Even at the moment of his greatest triumph, Vladimir Ivic seemed only grudgingly to let a smile cross his face.
He would have been within his rights to have been dancing a jig all the way home from Sharjah to Al Ain, given what his side had just achieved.
The UAE Pro League title, wrapped up with two games in hand. And with a crushing 5-0 win that underlined Al Ain’s dominance of this campaign in permanent marker and with five exclamation marks.
Still, he would not allow himself to lose focus. “We are still in the game,” Ivic said with a wry grin.
By that he means the task of making himself invincible. Al Ain have their title homecoming against Al Dhafra at the Hazza Bin Zayed Stadium on Sunday night.
They then complete their league programme with a game against Dibba. If they avoid defeat in those two fixtures, they will finish the campaign unbeaten.
“Of course, our target is to do it, and we will give our maximum,” Ivic said. “The season is not finished for us.”
They also have a chance of completing the domestic double. Al Ain face Al Jazira in the President’s Cup final in Abu Dhabi on May 22.
Quirkily, if they do win that, it will be the third season in a row that the title winners have also won the double, after Al Wasl and the outgoing champions, Shabab Al Ahli.
Shabab Al Ahli fought a good fight in their title defence. Six points behind with two games to play, they could yet match Al Ain’s points total, but the title has already been decided.
Unlike the conventional tiebreaker of goal difference elsewhere, the UAE league uses head-to-head results to separate sides level on points. Al Ain beat Shabab Al Ahli home and away this season.
Quite how the champions have achieved such dominance over the competition is hard to fathom, considering where they were as a club last season.
They were champions of Asia in 2024, yet their star plummeted with alarming haste. Within a couple of games of the next season's start, Hernan Crespo – the coach who oversaw that AFC Champions League title win over Yokohama F Marinos – looked lost.
“What we achieved last season was a miracle,” Crespo said after a wild draw with Al Bataeh in Sharjah. Not long after, the Argentine was out the door.
Leonardo Jardim followed Crespo into the hot seat, but lasted a mere 87 days. Then Al Ain alighted on Ivic, whose stints managing in Russia, Israel, England and Greece did not exactly foretell success.
And yet, within the space of 456 days, he has overseen a transformation from no-hopers to potential 'Invincibles'.
Ushering in the title with the punctuation mark of that 5-0 win in Sharjah felt fitting. Less than a year ago, that had been the same margin by which Al Ain had been embarrassed by Juventus on the world stage.
At the Club World Cup in Washington, a Juventus side that had prepared for the game by visiting US President Donald Trump at the White House that same afternoon basically played unopposed.
The same was true for Manchester City the next time out. They put six past the UAE’s representatives at the new global competition.
It felt at that point that Al Ain were in an inescapable downward spiral, with an overinflated squad supplemented by some bizarre, ad hoc loanees. It felt soulless and hopeless.
But Ivic had a plan and a work ethic. Hard work should be the basic standard; the coach has had to work smart as well as work hard.
The biggest task was making sense of the hotchpotch of a squad he had, keeping in mind the opaque regulations of the UAE Pro League.
Article 8 of the competition governs player participation, and it is complicated. It references the fact that a side can have “a maximum of five foreign players regardless of their nationalities”.
It then says that the “number of foreign and UAE resident players fielded in the match shall not exceed seven”.
This means the players might need to make sure they have copies of their passports when Ivic plans to make a substitution.
“It was not easy to deal with these situations because the number of the domestic players was not good, not enough,” Ivic said.
“We need every time there is a change to think, who will be on the line-up, who will not be when we do substitution, and how we will do it.
“For the teams who become champions, these are the kind of problem that you need to deal with.”
Another rule is that the goalkeeper must be “an Emirati national, son of Emirati mother national, UAE passport holder or born in the UAE”.
Happily for Ivic, his keeper is a banker. Khalid Essa is the long-serving UAE captain and part of the fabric of Al Ain.
He is one of the jewels in the crown on which this success has been built, the others being the overseas forward Kodjo Laba – who has scored 22 goals during the league campaign – and Soufiane Rahimi.
Elsewhere, difficult decisions have had to be made. UAE internationals and club mainstays Khaled Hashemi and Yahia Nader have been moved out to Baniyas. Kouame Autonne, the UAE centre-back, has rarely been spotted.
And through all the complexities, Ivic has hit on a winning formula. “It's [been] too complicated,” he said.
“In the end, we achieved our goal. I hope that in the next three games, we will do in the same as we did [against Sharjah], and then go on vacation.”
