The passing of another football season always brings with it a certain finality, but when it comes to the 2023/24 Adnoc Pro League, it feels doubly definitive.
On Sunday, Ismail Matar was there for his final match for Al Wahda, the club he has – rather incredibly – represented for a quarter of a century. At 41, one of the finest footballers the UAE has produced consigned his playing career to the past.
Matar’s retirement prompted a flood of homages from Wahda – his boyhood club – Sunday’s rivals Sharjah, and on social media. As well it should.
Matar is a three-time UAE league champion and has captured every other domestic trophy as well, some more than once. For the national team, he first rose to prominence as player of the tournament at the 2003 Fifa World Youth Championship (more recently known as the Fifa U20 World Cup), on home soil.
Having scored a last-minute winner in the last 16 against Australia, Matar was selected for the award ahead of the likes of Andres Iniesta and Javier Mascherano. It marked a huge moment not only for the player, but the country.
His penchant to play protagonist continued through to the 2007 Arabian Gulf Cup; Matar scored the decisive goal in the final, the UAE becoming regional champions for the first time. Six years later, albeit in a relatively reduced role, he was part of the team who again sealed the trophy.
In between, Matar led the UAE’s bright band of tyros at the country’s memorable inaugural appearance at an Olympics, notching first in their opening match at the 2012 Games against Uruguay at Old Trafford. He would do the same in the last of their three games, against Senegal in Coventry.
Perhaps even Matar would not have envisioned he'd be concluding his career some 12 years later, last month’s League Cup success in hand, the outpouring of tributes and tears quickly following. For sure, his was a football life lived well.
If Matar has been long viewed the doyen of this specific era of UAE football, the generation that he bridged included a trio of players developed to take the national team further.
For a time from the middle of the last decade, Omar Abdulrahman, Ali Mabkhout and Ahmed Khalil were considered the UAE’s three leading lights, the headline acts in a team that was fast going places.
There was the Gulf Cup triumph in 2013, where Abdulrahman, then only 21, suggested emphatically that a prosperous career lay ahead. His opening goal in the final against Iraq, a mazy dribble and finish, simply reinforced that.
Of the UAE’s 10 goals in the Bahrain tournament, Abdulrahman, Mabkhout and Khalil chipped in with seven. The team’s future seemed set.
Again, at the 2015 Asian Cup, the attacking triumvirate were integral to the UAE’s historic run to bronze. Staged in Australia, it constituted their best result on foreign soil in the continent’s principal event.
They even defeated record-winners Japan in the quarter-finals; in the shoot-out in Sydney, Abdulrahman did the Panenka. With five goals in all, Mabkhout took the tournament's Golden Boot.
Khalil would that year enter the record books as the first Emirati to be named Asian Player of the Year. Twelve months later, Abdulrahman followed suit.
From there, though, the promise never felt fulfilled. Yes, Mabkhout went on to become the UAE’s all-time record goalscorer, later matching the feat in the domestic top flight.
Representing Al Jazira as boy and man, now 33, it was anticipated his playing days would come to a close at the Abu Dhabi side. But, on Saturday and much to everyone’s surprise, Jazira announced in a statement on social media that the 2023/24 finale against Al Ain would represent Mabkhout’s last match for the club.
He departs having scored 218 goals in 298 league appearances, with a collection of trophies in the bag.
So, remarkably, Mabkhout, Abdulrahman and Khalil are now without a club. Abdulrahman was released in February by Al Wasl; last week, Al Bataeh dismissed reports they had agreed to keep Khalil beyond the season’s final match.
Abdulrahman is 33, Khalil one year younger. Both ravaged by injury and fitness issues, the former made only 19 league appearances since 2020, the latter 28.
Thus, as the UAE get set in the next week to sign off on a successful second round of qualification for the 2026 World Cup – they face Nepal away on Thursday and Bahrain at home on June 11 – they look now to a fresh group to deliver what Matar, Mabkhout, Abdulrahman and Khalil could not: the country’s second participation at a global finals.
Undoubtedly, Matar will never be forgotten. Quite conceivably, the other three will find new employers. But the sense is that a chapter, that promised so much and delivered some way and more too, has closed.
Wonka
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THURSDAY'S ORDER OF PLAY
Centre Court
Starting at 10am:
Lucrezia Stefanini v Elena Rybakina (6)
Aryna Sabalenka (4) v Polona Hercog
Sofia Kenin (1) v Zhaoxuan Yan
Kristina Mladenovic v Garbine Muguruza (5)
Sorana Cirstea v Karolina Pliskova (3)
Jessica Pegula v Elina Svitolina (2)
Court 1
Starting at 10am:
Sara Sorribes Tormo v Nadia Podoroska
Marketa Vondrousova v Su-Wei Hsieh
Elise Mertens (7) v Alize Cornet
Tamara Zidansek v Jennifer Brady (11)
Heather Watson v Jodie Burrage
Vera Zvonareva v Amandine Hesse
Court 2
Starting at 10am:
Arantxa Rus v Xiyu Wang
Maria Kostyuk v Lucie Hradecka
Karolina Muchova v Danka Kovinic
Cori Gauff v Ulrikke Eikeri
Mona Barthel v Anastasia Gasanova
Court 3
Starting at 10am:
Kateryna Bondarenko v Yafan Wang
Aliaksandra Sasnovich v Anna Bondar
Bianca Turati v Yaroslava Shvedova
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Sheikh Zayed's poem
When it is unveiled at Abu Dhabi Art, the Standing Tall exhibition will appear as an interplay of poetry and art. The 100 scarves are 100 fragments surrounding five, figurative, female sculptures, and both sculptures and scarves are hand-embroidered by a group of refugee women artisans, who used the Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery art of tatreez. Fragments of Sheikh Zayed’s poem Your Love is Ruling My Heart, written in Arabic as a love poem to his nation, are embroidered onto both the sculptures and the scarves. Here is the English translation.
Your love is ruling over my heart
Your love is ruling over my heart, even a mountain can’t bear all of it
Woe for my heart of such a love, if it befell it and made it its home
You came on me like a gleaming sun, you are the cure for my soul of its sickness
Be lenient on me, oh tender one, and have mercy on who because of you is in ruins
You are like the Ajeed Al-reem [leader of the gazelle herd] for my country, the source of all of its knowledge
You waddle even when you stand still, with feet white like the blooming of the dates of the palm
Oh, who wishes to deprive me of sleep, the night has ended and I still have not seen you
You are the cure for my sickness and my support, you dried my throat up let me go and damp it
Help me, oh children of mine, for in his love my life will pass me by.
Specs
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Power: 905hp
Torque: 985Nm
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Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
More from Rashmee Roshan Lall
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Water waste
In the UAE’s arid climate, small shrubs, bushes and flower beds usually require about six litres of water per square metre, daily. That increases to 12 litres per square metre a day for small trees, and 300 litres for palm trees.
Horticulturists suggest the best time for watering is before 8am or after 6pm, when water won't be dried up by the sun.
A global report published by the Water Resources Institute in August, ranked the UAE 10th out of 164 nations where water supplies are most stretched.
The Emirates is the world’s third largest per capita water consumer after the US and Canada.
Bharat
Director: Ali Abbas Zafar
Starring: Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, Sunil Grover
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Dubai works towards better air quality by 2021
Dubai is on a mission to record good air quality for 90 per cent of the year – up from 86 per cent annually today – by 2021.
The municipality plans to have seven mobile air-monitoring stations by 2020 to capture more accurate data in hourly and daily trends of pollution.
These will be on the Palm Jumeirah, Al Qusais, Muhaisnah, Rashidiyah, Al Wasl, Al Quoz and Dubai Investment Park.
“It will allow real-time responding for emergency cases,” said Khaldoon Al Daraji, first environment safety officer at the municipality.
“We’re in a good position except for the cases that are out of our hands, such as sandstorms.
“Sandstorms are our main concern because the UAE is just a receiver.
“The hotspots are Iran, Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, but we’re working hard with the region to reduce the cycle of sandstorm generation.”
Mr Al Daraji said monitoring as it stood covered 47 per cent of Dubai.
There are 12 fixed stations in the emirate, but Dubai also receives information from monitors belonging to other entities.
“There are 25 stations in total,” Mr Al Daraji said.
“We added new technology and equipment used for the first time for the detection of heavy metals.
“A hundred parameters can be detected but we want to expand it to make sure that the data captured can allow a baseline study in some areas to ensure they are well positioned.”
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The Energy Research Centre
Founded 50 years ago as a nuclear research institute, scientists at the centre believed nuclear would be the “solution for everything”.
Although they still do, they discovered in 1955 that the Netherlands had a lot of natural gas. “We still had the idea that, by 2000, it would all be nuclear,” said Harm Jeeninga, director of business and programme development at the centre.
"In the 1990s, we found out about global warming so we focused on energy savings and tackling the greenhouse gas effect.”
The energy centre’s research focuses on biomass, energy efficiency, the environment, wind and solar, as well as energy engineering and socio-economic research.
F1 The Movie
Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Rating: 4/5
Founders: Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Albabtain.
Based: Riyadh
Offices: UAE, Vietnam and Germany
Founded: September, 2020
Number of employees: 70
Sector: FinTech, online payment solutions
Funding to date: $116m in two funding rounds
Investors: Checkout.com, Impact46, Vision Ventures, Wealth Well, Seedra, Khwarizmi, Hala Ventures, Nama Ventures and family offices
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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The specs
Engine: 8.0-litre, quad-turbo 16-cylinder
Transmission: 7-speed auto
0-100kmh 2.3 seconds
0-200kmh 5.5 seconds
0-300kmh 11.6 seconds
Power: 1500hp
Torque: 1600Nm
Price: Dh13,400,000
On sale: now
