Late into Wednesday night, Omar Marmoush momentarily lost his way exiting the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium.
He was heading out of the away dressing room towards the Manchester City team bus and from there to a subdued flight home. It’s a bit of a maze down in the basement floors of Real Madrid’s redeveloped stadium. As City’s new man was there for the first time, he needed directions.
His next visit to the Bernabeu, Marmoush will doubtless have resolved, will turn out better all round.
By the time his rasping free-kick hit the Madrid crossbar, setting up a very late City goal, the tie had been utterly lost, Madrid knocking City out of the competition by 6-3 on aggregate.
Some time after Marmoush and his teammates had left, Kylian Mbappe was in the same exit corridor, showing off, to reporters, his match ball, signed by all his Madrid colleagues.
It was his memento for having scored all three home goals in the night’s 3-1 second leg. Hat-tricks give strikers some of their most prized souvenirs, but the afterglow can be brief. Only five days earlier Marmoush was celebrating his own treble in City's thrashing of Newcastle.
After the high of his first Etihad goals, the low of his first ever start in the Champions League, another major milestone hurries on to the diary of Marmoush – Sunday’s first taste of what has become the summit collision of the modern English Premier League City versus Liverpool.
This time it’s an especially resonant fixture for millions of Marmoush’s compatriots: His City against Mohamed Salah’s Liverpool, the two Egyptian stars centre stage.
One is the most expensive purchase of this Premier League season; the other may come to be judged among the most transformational signings ever made in the Premier League era. Yet again, Salah is leading the division’s goalscorers – 24 from 26 games so far.
If the Premier League table casts this City-Liverpool clash as a step in the deposing of City as champions – they trail leaders Liverpool by 17 points – the all-Egyptian duel perhaps foreshadows another passing of the baton.
Salah, at 32, may show very few signs of losing his speed and rapier finishing, but at some point he will yield his status as his country’s finest active footballer and the region’s most feted sporting export.
And Marmoush, 26, is shaping up as the heir, suddenly touching the sorts of peaks – he had struck 20 goals for Eintracht Frankfurt before his €75 million January move to City – that are almost routine for Salah.
“A majority believe Salah's records and consistency will leave his legacy untouchable,” says Amr Nageeb Fahmy, author of the newly published The Pharaohs’ Hegemony, a brilliant, detailed account of the Egypt national team’s domination of African football in the period up to 2010.
“But there may be a flame passing from Salah to Marmoush – if this is the last season for Mo at Liverpool and if he might be on his way to playing in the Middle East after the summer.”
Salah’s Liverpool contract expires in June, with no extension yet agreed. He has eager suitors in Saudi Arabia’s Pro League.
Marmoush and Salah have never before played a competitive fixture on opposite sides, a sign of how the football landscape has altered in the last decade and a half.
In that time, aiming for success in Europe became a focus for an aspiring Egyptian professional, often to a greater degree than achieving status with one of Cairo’s superclubs, with Al Ahly or Zamalek.
Neither Salah nor Marmoush played for either, Salah moving from Al Mokawloon to Basel in Switzerland at 20, Marmoush leaving Wadi Degla for Germany’s Wolfsburg as an 18-year-old.
The circumstances were distinct. Salah, pushing himself from a young age through long daily journeys to practice, was breaking into the senior level of the game at a time of national crisis, when incidents of stadium violence led to the suspension of Egypt’s league.
He had no choice but to accelerate his career elsewhere. That he would do so, via the odd setback – an unfulfilling spell at Chelsea – with such brilliance, first in Italy and then as the spearhead of a Liverpool that conquered Europe and the Premier League set down an aspirational pathway for others.
“Mohamed Salah is a role model for all the players, not just Omar Marmoush,” Mohamed Ghoraba, the Pharaohs’ team manager during the period Salah and Marmoush have coincided with Egypt, tells The National. “In the eight years he’s been at Liverpool, everyone has looked up to Salah.
“But what they have both done is open doors, to show there is no such thing as ‘impossible’. In the past we have sometimes had difficulties trusting ourselves to realise our full potential.
“The way Salah exploded on to the top of the sport changed that. With Omar Marmoush we now extend that timeline.
“People used to say Salah was like a one-off, that Egypt would wait another 20 or 25 years for another player like him. But then they see Marmoush’s success.
“That has a big effect on young players, and on families who can more clearly see a great future in football for their children.”
Salah and Marmoush’s backgrounds are very distinct in several respects, but, as athletes, they share plenty.
There’s the eye-catching pace, the purposeful direct running, Salah mostly from the right on to his preferred left foot, Marmoush the mirror of that. “They have many things in common,” says Ghoraba. “The speed, of course, but also the mentality.
“They are both very driven and have been throughout their development, and in their ambition to reach the top. Salah had to fight for everything he achieved from day one, and those who have come up after him know that.”
If Salah, with more than 100 caps for his country and a stack of medals and records from his career in club football, is the pioneer, he is also the careful guide to those following him in the national set-up.
Ghoraba has observed “a very fruitful and positive” relationship grow between the Liverpool legend and the City star-in-the-making.
“They recognise one another as a top player and they link up well,” he said. “But they both have humility and they come to play for Egypt with a lot of love for the jersey and the desire to put their stamp on it.”
That desire becomes ever fiercer as Salah approaches his mid-30s. He has become his country’s most globally admired sportsman in the 21st century but his senior Egypt career has peaked only at two runners-up places at the four Africa Cup of Nations he has been to.
The comparison with the so-called ‘golden generation’, the heroes of the Pharaoh hegemony is sharp. By the time Mohamed Aboutrika, the Egyptian star Salah grew up regarding as an idol, had reached the age Marmoush is now Aboutrika had won his first Afcon. By the time Aboutrika was the age Salah now is, Egypt had won three Afcons on the trot.
Fitness permitting, Egypt will go to the next Africa Cup of Nations finals, in December, with a peak-form Salah attacking from one flank, and Marmoush, easing into the role of leading Manchester City’s renaissance, sprinting in from the other. It sounds irresistible. It swells expectations.
“That puts a lot of pressure on them,” acknowledges Ghoraba. “The level of anger and aggression Salah has had to deal with when Egypt haven’t gone all the way in tournaments is very, very high. Omar may soon have to face the same issues.
“But, trust me, he can deal with it. He’s still young but he has the ambition to be a future leader of the team – and he’s a good guy.”
