When Liverpool take on Real Madrid in the final of the Uefa Champions League in Kiev on May 26, the date will hold a special resonance with UAE football fans.
Forty years earlier Liverpool, fresh from retaining what was then known as the European Cup following victory over Club Brugge at Wembley, visited Dubai to play a friendly match against Al Nasr to inaugurate the UAE club's Al Maktoum Stadium.
While Mohamed Salah is the superstar name in today's Liverpool line up, the team Bob Paisley brought to the Emirates in 1978 contained some stellar names too.
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When 1978 European champions Liverpool visited a Dubai 'most people cannot imagine'
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A team packed with international caps and more medals than the skyscrapers that now dominate the Dubai skyline included Ray Clemence, Alan Hansen, Emlyn Hughes, Terry McDermott and Jimmy Case. They took on the unknowns of Nasr at the 12,000-capacity Al Maktoum Stadium when the landscape in Dubai was a very different place to the metropolis it is now.
In June 2015, as part of The National's summer of sport series, Gary Meenaghan talked to local journalists and former Nasr players about the day Hughes' all-conquering side came to town.
You can also read the profiles of the Liverpool players who took part in that match.
