It all started so spectacularly for him last season; eight goals in his first ten Premiership games and Amr Zaki was flying. The man known as “The Bulldozer” to fans back in his native Egypt was swashbuckling his way through England’s top league with a series of outstanding performances up front for Wigan Athletic, and the plaudits were coming thick and fast.
Wigan chairman Dave Whelan was so gushing in his praise, he likened their on-loan centre forward to Alan Shearer:
He has the same confidence when he gets the ball, he knows where the goal is, he doesn’t need to look up, he has this instinct.
Steve Bruce, at the time Wigan manager:
He is going to have a real future in the Premier League. His physique is great, he has awesome power and pace and of course he wants to score goals.
Then it all went wrong. Zaki’s trips to play internationals for Egypt saw him continually arrive back in England later than anticipated, and despite being fined on several occasions, his behaviour never altered.
Bruce, admitting the fines were “considerably more than the average person in Britain earns in a year”, sent a letter to Zaki’s parent club, Al Zamalek, refusing to take up the option to sign him. At that point, you’d have thought we’d seen the last of him over here. But not so.
In a move that has taken the Premiership by surprise, Hull have agreed to loan Amr Zaki till the end of the season, for a fee thought to be around £600,000. Phil Brown, perhaps remembering how the Egyptian scored twice against his club and tore them apart in a 5-0 Wigan win, reckons the forward “is looking to prove a point”
Allegedly rejecting an offer from Stoke City, Zaki, now sufficiently recovered from the injury that forced him to miss the current African Cup of Nations, is expected to make his debut for the Tigers tomorrow at home to fellow strugglers Wolves. His new boss Brown has struggled to get any sort of consistency from a multitude of strikers this season, and will be hoping the new man can make the same sort of immediate impact as he did at Wigan.
Zaki’s first five scheduled fixtures are (WOLVES & CHELSEA, MAN CITY, blackburn, west ham), with the first two being part of this week’s Double Gameweek 24. Coming in at just £5.0 in FPL, and considering his proven on-field pedigree, the big centre forward could prove to be a fantastic budget striker in the second half of the season, as he looks to fire his new club to Premiership safety.