كتب : عمرو حسن | الأربعاء، 27 مايو 2009 - 15:32

Are Egyptians sore losers?

Our Premier League is over and Ahli were crowned champions, but the bitterness has started, and it seems that the massive injustice felt by Ismaili fans will not go away anytime soon.

Everywhere in the civilised world, we hear the term sporting spirit. Unfortunately, this ideal term is not implemented as we would have hoped.

In big tournaments like the World Cup or the UEFA Champions League, many coaches and players blame out-of-hands circumstances for their losses.

Refereeing mistakes, pitch and weather conditions and luck are all sometimes cited as reasons behind defeats. But it all takes little time before a team, coach or a player fully understands that he fairly lost a game or a competition.

However, in Egypt this is not the case. In Egypt no one is wrong. No team underperforms. No team deservers to beat the other.

Now we take a look at Ismaili fans, players and chairman after losing the league to Ahli. We could see they all started complaining about the league decider before it even started.

After the game, chairman Nasr Aboul-Hassan said that the referee assigned for the clash wasn’t good enough. He's Spanish, and they don’t even know his name, but they still criticized the Egyptian FA for choosing him.

After the game, some of them started talking about the wrong calls the judge did, including two 'clear' penalties that were not awarded to Ismaili.

Dervishes' fans are all persuaded that they are living in the Arab Republic of Ahli, and that no matter what their club did, the Red Devils would have been made champions one way or another.

Ismaili fans are not the only ones. I still remember the days when Ahli won seven consecutive league titles in the nineties.

I recall when nearly every Zamalek fan wouldn’t acknowledge that his team were not good enough to beat their rivals for a title at the time.

According to some of them, referees favoured Ahli every year. For seven long years they strongly believed that whoever was in charge of Egyptian football just wanted Ahli to win the league.

No wonder Zamalek can't get out of their current miseries. You can never progress unless you admit your mistakes and give your opponent enough credit, but once again that never happens in Egypt.

Similarly, and when Ahli were struggling before winning this season's title, many club faithful were adamant that the media, the Egyptian FA and all other league clubs are plotting against them.

One Ahli fan went on to confirm to an Ahly TV show that the Egyptian FA simply want the club to lose the title, because they will benefit from that in their battle with the Cairo giant over the league's broadcasting rights.

It was a remark that made the show's host Sayed Abdul-Hafiz's eyes shine.

It's a horrible fact that we're not capable of congratulating each others. I'm afraid some of us hate each others so much that we are too weak to admit our opponents' superiority.

While we are fine when Egypt lose an international game, we would never take a local defeat lightly. We are very sore losers and we don’t even use logic to interpret why our clubs lose or win.

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