In the middle of last October, Omar Marmoush boarded a flight for Nouakchott, Mauritania, a man in the form of his life.
His season with Eintracht Frankfurt had started with eight goals and four assists from six Bundesliga matches. The grandest clubs in Europe were weighing up transfer bids for him.
On duty in Mauritania with the Egypt national team, he came back down to earth.
The match, an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier in which Marmoush’s Egypt needed a point to seal their place in the finals, struggled to find any flow.
Though Marmoush posed the sharpest goal threat, his sapping evening ended with him being given some rest in the 82nd minute, the score locked at 0-0.
Enter the substitute Ibrahim Adel, who, taking possession in his own half of the field, spotted Mauritania’s goalkeeper off his line and thought: ‘Why not?’.
He had only been on the field a couple of minutes. His speculative shot arced perfectly over a full 45 metres to drop over the keeper and deliver Egypt’s three points.
Sometimes, surprise is the best form of ambush, and in the kaleidoscope of experiences Marmoush has hurriedly compiled in this, his breakthrough year, he has been through several startling moments.
Take Leyton Orient on Saturday, where Marmoush led the line for his new club Manchester City, his taste of the FA Cup, perhaps the most romanticised competition in his sport, away at a club in English football’s third tier – 48 places beneath serial Premier League champions City.
Yet, for 40 minutes on Saturday, Orient led 1-0 from a moment of pure surprise, Jamie Donley venturing that a carefully lobbed shot from 40 metres might catch City goalkeeper Stefan Ortega unawares.
Like Adel’s mind-the-gap moment, he dared and won. Unlike Adel’s long-ranger, it would not be decisive, City recovering to win 2-1.
Marmoush, who moved to Manchester last month, has yet to open his City account, but he came close with a couple of well timed-volleys at Orient, evidence that he’s finding his groove, finessing his runs behind opposition defences.
He is not yet the impactful match-winner who scored 20 goals and directly set up another 14 in his last 26 matches for Eintracht, but underlying metrics from his three games so far for City are encouraging.
He’s making a similar rate of 'shot creating actions' at City than he was through the autumn and into the new year in Germany.
And he has come into an unsettled City, where an inconsistent 2024-25 means opponents no longer mind the gap in quality and achievement that the English champions have for so long represented to others.
Donley saw vulnerability on Saturday and felt emboldened. The previous weekend Arsenal inflicted on City the heaviest defeat in the long managerial career of manager Pep Guardiola, 5-1.
“Since I have been here this is maybe the most difficult season so far,” admitted Ruben Dias, whose four-and-half years at City have yielded a clean sweep of league titles and the 2023 European Cup. “But I am a firm believer that in the most difficult scenario you can still achieve something beautiful,”
On Tuesday, Dias confronts his seventh game against Real Madrid in less than three years.
It’s another frontier fixture for Marmoush, a debut in the Uefa Champions League, and a first taste of a rivalry that has come almost to guarantee sudden, left-field surprises.
City versus Madrid in a semi-final three years ago meant a 5-3 aggregate lead with 17 minutes left abruptly turning, for Guardiola’s team, into a 6-5 loss after extra time.
Last April, City-Madrid in the quarter-finals saw the lead switch back and forth four times in the course of a 4-4 draw over 210 minutes, the Spanish club triumphing on penalties.
The big surprise this time is that this heavyweight clash takes place in February.
City and Madrid, both enduring bumpy campaigns, failed to make the top eight of the competition’s new format, and so are obliged to take part in this play-off round. Their misfortune is to have ended up meeting one another.
Marmoush should be assigned a major role, either from kick-off or to provide impulse later on and would be entitled to feel that for all Madrid’s potency up front, this is not a bad time to meet them.
There are gaps to exploit in a side who so far this season have conceded nine goals over two games against Barcelona, and lost by two-goal margins in Europe to Liverpool and AC Milan.
And while Saturday’s 1-1 draw in the derby against Atletico Madrid maintained Real’s narrow lead at the top of la Liga, it came with yet another debilitating injury bulletin.
Madrid’s defence is most affected, and now Lucas Vazquez, the experienced winger who has been converted into a right-back because of a lack of cover there, has added his name to a long list of those unable to travel to Manchester due to injury.
Antonio Rudiger, whose man-marking of Erling Haaland has been a feature of recent City-Madrid clashes, went into treatment 10 days ago.
David Alaba’s gradual recovery from surgery more than a year ago was set back last week. Dani Carvajal, first-choice right-back and captain, has been out since the autumn. Eder Militao will be absent until at least April.
Carvajal, Vazquez, Alaba, Rudiger and Miltao have won 19 Champions League gold medals between them.
That’s a lot of missing expertise. Two of the defensive replacements, Jacobo Ramon and Lorenzo Aguado, in the squad for the first leg at City are youth-team players with a combined 12 minutes of European Cup playing time on their CVs.
Raul Asencio, 21 and called up from the junior ranks only in November, looks certain to start against City, partnered in the middle of the back four by Aurelien Tchouameni, normally a midfielder.
Manning the right back position, territory Marmoush likes to attack, will likely be another midfielder, Fede Valverde, forced in emergency into an unnatural role.
No better time then for City to recover some panache, and for the new man in attack to make a lasting first impression in Europe.
