These next five days are crucial in the history of UAE soccer.

What looked like one of the best teams in Asia, a year ago, probably needs to win twice at home — versus Palestine tomorrow and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday — just to make the final round of continental qualifying for the Russia 2018 World Cup.

The pressure will be enormous.

This is the Emirati team that was supposed to make a major push for a spot at Russia.

Going out even before the final round of Asia qualifying would be a disaster, perhaps a defining one for the players, coaches and federation.

I covered the UAE national team in 2011 and 2012.

The former led to the short-lived attempt to qualify for Brazil 2014, which fell to pieces in the first week of the second-to-last Asia round. A 3-2 home defeat to Kuwait, then a 3-1 collapse at Lebanon in Beirut, deeply humiliating, at the time, essentially ended Emirati hopes.

But then I stayed on with the age-group team coached by the astute former engineer (and Pep Guardiola admirer) Mahdi Ali, and the Under-23 team dramatically qualified for the London Olympics by winning their final three matches, including a memorable 3-2 victory in Tashkent over Uzbekistan.

From that moment … or certainly no later than the London Olympics, where the UAE’s young men led Uruguay 1-0 at Old Trafford, were tied 1-1 with Great Britain in the second half at Wembley and held Senegal to a 1-1 draw … the goal, nay the expectation, has been Russia 2018.

The UAE has played in the World Cup only once, in 1990, when Asian football was not very good and, in many cases, not even serious.

Even though Asia berths in the World Cup have gone up from two in 1990 to four-and-a-half in 2018, the competition is much stiffer.

Japan is a continental power now and a World Cup regular. Australia joined the Asian Football Confederation in 2007 and tends to take another berth. China is improving. Iran is always strong, and Saudi Arabia remains a competitor.

Somehow, the UAE, with a citizen population of barely 1 million, has to wedge itself into an equation which leaves four from 46 AFC federations.

Things looked tidy for the Emiratis a year ago, when they stood high enough in the Fifa rankings to be seeded among the eight sides who would be placed at the top of eight groups.

Then came the draw, which gave the UAE perhaps the worst possible opponents from Pot 2 and Pot 3 — Saudi Arabia, which seems to intimidate Emirati teams and happened to be, a year ago, the ninth-ranked Asian team, and Palestine, a rising soccer nation which would certainly be difficult at home.

The UAE drew at Palestine, actually venturing into the territory for the historical match at a battered stadium that ended 0-0.

(Saudi Arabia later insisted that it was too dangerous for their side to go to Palestine and got the game was moved to a neutral venue, in Jordan, which produced another scoreless draw.)

Then the UAE went to Jeddah and lost to the Saudis 2-1 after taking an early lead. The Saudis won on a 90th-minute penalty, a crucial event.

The Group A table, with five days left, has Saudi leading on 16 points, the UAE second on 13 and Palestine third, on nine.

Only the eight group winners are guaranteed a berth in the final 12. The other four come from the best second-place teams, and the UAE probably needs a win and a draw to have a good shot at that.

Saudi is home to Malaysia tomorrow, which should yield a lopsided result which improves the Saudi goal differential. While the UAE gets the rugged/obstinate/dangerous Palestinians, who could yet finish second, in Abu Dhabi.

On Tuesday, Saudi goes to Abu Dhabi, and the UAE will be hoping a victory and an edge in goal differential (made possible by Malaysia finishing fourth) makes them champions of the group.

About the pressure.

The sense in the country is that if this team, with heralded midfielder Omar Abdulrahman and forward Ahmed Khalil, the competition’s leading scorer and current AFC player of the year, does not make the World Cup … the UAE may never do so in our lifetimes.

The team ahead of this one was weak, the one coming after is perhaps weaker still. The London 2012 team are men in their primes, here in 2016, at 26 and 27.

This is the UAE’s last best chance, and I wish I were there to see it.

It will be interesting to see what sort of crowds the national team gets. My hunch is that the crowd tonight will be small because of the Emirati fear of failure, and not wanting to be associated with it, in case of something less than victory.

If the UAE can get a goal, it should be able to waste away the game against the Palestinians … and produce a big crowd for the Saudi match, which would be close to a winner-take-all situation.

This is a key moment. A nation’s belief that it can stand among the world’s elite is at stake. Failure to advance will dash that belief.