatient ‘fans', still want consistent results with no room for slip-ups - something which has no place in football. This is apart from the fact that it was just a friendly match not even included in FIFA's agenda, coming a few weeks after an emphatic victory over Australia in Cairo. The annoying factor was that absurd notion claiming that the match was fixed as Qatar were celebrating their successful bid for hosting the 2022 World Cup. The appalling accusation evoked memories of the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup in South Africa, where a lousy local tabloid claimed that Egypt's players brought prostitutes into their hotel rooms after the 1-0 victory over Italy. The earth-shattering claim was almost ignored by the Pharaohs squad until the Egyptian media made a meal of it, forcing a vigorous reaction from the team's camp in Johannesburg. The relationship between this type of ‘media' and the national team will never be stable unless the latter wins the World Cup to satisfy the press.
