No one can criticize UAE soccer players for a lack of imagination.

A year ago, the late Theyab Awana scored what must be the only back-heel penalty kick in an international game — a friendly with Lebanon. The audacity of the moment was jaw-dropping. (I was there and didn’t believe it even as I saw it, live.)

And last month, Ali Kasheif, perhaps the best goalkeeper in the country, came up with a particularly ingenious way to kill time … so ingenious it makes me wonder why I’d never heard of it before.

To wit:

Kasheif untied the laces on his own right shoe.

This was in an important game, too … in the Asian Champions League, against Esteghlal, one of the two big Iran teams located in Tehran, with a crowd of over 36,000 watching at the famous Azadi Stadium.

Ali Kasheif plays for Al Jazira, the Abu Dhabi team which was leading 1-0 at the time, and the goalkeeper certainly was not the only guy thinking about how he could get to the final whistle on the high side of the score.

But he was the one who did something about it.

I was watching via television, here in the UAE, and I did not notice the shoe-untying at the time. I did notice that he had an untied shoe, and I remembered Abdullah Mousa, the left back, coming back to tie it.

However, someone in Iran studied the tape, and by looking closely it appears clear what happened.

Watch the video.

As Ali Kasheif bent over to place the ball for a penalty kick, adjusting the ball just so … he pulled loose the laces on his right shoe with his gloved right hand … pretended to “discover” the problem … motioned to the referee for time … lifted his foot to show the problem … and then leisurely jogged towards the bench and took off his gloves before his teammate came back and tied his shoe.

By my count, he killed at least one minute.

Impressive. And this is a country where time-wasting on a soccer field is a high art. The diving and fake injuries are impressive at any time in the match, but they become inspired in the final 10 minutes.

Esteghlal eventually did get a tying goal, in the 68th minute, but Bare, the Brazilian, got a go-ahead goal for the UAE team in the 72nd, and Jazira hung on to win.

It was the first time a UAE team had beaten an Iranian team, in the Asian Champions League, on Iranian soil. It was a big deal.

It firmed up Jazira’s position at the top of the group, and the club clinched first place a few weeks later and gets a home game in the one-off final-16 match next week.

Oh, and the “title” on the video: “Arab goalkeeper wastes time on purpose” … was, I assume, written by an Iranian or an Esteghlal partisan. No one in the Gulf would use such a generic term — “Arab” — when we know well which country Jazira come from.

(Keep in mind, Iran and the UAE are political rivals, and it spills over into soccer. The former national team coach, Srecko Katanec, once noted that it was OK for Jazira to lose 5-1 to Sepahan of Iran, but if the national team lost 1-0, it was a disaster. Well, it’s bad for a UAE club to lose to an Iran team, but yes, it’s a disaster for the UAE national team to lose to the Iran national team.)

The only thing I wonder about now is … did Ali Kasheif invent the untie-your-own-shoe gambit, or did he borrow it — and execute it brilliantly?

Well-played. Deliciously cynical.