So, while I had my head turned, Al Jazira fired its coach for being too harsh or too lenient or perhaps too Belgian, Baniyas owned up to the fact that it owed significant chunks of money to a couple of players, and David O’Leary, the Irishman who coached in Dubai last season, is going to FIFA to see if they will force the Al Ahli club to pay him the money he would have made had they not fired him last year after all of eight months in charge.

Other than that, nothing happened while I was in France.

First order of business today? Get some news flowing on the UAE Olympic team’s win-and-their-in match with Uzbekistan on Wednesday.

Weather could be a big factor, and I wrote about that. The UAE doesn’t do winters very well. At all. And it’s still winter in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, where the game will be played.

In that story, a Pro League coach who is from Austria said his experience has been that UAE players consider it “very, very cold” when temps reach 10 Celsius — or about 50 Fahrenheit.

It will be colder than that in Tashkent. And perhaps raining. Or even snowing. Hmmm.

I then made the walk down to the other end of the block, from the offices of The National, to watch Jazira, and their new coach, the Brazilian Caio Junior, play Al Shabab in the semifinals of the Etisalat Cup.

It did not go well for Jazira and Caio Junior, who had to sit in the stands because his on-field credential had not come through, and Shabab’s 4-0 victory was the biggest beating Jazira has endured in … a minimum of two seasons, and maybe four or five.

I did a sidebar on this Caio Junior character, who is in his 15th (!) coaching job since 2002. Yes, you read that right — he has been hired 15 times in 10 years.

If he were any good, wouldn’t he have lasted a bit longer with … oh, any of those previous 14 teams?

I liked his predecessor, Franky Vercauteren, but he had lost four league games, and Jazira lost four league games, total, in the previous three seasons, and maybe that’s why he was dumped — one day after winning an Asian Champions League match at Qarshi, Uzbekistan, after a blizzard.  So never mind that he got Genk to the group stage of the Uefa Champions League. Vercauteren apparently is not up to snuff.

Oh, and at the end of the evening, in the other Cup semifinal, involving the celebrity coaches Diego Maradona and Quique Sanchez Flores, the latter’s Ahli team beat the former’s Al Wasl team.

Two upshots here: Maradona is not going to be winning any trophies with Wasl this season. (What a surprise.) And second, he is going to be without his No. 1 goalkeeper, Majed Naser, who went nuts after the game and attacked Sanchez Flores from behind — hitting or slapping him in the head. Naser was immediately suspended indefinitely — which turned into a 17-game suspension, by league order, soon after.

Also, the event got some exposure on YouTube. Crazy stuff.

So, a whole day of writing or watching UAE soccer, which is generally not a bad thing, but in this case involved a lot of words … in not all that many hours … on the day after flying home from France.