Return of Zamalek, with all the memories of a great future gone by

The announcement on Monday that Gor Mahia will meet Egypt’s Zamalek next weekend in their first match of the Caf Confederation Cup group stage has some fans who last went to a stadium to watch local football more than 30 years ago preparing to return. That is what they are telling me. The clock has come full circle and suddenly, the air is thick with anticipation.

I can understand them. Of all of Gor Mahia’s prospective opponents, Zamalek are in a class of their own. They were the accident that happened on the road to a first continental title that many believed was at hand.

Len Julians’ team of that time had many qualities that a side challenging for a major championship seeks: talent, teamwork, motivation and the backing of millions of fans scattered in the four corners of the earth.

Zamalek occupies a special place in the psyche of Gor Mahia supporters that I don’t think even Tunisia’s Esperance, whom they defeated 4-3 to claim their first and only African title in 1987, can match. The legend of Zamalek begun early in 1984. It is the famous club in Egypt that became a person in Kenya. Zamalek is to its great rival, Al Ahly what Gor Mahia is to AFC Leopards in Kenya, Yanga to Simba in Tanzania, Asante Kotoko to Hearts of Oak in Ghana and Orlando Pirates to Kaizer Chiefs in South Africa. Blood rivalry.

A loss by one to the other results in health complications for their truest fans – although this is probably doubtful in the Kenyan situation today where Gor Mahia has become dominant. (I will write about this terrible development soon.)

If, in the misty future, an occasion will present itself for Gor Mahia Football Club to document its history, the player who went to Egypt and returned home with a new name will merit more than a passing mention.

Before March 1984, club fans knew him as Abbas Khamis Magongo. He was a native of Tanzania. He migrated to Mombasa and after a while acquired a Kenyan passport.

After March 1984, his name became Abbas Khamis Magongo Zamalek. For a long time, we sports journalists put his Zamalek name in quotation marks. But, like team mates such as Peter Otieno Bassanga, the nickname became the real name with the passing of time.

Magongo was a quiet, affable man who let his artistry speak for him. He was also a contradiction in terms on the football field. The enormous work he put in as a defensive midfielder was out of all proportion to his slight frame. And so were the cannon balls that flew off his thin legs. He was an exciting player to cover and I delighted in the days when he was in the famous green shirt.

I got to know his day job by accident. Once I had an appointment with National Super Alliance leader Raila Odinga who was then Managing Director of his family business, East Africa Spectre, the gas cylinder manufacturing company. Raila asked that we meet at the factory at 7am. Both of us were on time and before sitting for our meeting in his office, he took me around the plant.

Workers in blue overalls were busy in various stages of the production process. And then our eyes locked in familiarity with one of them.

“Zamalek!” I exclaimed, “You work here?”

Zamalek, who was obviously surprised, seemed happy to see me. He smiled broadly but in deference to the man in whose company I was, he indicated that he was busy. He was ordinarily a shy man but now he was even more so. His overalls, which were in such sharp contrast to the green kit that I was accustomed to, made him appear like an actor in a theatre stage. I turned to his boss who was counting the cylinders that had been made overnight.

“I didn’t know he works here,” I said, “What is he skilled in?”

Raila explained: “It’s not a question of skills. We are just giving him a means of earning a livelihood. Football can’t pay him and he is not well educated. So we find him something he can do – and he is able to continue playing football and supporting his family. We do that with people like him.” “That is very kind of you,” I remarked to which he nodded in appreciation and moved on to the next subject.

Magongo was the personification of Gor Mahia’s most famous aborted assault on an African title. Here, his captain, Austin Oduor takes up the story. “In the 1984 second round of the Africa Cup of Champion Clubs, we found ourselves pitted against Zamalek of Egypt. Before we departed for Egypt, we started hearing rumours that some of our players had been targeted by the referee. He would be quick to his red and yellow cards. The aim was to weaken us by the time the second leg came around in Nairobi.

“These were not rumours to be taken lightly in those days. When African teams were playing against North African sides, referees from Senegal and Sudan had a well-known record of bias. And the one picked to officiate our Zamalek game, Hassan Abdel-Hafiz, was Sudanese. According to these rumours, the players on his hit list were Magongo, Abdalla Shebe, Charles Otieno, Hesbon Omollo and me.”

Gor Mahia’s coach of that time, Len Julians was a man whose volcanic temper in the game’s heated moments belied his pious fellowship with the Salvation Army. But Julians knew how to mould players and to get them to give their best. He also knew their characters and used this to guide his fielding. He knew Abdallah Shebe was temperamental, good fodder for a referee who was less than neutral, and decided not to field the talented striker.

Gor Mahia assumed control of that game almost from the start and had Zamalek in trouble before their frenzied supporters. And then – catastrophe. Magongo, the soon to become Zamalek, made a tackle that the referee decided was a penalty. Gor Mahia players disputed it but Julians pleaded with them to allow it be taken – and it was duly scored.

That should have been it. But in Austin’s account, “the referee came to our half before the restart and started looking at the backs of each one of us. Finally, he located the shirt number he was looking for. It was Number 16, which Magongo always wore. He flashed out a red card.

“We couldn’t believe it. A red card after the penalty was already taken? If there was to be one, it should have been before. We furiously disputed it. In the heat of the moment, we mobbed him and at one time he fell on the ground. He went outside the pitch and after a while, he reappeared with a massively bandaged hand. He restarted the game and then blew his whistle three times. We asked him what was happening. He said his injury couldn’t allow him to continue. He ended the match.”

The rest is history. Magongo got his new name and Gor served a three-year suspension for assaulting a referee. They came back with a vengeance to win what is today the Confederation Cup in the very first season of their return. Almost 40 years later, this journey comes full circle next weekend.

Zamalek for their part exhibited great sportsmanship by extending an olive branch to the team that had paid a steep price on their account; they came to Nairobi on their own initiative to train with Gor Mahia and request them to let bygones be bygones. Even if next Sunday’s encounter will be keenly contested, there can be no doubt that it will be free of any rancour from the past.

This week, an old friend told me he was planning to go to Kasarani for the encounter. He said: “The last time I was in a stadium for a local game, I think it was 1987 – when Kenya hosted the All-Africa Games and Gor Mahia played Esperance. I don’t remember ever going back. But I am seriously considering going to watch Gor versus Zamalek. I am talking to people like me and see whether I can raise some numbers. Two guys are interested.”

When I asked him why he doesn’t support local football, he said he lost interest a long time ago. He was scathing in his appraisal of the local game.

“I am a football fan and inclined to support local football. I don’t actually have much time for EPL and all that. But I am very frustrated by our low standards. I simply cannot go to the stadium to watch the kind of schoolboy fare that I catch glimpses of on TV. I want the real stuff. Religious crusades and political rallies are more interesting in their content than the football played in Kenya. What a pity!”

Religious crusades? I asked him. “Yes!” he snapped, “I enjoy watching fake miracles, the ones enacted by false prophets and their henchmen.” The drama provided him with content for social media gossip, he told me, when I wondered why somebody would have a hobby like that. On my part, I hoped we will have a rendezvous at Kasarani next Sunday to reconnect with Zamalek. And I hope it will be beautiful, like the game itself always is in its purity, and that up there, Abbas Khamis Magongo Zamalek will be smiling.

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It is one year since we were to host Chan. After Caf called out our lies about preparedness to host their second-tier competition and handed it to Morocco, the Government promised that construction of the stadiums would proceed as scheduled and all would be ready in three months.

That promise came on the back of a 2013 election pledge by the then Jubilee candidates that they would build five world class stadiums in Garissa, Mombasa, Eldoret, Kisumu and Nakuru. Workers are still shoving up dirt at Nyayo National Stadium and Kipchoge Keino Stadium in Eldoret which were supposed to host some of the Chan matches. If refurbishing small stadiums can prove more daunting than prospecting for oil in the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where does that leave constructing huge new ones?