CONFEDERATIONS CUP
Egypt
The Pharaos' position as the pre-eminent team in African football could be coming to an end as the ageing "golden generation" starts to find the competition at home becoming increasingly tougher.
Egypt have won back-to-back African Nations Cup tournaments - their success in Ghana last year was much more impressive and emphatic than their victory at home in 2006 - but, with key components of the team looking jaded and exhausted, the side is at a crossroads.
The game against Zambia in Cairo at the beginning of the final phase of the World Cup qualifiers proved as much and the 1-1 draw was a surprising setback for one of the favourites in the preliminary competition.
The situation was then exacerbated by a war of words between strikers Mido and Amr Zaki, who are team-mates at Wigan but evidently have little time for one another. Mido, who has always been a combustive entity, was thrown out of the national set-up in 2006 for arguing with the coach, Hassan Shehata, and Zaki - who is no angel himself, just ask Wigan manager Steve Bruce - accused him of another outburst against Shehata after he started the Zambia game on the bench.
Shehata made sure there will be no such trouble during the Confederations Cup by omitting Mido. "He was excluded due to a tactical point of view," he explained.
The rest of Shehata's squad draws heavily from Cairo giants Al Ahly.
The likes of Ahmed Hassan, Mohamed Aboutraika and Wael Gomaa are part of a club side that has dominated African football for the last five years, but that bubble may have burst - with Aboutraika in particular suffering a litany of niggling injuries after years of strenuous competition.
Meanwhile, Hassan has struggled on his return to Egypt from Anderlecht in Belgium and there is no obvious successor to keeper Essam Al Hadary, who has seen better days.
It could be argued there is no substitute for experience, but the Confederations Cup will go a long way towards determining whether Egypt's recent slump marks the end of an era. Despite a consistent level of success in continental competition, Egypt have not made it to the World Cup finals since 1990, when they acquitted themselves adequately in a group containing England, Republic of Ireland and Holland.
World Cup qualification remains something of a Holy Grail for the Pharaohs, who see the Confederations Cup as a chance for some quality warm-up games ahead of the final phase of the 2010 preliminaries.
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