Legendary striker will renew his acquaintance with Scottish football when Trabzonspor take on Hearts
Mo Salah will renew his acquaintance with Scottish football on Thursday when Trabzonspor host Hearts in the Uefa Conference League.
The striker joined the Turkish club in the summer after nine seasons and 257 goals for Liverpool. Three of those strikes were especially noteworthy from a Scottish perspective because they were scored at Ibrox and still constitute a record.
On October 12, 2022 Salah came off the bench in a Champions League match against Rangers and netted three times in six minutes and 12 seconds. It remains the fastest Champions League hat-trick of all time. Liverpool won 7-1, a scoreline that Hearts fans will note with a shiver given the events of last weekend.
But Salah’s quickfire treble in Govan was not his only sojourn to Glasgow. His first, 10 years previously, went under the radar. On a none-too-sunny midweek afternoon in August, Salah was playing for Egypt against Belarus at Hampden Park in the men's football tournament at the Summer Olympics.
Just a name on the Egypt team sheet
London 2012 may have been huge but Scotland’s role was minimal. We had received an invitation to the party but it was hardly access all areas. Hampden was to host eight matches, three in the men’s competition and five in the women’s, one of six venues used for Olympic football in 2012.
Salah had recently left Al Mokawloon in his native Egypt to move to Europe for the first time, joining Basel. He had just turned 21.
“He was just a name on the Egypt team, as far as I was concerned,” said Andy Mitchell, who was employed as the media operations manager for Hampden during the Games. “I think he was playing in Switzerland at the time, he would have been about 20, 21. So yeah, an unknown player, but I think everybody on the pitch was pretty much an unknown player.
“Funnily enough, I took a few photos when I was working, and I've got pics of the teams coming out and lining up the anthems, and there's Mo Salah quite clearly in the line-up. So it's nice to have those images.”
Only 8,732 turned up at Hampden to see the man who would later assume the mantle ‘The Egyptian King’ net his first goal on Scottish soil. Salah opened the scoring as Belarus were defeated 3-1, his third strike in three games in Group C and an important one as the win secured Egypt’s place in the Olympic quarter-finals.
Scottish football’s thorny relationship with the Olympics
Football has always had a fairly difficult relationship with the Olympics. Squads for the men's tournament are made up of under-23 players, with three overage players permitted. The 2012 competition was further muddied by the row around Britain entering a team. The Scottish FA had always kept its distance, fearing that agreeing to join a combined GB team might give Fifa ideas further down the line. As the host nation, the pressure was on Britain to compete and two teams were duly entered but without any Scottish involvement in the men’s side. Kim Little and Ifeoma Dieke, both Scotland internationals, were part of the women’s squad.
The SFA’s concerns did not prevent Hampden joining Old Trafford, St James’ Park, the Millennium Stadium, the Coventry City Stadium and Wembley as host venues.
“The football was kind of out on a limb in some respects, so it was great to have it come to Scotland and play the games at Hampden, but at the end of the day, you were expecting people to turn up and pay quite hefty admission charges simply on the basis that it was the Olympics,” said Mitchell.
“And this particular game, it was a Wednesday afternoon, I think it was about £25, £30 a ticket to basically see Egypt and Belarus under-23s playing a match. And that's why I suppose it was fairly low-key, I think about 8,000 turned up and saw the game. It all went off very well, but in terms of capturing the public imagination, it wasn't the greatest.”
A trawl through the newspapers of the day provides little to disprove Mitchell’s claim. The game might as well not have taken place for all the coverage it received. London 2012 was dominating front and back pages and it was Salah’s misfortune that his Hampden goal came on the same day Britain won its first gold medals of the Games.
Salah usurped by Wiggo
Rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning led the way with their success in the women's coxless pairs and they were closely followed by Bradley Wiggins who triumphed in the men’s individual time trial. The cyclist was famously photographed on a throne at Hampton Court Palace, medal dangling from his neck. The Egyptian King had certainly been usurped that day and the media had eyes only for the main events.
“They're going to be focussing on the events down in London, the athletics, the big-money sports, and you're hardly going to waste too much resources sending someone to Hampden for a small fry under-23 game,” said Mitchell.
Salah would go on to be one of the most feted players in the modern game, with spells at Chelsea, Fiorentina and Roma before he found his true home at Anfield during a trophy-laden nine years. But there would be no Olympic medal. Egypt lost 3-0 to Japan in the quarter-finals at Old Trafford and over 70,000 turned up for that one, suggesting the fervour around London 2012 was more obvious south of the border than it was in Scotland.
Hampden did have its moments, though. A Spain side featuring Juan Mata, David de Gea, Jordi Alba, Koke and Isco attracted a 37,726 crowd for their group match with Japan. And more than 18,000 were there to see the USA beat France 4-2 in the women’s competition.
Korean incident
The latter game was part of a Hampden double-header, the second installment of which caused a diplomatic incident. Colombia took on North Korea after the US-France game and the London 2012 organisers risked incurring the wrath of Kim Jong Un.
“They put the teams up on the giant scoreboard, and next to the North Korean player photos, they put the South Korean flag,” explained Mitchell.
“So the Koreans pointed at this and said, ‘we're not playing until you correct the flag’. Now, normally, that could be done in two minutes at Hampden. But all the scoreboard material was done centrally by the Olympics at some data centre in Slough. It was sent as a sealed package and it couldn't be edited.
“So the message had to go down the line saying, ‘can you redo it, please? Because they're not going to play until it's corrected’.
“Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose. It was also the night of the main dress rehearsal at Olympic Park. So all the bigwigs of the Olympic movement were involved with that.
“So the Koreans refused to play. It took about an hour to get everything sorted out and they wanted a full apology.
“So I managed to get a statement from the main press office, because I wasn't allowed to do statements off my own bat. And they said, ‘we apologise to the North Koreans for putting on the South Korean flag’, to which they said, ‘we are not North Korea. We are the People's Republic of Korea. You need to rewrite the statement’.
“So it was just getting a bit crazy by that time. But that got a lot of attention, as you can imagine. An Olympic scandal!”
At least it put Olympic football at Hampden in the news, which was more than Salah managed, despite his best efforts.