'I feel so much for Palestine': Wessam Abou Ali desperate to help adopted national team

Shortly before midnight on Friday, messages will be exchanged across the length of the African continent and, if all goes according to form and reputation in the quarter-finals of the CAF Champions League, promises will be made for a reunion of two friends at next month’s final. Those in contact will be Wessam Abou Ali and Tashreeq Matthews, footballers whose lives have transformed in a few short weeks.

At the end of last year they were both starring in Sweden’s top division, partners in a strong end-of-season run by the middling club Sirius. Matthews, a South African, and Abou Ali, a Palestinian born and raised in Denmark, were both sold in January, in the Swedish close-season, with Sirius’s executives delighted that, even if the club were losing two talented individuals, their market value had risen substantially while there.

Matthews went back to his native South Africa, signed by serial champions and holders of the African League, Mamelodi Sundowns, who host Tanzania’s Young Africans in CAF’s more traditional super-elite competition.

Abou Ali, meanwhile, was offered the number nine jersey at the biggest club in Africa and the Middle East, Egypt’s Al Ahly, who on Friday take a 1-0 advantage into the second leg of their Champions League quarter-final against Tanzania’s Simba.

Although Abou Ali’s participation in Cairo may be restricted, the 25 year old having only just completed his recovery from a hamstring strain, he has already made an eye-catching start to his Al Ahly adventure. He scored within five minutes of his Egyptian league debut, the first of a brace in the 5-1 win over Baladiyat El Mahalla.

Frustratingly, the injury interrupted that momentum. It also postponed the beginning of his senior international