Sunderland had a Championship campaign full of goalkeeping errors last season, and the club will be hoping to sign a goalkeeper who can save them games in League One.
Sunderland’s 2017/18 Championship campaign was full of goalkeeping blunders, with the Wearsider’s testing three different players between the sticks.
Jason Steele and Robbin Ruiter rotated playing in goal in the run up to Christmas, with neither making a good impression on the Sunderland faithful. January then saw 33-year-old Lee Camp join the Black Cats, with the former Cardiff stopper failing to keep a clean sheet in his 12 appearances, conceding 22 goals.
Sunderland’s new manager Jack Ross, therefore, will likely be looking for a new goalkeeper as one of his transfer priorities – and 27-year-old Egyptian Ahmed El-Shenawy should be the man on 42-year-old Ross’s radar.
El-Shenawy currently plies his trade in Egypt with Giza based club Zamalek SC, where he has made 164 appearances in two spells at the club.
But the stopper caught the eye of football fans around the world only recently, when his nation faced off in their first World Cup game against Uruguay.
El-Shenawy’s side were beaten narrowly by Uruguay who sit 14th in the world rankings, 31 positions above 45th ranked Egypt. Despite losing 1-0 to a Jose Giminez header in the 90th minute, however, the Egyptian stopper still managed to secure a man of the match performance over the 90 minutes.
El Shanawy made a number of outstanding saves, including an athletic stop from an Edinson Cavani shot and a low-down block against one of the world’s best strikers in Luis Suarez.
The display from the former Al-Masry man on one of the biggest footballing stages, accompanied with El-Shenawy’s likely price-tag, makes the goalkeeper an interesting target for Sunderland’s League One campaign next term.
Not only is the 27-year-old an excellent stopper, but his age alongside his inexperience of English football will likely deter many of the top Premier League club’s from signing the Egyptian.
Ross’s small transfer budget as well as the level of football Sunderland now find themselves playing means El-Shenawy would be an excellent acquisition to help Sunderland bounce back to the Championship at the first attempt..
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