Thu, 28 Oct, 2021
Newcastle: The United Arab Emirates are “very close” to being consistently considered a top four side in Asia according to coach Mahdi Ali after claiming third place at the AFC Asian Cup Australia 2015 with a 3-2 win over Iraq on Friday at Newcastle Stadium.
Ali’s 2013 Gulf Cup champions were seen as one of the outside favourites ahead of the tournament, and two goals from captain Ahmed Khalil and a penalty from tournament leading scorer Ali Mabkhout secured the UAE’s best finish at the AFC Asian Cup since reaching the 1996 final on home soil.
The UAE will now turn their attentions to the start of the qualifiers for the 2018 FIFA World Cup and 2019 AFC Asian Cup, which begin in June.
Watch UAE's medals handover ceremony
Watch coach Mahdi Ali's post-match interview
“I think we always need to be optimistic and we always have to think about improving the team as we want to be one of the top four teams in Asia. We are very close to these teams and I think that when we played Iran, who are ranked first in Asia as per the FIFA rankings, we played a very good game and in the end it was only one chance for Iran and they won the game,” said Ali, who saw his side lose 1-0 to Team Melli at the end of the group stage.
“There is no big difference between us and the other teams and we are very close and we have to work harder to compete with them in other areas. We have learned many things in this competition and we have to work harder on these areas if we want to qualify for the World Cup in 2018.”
It has, though, not been confirmed if Ali, who has a long history working within the national team youth set-up, will remain with the UAE for the upcoming qualifiers.
“We did not discuss how to go further in the upcoming qualifiers as my contract will be finished in June, and as we are playing the qualifiers in June, we need to sit down and see how we can perform,” he added.
“We have only discussed, but we did not finalise it, officially it is not signed yet.”
The 49-year-old, however, showed his worth to the side after delivering a highly charged half-time team-talk as the UAE conceded twice towards the end of the first half after Khalil had opened the scoring on 16 minutes.
And the UAE responded as Khalil netted his fourth of the campaign seven minutes after the restart before Mabkhout’s penalty, his fifth of the tournament, three minutes before the hour mark sealed the win.
“I was very angry at half-time and it was a very hard talk at half-time. After we scored the first goal in the first 15 minutes we took it a bit easy and we lost a lot of balls and I was very angry during half-time and I told them you have to go and change the first 30 minutes after half-time,” said Ali.
“I told them that I had not seen them playing like this and I wanted to see my team in the second half.”
Photo: WSG