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Politics/headline news
Ahly surprises Real Madrid
by Tarek Atia
(cairolive.com, August 5, 2001)
Egyptian soccer team Ahly beat Europe's number one soccer club Real Madrid 1-0 in an exciting match that took place at Cairo Stadium on Saturday night. Some 80,000 fans packed the stadium to watch this "contest of the century", as it was dubbed, which pitted the number one clubs from both Africa and Europe.
The Spanish team received $1.5 million to play in the friendly match, and its players included some of the best in the world: Zeineddin Zeidane, Roberto Carlos, Luis Figo and Raul Gonzalez.
Ahly was hoping to more than recoup its expenditure. The TV rights to the match, which was broadcast exclusively on Egyptian tertiary and satellite channels, cost some LE1.2 million.
On top of that, every available space was rented out to sponsors and advertisers. The Ahly players' jerseys had the McDonald's logo emblazoned smack in the center. The pitch itself featured the Coca-Cola logo at center field, and the announcers were sitting at desks with KFC and Pepsi logos all around them.
At the stadium itself, much ado was being made of some of the salaries of Real Madrid's players. "Did you know that Zeineddin Zeidane makes $60,000 a week?" one person commented. And whenever an Ahly player took down a Real Madrid star, the crowd would yell out, "What are you doing, you're going to increase Egypt's foreign debt..." After all, some of these players' contracts were worth a whopping $65 million.
In essence, Ahly truly represented Egypt in this contest, and most of the people watching on TV or at the stadium cheered for the home team even if they normally favored Ahly's arch rival Zamalek.
The Ahly players themselves played as though they were in the finals of the World Cup, while Real Madrid's laid-back attitude was more fitting for the friendly match.
 The first half featured a mostly defensive scheme by Ahly, but in the second half, the Egyptian team turned on the juice and started attacking, and that's when the team's African star "Sunday" put in the game-winning goal. The rest of the second half featured several more Ahly attacks, three of which almost got the ball across the goal line.
The match was well-organized, commented one spectator, who especially enjoyed the plentiful fireworks that were set off at the stadium both before and after the game.
The last time Real Madrid played in Egypt was in 1961, against Zamalek. Let's hope it doesn't take another 40 years for Cairo to witness the kind of high-level soccer we got to see on Saturday night.
Did you like this article? Send your comments to comments@cairolive.com
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