ALEX McLEISH has left Zamalek after just 65 days and became the FIFTH victim of the Egyptian club's eccentric president this season.
The former Rangers and Scotland boss had guided the Cairo club to the African Champions League quarter-finals and had a 60 per cent win rate.
But the ex-Aston Villa manager found his position untenable after a series of bizarre decisions by club president Mortada Mansour.
Mansour sacked McLeish's Scottish No.2 Frank Nuttall at the weekend after just a few weeks at the club, despite poaching him from Kenyan champions Gor Mahia.
He also binned another of McLeish's coaching staff and replaced them with Egyptians Gamal Abdel-Hameed and Mohamed Helmy.
Finally, McLeish's personal translator was shown the door...just one day after Mansour claimed he had full confidence in the ex-Hibs and Motherwell boss.
McLeish took charge of Zamalek on February 28 and won all his African Champions League games, although his club fell behind rivals Al-Ahly - managed by former Spurs boss Martin Jol - in the Egyptian League.
In the week after he took charge, McLeish acknowledged he didn't expect it to be easy in Egypt, where the fans are still banned from all matches.
He explained: "I'm fully aware of the job situation here. That's part of the challenge and part of the opportunity. I have to make sure that I'm doing a good enough job. I'll definitely improve the players through my football knowledge and my coaching, no doubt about that.
"It would have been easier not to take this job. But Zamalek are one of the biggest teams in Africa and the Middle East, which is quite some accolade for the club. It's something that is going to be a good challenge for me. It's a great challenge to try and win a title because in England, I've been fire-fighting for a long time.
"I was thinking to myself, do I wait for a job in England and I thought, 'nah. I'm not sitting on my a**e any longer.' I need to get out. I've done Scotland, I've managed Rangers which was a delight and I didn't want to go back. I wanted to try something different, so here I am."
Zamalek have already sacked former Spurs star Mido twice as manager this season as well as two other unfortunate local coaches.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel