Veterans Safwat and Maamoun aim to inspire golden tennis future for Egypt

Five days after he helped guide Egypt to qualification to the Davis Cup World Group I for the first time, playing captain Mohamed Safwat was still recovering his voice.

“I lost it during the weekend. Between playing and cheering on my teammates during their matches, I didn’t stop talking the whole two days,” Safwat says with a laugh.

Egypt defeated Ecuador 3-1 in a World Group I play-off tie in Cairo this month, securing a place among the best tennis nations on the planet for the first time.

Safwat, who has been Egypt’s top player for nearly 15 years, took over the team’s captaincy mid-2023 and has since helped his side claim two crucial tie victories, over Uruguay in Montevideo last September, and now against Ecuador at Cairo’s Gezira Club.

The Mansoura native gave Egypt a 1-0 lead after surviving a titanic three-and-a-half-hour battle against Ecuador’s Alvaro Guillen Meza. Safwat squandered a 3-0 lead in the opening set, and a 5-0 lead in the second, and had to save two match points before completing a 4-6, 7-6, 7-6 victory.

“This was the strangest match I ever witnessed in my entire career,” Safwat told The National.

In the second singles match of the tie, 24-year-old Alexandrian Amr Elasrawy posted a big upset over former top-100 player Emilio Gomez before Safwat and Karim Mohamed Maamoun sealed the deal for the hosts by winning the doubles.

Safwat, 33, and Maamoun, 32, are the team's veterans and have been Egypt’s trusted duo for over a decade. But they’re both in the twilight of their careers and want to give back to the sport that has given them so much.

At the start of last year, they sat down with the president of the Egyptian Tennis Federation, former top-40 player Ismail El Shafei, to figure out a plan for the