The UAE Falcons have been mentioned previously on this blog. Back in February I drove up to Dubai to watch them practice.

A batch of guys, led by a German coach, are trying to play American football, as it is known here. (Just plain “football” in these parts being soccer.)

They actually got a game against outside opposition, last month, when I was in France. So I didn’t see them lose 71-3 to a Turkish team. What made it sting a little more was that the UAE Falcons raised the money to pay for the guys from Turkey — “which included four paid Americans” — to come over and kick their butts.

As noted in this story in The National, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the future of the sport in the country, because just playing the game brought out more players.

On Saturday, the UAE Falcons came to Abu Dhabi for the first time, splitting into two teams for a full-contract intrasquad game, and my colleague at The National, Chuck Culpepper went out to Zayed Sports City to see the action, and was gripped by the same sense of nostalgia I was when I saw the Falcons practice, earlier this year.

More guys have, in fact, turned out, and they all braved one of the first seriously hot days of the year to play four 20-minute (running clock) quarters.

In his comment (linked above) and in a succinct game story, Chuck relays comments from the players, including a member of the Sharjah ruling family, who are keen to see this all work out.

The Falcons’ short-term goal is to spin off a team or two (or even three) to give the players someone to play against. The hope is to launch a team in Abu Dhabi, and maybe a second in Dubai or Sharjah, and a third in Al Ain, if things go right.

What limits the game here is that American football, however popular it is in the U.S., has not been a sport that has traveled well outside the country of origin. In that sense, it is rather like sumo wrestling or hurling.

It is a North American sport — I find it interesting that more than a few Canadians are involved — with a handful of devotees from Europe, and an even smaller handful of people who saw the game while visiting or studying in the U.S. and have a hankering to put on the pads and hit somebody.

Chuck quotes one of the players as saying: “We’ve got to get them to stop calling it ‘American football.’ It’s football. The other one is ‘soccer.'”

The UAE Falcons probably should not spend much time or energy on that. Football is football here, not soccer, and anything else claiming to be football is the entity that will have to add on the qualifiers. Like “Aussie rules” or “American.”

I wonder about the injury situation. These are not all guys in the bloom of youth, nor are they in tip-top shape. Think of all the “just messing around” football games you’ve heard about: Someone always gets hurt, right? If they play a season of six, seven, eight games, wouldn’t every team run out of healthy bodies? And who will pay for the surgeries?

Anyway, we will be following this further. The season is over; it’s just too hot to play here before October, and perhaps even November.

By then, the block-and-tackle guys will be hoping they have other teams to push around. It will be interesting to see if it happens.