The heat is on for Metsu's men

Bahrain's Abdulla ismail, left, and RashidAbdulrahman of UAE, chase the ball during the friendly match at the Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium.

ABU DHABI // Until this weekend my experience of watching the United Arab Emirates play international football was confined to 90 thoroughly enjoyable minutes on on a balmy evening in Bologna 18 years ago. Travelling across Italy from Genoa offered a welcome diversion from the more pressing business of reporting on Scotland's brief but eventful Italia 90 campaign.

The European writers in our press corps labelled the UAE's opening Group D match against Colombia somewhat irreverently as the clash between the oil barons and the drug barons - a must-watch encounter. That was the first of only three matches the Emirates have played on the biggest football stage of all - the World Cup finals. It ended in a gallant 2-0 defeat, more respectable than what followed against the eventual champions West Germany (5-1) and Yugoslavia (4-1).

Hopes in the country are growing that the current crop of UAE international representatives under the guidance of their French coach Bruno Metsu can bridge an uncomfortably long gap between a third and fourth fixture at the finals by qualifying for one of the 32 places available in South Africa in 2010. Nobody will be seriously expecting Metsu to deliver the goods in an Asian group involving Iran, North Korea, South Korea and Saudi Arabia - the top two nations qualifying with the third placed team entering a series of play-offs.

At least that was the conclusion after Friday's night's friendly at the Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium where Metsu's men were outplayed by their seriously under-strength Bahrain visitors and in the end were fortunate to come out of it losing by the narrow margin of 3-2. Admittedly, friendlies are notorious for producing misleading form guides for the serious stuff that follows and Metsu was keen to make that point afterwards as he maintained that his players were "not yet fresh" after returning from a summer tour to Europe.

He promised they would be by the time the first double-header of fixtures comes along in the same stadium next Saturday when North Korea are the visitors, Iran following four days later. They had better be and against the lowest rated of their four opponents. By then the impressive venue, home of Al Jazira, should be a small step closer to the 40,000 capacity state it will surely be in by the time it welcomes whoever succeed Manchester United as winners of the European Champions League and the winners of South America's Copa Libertadores along with representatives from the other four footballing continents. Every seat will probably be required by the time that exciting Club World Cup tournament comes to the capital for the first of two years in December 2009.

Whether the rush to install enough extra places over the next few days to raise capacity to 15,000 for the World Cup fixtures is justified remains to be seen. It is hoped that Metsu and his players make more use of Al Jazira's excellent facilities than they did on Friday. Shortly after Bahrain, ranked 67 in the world compared to the UAE's 104, had completed their deserved victory, Khaled al Omari, the media officer at the ground, proudly opened the superb state-of-the-art interview room.

Briefly, I occupied one of the 64 seats facing the raised platform reserved for the major protagonists of that evening. Nobody else came. Instead there was a free-for-all in the dressing room area at which the Frenchman Metsu and his Czech counterpart Milan Macala, the Bahrain coach, attempted to dispense information in a dignified way. Macala, who has also managed the Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia national teams, would surely have liked a more formal situation to savour his triumphant return to a nation where he served as the coach of Al Ain, Al Ahli and Al Nasr.

Instead we had to make do with morsels about how the current UAE team will fare in the coming months - he was diplomatic but unadventurous in his responses - before he spoke with more enthusiasm about his own prospects of going to South Africa. "We have beaten Japan once already [in the previous qualifyingphase] so there is no reason why we can't do it again," he declared about his team's opening match in the other Asian group which also includes Australia, Qatar and Uzbekistan.