Hossam 'Ghastly' Behaviour

Ghaly attended training with his new teammates on yesterday morning. The Egyptian was involved in some harsh tackling which triggered a fight between him and other players. Amongst these players were Tunisians Nafti and Jaidi.

Coach Steve Bruce spoke with Ghaly about the training ground incident and the Egyptian was clearly unimpressed by his new teammates behavior against him.

According to Bruce, the player's agent sent a voice mail message to the Blues coach to express Ghaly's anger:

"His agent left a message and said that he [Ghaly] wasn't happy with the standard of players here," revealed Bruce to the Birmingham Mail. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing - and I've kept the message on my voicemail.

Following the training, Ghaly was supposed to join his teammates for lunch and then continue the 2nd part of training but the Egyptian headed directly to the dressing room.

When told that he should have lunch and asked to do extra running and a one-on-one session with fitness coach Dan Harris, the Egyptian expressed his dismay from the intensity of training:

"When he had his one-to-one session with Dan, he was moaning we 'don't do this, don't do that' at Tottenham.

Bruce then replied in harsh words to Ghaly and asked if he meant Spurs' reserves? The Egyptian continued to show dissatisfaction and did little work during training.

Bruce then asked the Egyptian if he wants to stop training and Hossam said "Yes" and this was the last straw.

Bruce had some comments today on the situation as he spoke to Birmingham mail:

"There's no way I'm going to have someone criticising the squad, especially when they are supposed to be their new team-mates. And I'm not having anyone upsetting the togetherness and spirit we have worked so hard to build up here.

"I've had this before with a former captain [Kenny Cunningham] complaining about all sorts and I'm not going to keep fighting things like that. Yes, we train our players hard and we expect them to put the work in.

"What we do here was good enough for a World Cup winner [Christophe Dugarry] and so was our club and players. Hossam Ghaly came from Tottenham's reserves and we were quite prepared to give him an opportunity to play regularly and establish himself.

"He had had the summer off and after reporting back hadn't trained properly for a couple of weeks or so as the transfer negotiations got going. For the previous four or five days he'd done nothing. He was way, way behind in his fitness."