Did an over-and-back to see the UAE national team play Iraq in the second game of Group D competition at the Asian Cup. As I may have mentioned yesterday, the night before the match, I had been struck by a sense that this would be an important game. For good or ill. I became convinced of it. It oppressed me. I came up with a hare-brained scheme to make it happen. I was sure it would be a good idea to go over to Doha, in Qatar, just up the south coast of the Gulf, to give the paper two people at the event.

So I went, and for nearly two hours it looked like just another scoreless tie involving the national team here, and that would simply mean the UAE still controlled its destiny and could advance to the quarterfinals by defeating Iran on Wednesday. Not easy, but straightforward.

Then came one of those most horrible moments a soccer team can experience.

Zero-zero, three minutes into extra time. We’ve already done the arithmetic. Taken in tandem with Iran’s 1-0 victory over North Korea earlier in the day, the standings in Group D would be: Iran 6 points, UAE 2, North Korea 1, Iraq 1. If the UAE beat Iran, which already has clinched the group, the Emiratis are in. Doesn’t matter what happens when North Korea and Iraq play.

And then came the disaster for the UAE. A sort of half-hearted shot at goal by one of Iraq’s players. From what I could tell, about 40 rows directly above it, it was not on target.

But one of the UAE’s inside defenders, Walid Abbas, who had been very strong all night, took a stab at the ball with his right leg as he faced the end line. Perhaps he thought he was outside the goal mouth. (He wasn’t.) Perhaps he wasn’t thinking straight because he was tired. (He had to be.)

The ball nicked the foot of Abbas, took a new direction and rolled into the goal.

Mayhem. The UAE players numb with shock. Abbas on his hands and knees, head almost touching the ground, as if he wished it could swallow him whole. Iraq’s players in a huge, happy green mob, bench players running out on the field to join the 11 who were actually playing.

Mayhem, also, for the journalists covering the match. I had about 700 words of an 800-word column done predicated on a 0-0 tie. I had to; deadline was 26 minutes away.
Once it went final, a bit of summing up, and bang, it’s e-mailed back to the UAE.

Then came this jolt. Forty years ago, anyone sitting in the press box would have heard the metallic rat-a-tat of spinning drums as the paper was yanked out of a bunch of typewriters by exasperated hacks. In this case, it was more muttered expletives. (Journalism is far less noisy than it used to be.) A pause to take in what had happened, a look at the replay a time or two, and then the tap-tap-tap of new ledes being written.

One of those people was me, and this is what I sent to The National for the Sunday editions. If you look at it carefully, you might be able to tell where the “new” lede segues into what had been the top of the original column, and then pick up where it segues back into a new end, slapped on in haste.

It was fun, in a sick-to-your-stomach sort of way, because that’s deadline print journalism, and it’s practically all I’ve known in my adult life. Story is all done, ready to ship, and a guy hits a two-run pinch homer in the bottom of the ninth, and you adjust on the fly and hope you make deadline without too many errors or typos.

My colleague at the match, Ahmed Rizvi, did a straightforward game story, so if you’d like to see what happened and the reaction from the coach, go look at that. Ahmed has a hotel room, and he wasn’t in a huge hurry to get to the media bus.

As for me, my schedule was so tight that I hit “send” and was breaking down the laptop within 60 seconds, and headed out of the stadium in five minutes.

But more about the logistics, and the “rush” of the one-day road trip (another rather sick thrill) in an upcoming post.