FA Cup final: Omar Marmoush aims to complete magical season by helping Man City beat Crystal Palace

The National

15-05-2025

For the 17-year-old kid, wiry and fresh-faced, it was a breakthrough moment. Omar Marmoush had already been talked up locally as a star of the future. He had convinced his parents, initially sceptical, that football could offer a real future for their bright, determined son. Now he had some numbers to show for his belief in himself: A first senior start as a professional, and a first goal in the grown-up ranks. It was the tail end of 2016, and, in a first round Egyptian Cup tie played to a scant audience – crowd restrictions were in place across Egypt's club football – the meeting of Wadi Degla and Pharco was the opportunity for Mido, the Wadi Degla manager and himself a prodigy as a player, to grant Marmoush his springboard. After a smattering of substitute appearances in the league, Mido had told Marmoush to show what he could do with substantial minutes on the clock. He picked him in the starting XI for the first time and, shortly after half time, the tyro scored his team's first goal of a 3-0 win. It was a threshold moment in the striker's phenomenal rise. There have been 73 senior club goals since, spread across Egyptian, German and English football that, on Saturday, might deliver the first senior trophy of Marmoush's career. The kid who made his first tentative steps as a first-teamer in the Egyptian Cup eight-and-a-half years ago will be at London's Wembley Stadium on Saturday targeting the most famous domestic trophy in football – the FA Cup. It is a measure of Marmoush's impact since joining Manchester City in January, from Eintracht Frankfurt, that his case for starting in the final against Crystal Palace is perhaps the most pressing of the questions facing City manager Pep Guardiola – even with top scorer Erling Haaland back from injury. Guardiola rested Marmoush for most of last weekend's goalless draw against bottom club Southampton in the Premier League. It was a deflating scoreline against a team long relegated, with the Egyptian Marmoush, brought on with only six minutes remaining, coming closest to changing the outcome, thumping a shot against the crossbar. 'Maybe he should have played more minutes,' admitted Guardiola, 'because his creativity was really important.' There was a strong hint, too, that Marmoush will be given preferential consideration as attacking partner to Haaland from kick-off at Wembley. 'They can play together, as they played earlier this season before the injury from Erling. Omar is a player who has to move close to the box, the impact has been really good since he arrived,' said the City coach. That impact can be gauged in several ways. The City who made their worst start, in terms of attacking potency, to a Premier League season in 18 years have upped a gear in the period since Marmoush arrived. They have been less beatable, for one thing: 10 defeats across competitions up until the first week of January compared with five, including in both legs of the Uefa Champions League play-off against Real Madrid, in the period that Marmoush has been animating the centre-forward or wide left positions. City have become more resilient, too. Marmoush's stamp on that characteristic is clear. A low point of a markedly substandard campaign for a team who had won six of the seven previous Premier League titles would be the 5-1 loss to Arsenal in early February. Marmoush promptly scored a hat-trick in the next fixture, a 4-0 thrashing of Newcastle United, and although the Egyptian would be on the losing side against his compatriot Mohamed Salah's dominant new champions Liverpool, he again ensured that loss would not be followed by another, scoring and assisting in the subsequent 2-2 draw with Brighton. He led the comeback against Palace in the league, too, a fixture from barely a month ago that City have been studying closely ahead of Saturday's confrontation. Guardiola's men were stung by two early Palace goals, irritated at a penalty shout against Marmoush that had been turned down at 1-0, and revived once the Egyptian had levelled the scores at 2-2. City went on to add three more unanswered goals. If that's an encouraging precedent, so is the fact that City have not lost a domestic fixture in which Marmoush has started in the past three months, edging themselves into the top four of the table and putting themselves on course to qualify for next season's Uefa Champions League. That has usually been a given during the eight-year reign of Guardiola as manager and if there is no disguising the disappointments of 2024/25, the FA Cup run offers the hope of a trophy, at least. Here, too, Marmoush has played a vital role, match-winner in the 2-1 quarter-final win over Bournemouth, provider of City's second goal in the 2-0 semi-final victory over Nottingham Forest. He is entitled to feel he has done enough to be offered a major role in the last step of the journey. And indeed to merit that first senior silverware of a career now fully blossoming, Marmoush can look back over a memorable nine months. As the Bundesliga reaches its conclusion, he remains, despite having appeared in only the first half of Eintracht Frankfurt's campaign, within the top six of the German top-flight's top marksman for 2024/25. His 15 goals in 17 matches before moving to Manchester were scored at a per-minute rate very close to that of Bayern Munich's Harry Kane, who will almost certainly pick up the award for Bundesliga's leading scorer to go with the career-first league title he secured with the Bavarians. As for the illustrious list of players with the best 2024/25 goal contribution statistics – goals plus direct assists – in Europe's top five leagues, Marmoush's Bundesliga and Premier League tally for the season (21 goals and 12 assists) is behind only to Kane's 25 plus nine in Germany and Salah's 28 plus 18 in England. There are no official prizes for that achievement, but there are for winning an FA Cup – a medal Marmoush would cherish as a lasting endorsement of a magical season.