UAE national team are on the cusp of a golden era

Not since the UAE reached the Asian Cup final in Abu Dhabi 18 years ago have hopes of success been so high for the national team, writes Ali Khaled.

UAE's Omar Abdulrahman, left, is challenged by a Malaysian player in the friendly which the UAE won 3-1 at Shenzhen City in China on Wednesday, October 9, 2013. Courtesy UAE FA

As people across the Emirates celebrate Eid Al Fitr with families and friends, you would forgive a certain group of men who are itching to get back to work.

The end of a long, scorching summer may still be a while away, but the 2014/15 domestic football season is set to be a defining one for UAE football, and in particular for Emirati footballers.

Rarely in recent years has a new season been approached with so much anticipation.

New signings and returning stars look set to ignite the Arabian Gulf League campaign, with recent champions Al Ain and Al Ahli renewing an increasingly tense rivalry. For the first time in a long time, too, an Emirati club, Al Ain, are in the Asian Champions League quarter-finals.

It is on the international front, however, that next season could turn out to be a defining one for the UAE, with two major tournaments on either side of the New Year.

November sees the start of the 2014 Gulf Cup in Saudi Arabia, where the UAE will attempt to retain the title won so impressively in Bahrain last year.

A bigger competition follows six weeks later: the 2015 Asian Cup, the continent’s most important international competition, where UAE coach Mahdi Ali has identified the semi-finals as the senior side’s goal.

Not since the UAE reached the competition’s final in Abu Dhabi 18 years ago have hopes of success been so high.

The team’s improvement over the past two years has been so dramatic that players have been assigned the tag of the nation’s new “golden generation”.

“Sayf zou hadayn,” the old Arabic saying goes. Literally, it’s a double-edged sword.

Omar Abdulrahman, Amer Abdulrahman, Ali Mabkhout, Ahmed Khalil, Ali Kasheif and Habib Al Fardan have revived interest in the national time to levels not seen since the UAE’s original, beloved golden generation of Adnan Al Talyani, Muhsin Musabah and Fahad Khamis reached the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

But having a golden generation is one thing, a golden era quite another.

After the encouraging performances at the London Olympics, the Gulf Cup triumph, and a record-breaking, unbeaten 2013, some might argue that potential already has translated into results.

Certainly, success in Australia – now defined as the final four – will reinforce the notion that the UAE have found a team worthy of a label that can be a curse as much as a blessing. Just ask England and Portugal how their golden generations fared over the past two decades.

A return to the World Cup remains the ultimate dream for the UAE.

While the team is one to be proud of, and home attendances since the Gulf Cup have significantly improved, there are reasons why the acclaim might be premature.

For one thing, there is a fear that this group’s best performances will end up falling between the disastrous qualifying campaigns for Brazil 2014 and Russia 2018. Football history is littered with teams perceived to have peaked too early.

Mahdi Ali, ever the pragmatist, will have little time for such conjecture. He probably will care even less for the labels.

Having worked with so many players from the current squad as they progressed through age-group competition, he already will have his eyes on the next generation.

Following London 2012, where Mahdi Ali coached the under-23 team, a significant number of players were fast-tracked from the Olympic team to the senior side.

He now hopes that the current Olympic squad will, in the next two years, and beyond Rio 2016, produce talent to bolster the UAE’s bid to reach Russia.

He will not have long to wait to gauge how far the next group have progressed. The UAE Olympic team will take part in the 2014 U23 Gulf Cup in Qatar between August 30 and September 9. However, it is the AFC U22 Championship in January 2016, with the same group of players, that will decide which three teams go to Rio.

By then, we will have a clearer idea whether 2013/14 proved to be the peak for the UAE golden generation or a launching pad for an even bigger period of success.

Mahdi Ali will hardly be looking beyond what the coming season has in store. Who knows, by next Ramadan, he might be coaching one of the best teams in Asia.

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