I had never been impressed with Diego Maradona as a coach, which anyone who read my South Africa countdown 2010 blog can attest. This is a guy who can barely function in life … but I’m not even going to broach those issues.

It was Maradona the manager who almost achieved the impossible — failing to get Argentina out of South American qualifying for the 2010 World Cup. Yes, the Argentina of Messi and Tevez and Aguero. The Maradona whose first two stints as a coach of club teams, in Argentina, ended quickly and badly. Getting nuked 4-0 by Germany in the quarterfinals at South Africa didn’t help.

While with Argentina, Maradona seemed more like a celebrity tag-along. Attached to the team, adding greatly to its star power, but not really in control of what they did or how they did it.

I am reconsidering those ideas after watching El Diego’s first official game as coach of the UAE club Al Wasl.

First, Maradona on the pitch. He does not look particularly healthy. He limps, quite noticeably, and the limp is so severe (and his knees look so out of whack) that I couldn’t settle on which leg he was favoring. “Neither” was my final answer.

He is overweight and seems a bit puffy, too (which could be a condition of how difficult it is for him to move). And he’s still only 50 … though he apparently had some near-death experiences in the previous 15 years.

The irony here is that the body that served him so well as a player has betrayed him (perhaps with his active participation via dubious lifestyle choices), but the mind we all have minimized in his career as a coach clearly remains sharp.

His team demonstrated that.

Al Wasl was a decent team a year ago. Led the league early, hung around, sputtered at the end. The UAE “club of the century” (the 20th, not the 21st) recruited Maradona to try to return them to the top, and it seemed far more publicity coup than turning point. A concept not shaken by a couple of “pretty much all about me” press conferences in this country.

But then we saw Wasl play, against Al Jazira, the defending league and President’s Cup champions, in the opening round of the Etisalat Cup, Maradona’s first serious game in this country.

What’s to like about Maradona’s team?

–He clearly knows a good player when he sees one. He recruited two of the three South Americans on the team, and he picked up two very good players for, presumably, not a whole lot of money. Juan Manual Olivera, a tall Uruguayan striker, will be a handful. He hit the post twice, set up what should have been a goal, and had another shot cleared off the line by a defender. The revelation was the Argentinian midfielder Mariano Donda, who scored all three Wasl goals in a 4-3 loss. He is going to be Maradona’s brain out there (as well as the man who takes all free kicks), and he knows his business. His background is as a defensive mid, but he showed quality as an attacking player.

–He clearly knows UAE players well, too. He and Wasl recruited a right-side midfielder, Hassan Ali, away from their Dubai rivals Al Ahli, and Hassan Ali stepped right into things like he had been there forever and looked like someone who ought to be in the national team player pool. And one of the handful of guys Wasl kept from last year, the central defender Walid Ismail, was a tiger on the back line. It isn’t easy to round up Emiratis who can make an impact in this league, but he appears to have done it.

–He wants an attacking team. Which makes perfect sense in a country where heat at the start and end of the season (it was miserably hot and humid last night) make the notion of nursing a 1-0 advantage ridiculous, because fatigue will tear your defense apart even before the opponent does. He encourages his back four to push up all the way to the midfield strip, when in position, and the subsequent shrinkage of the field seemed to distress and oppress Jazira, which was playing pretty much its best team.

Wasl was the better team for the final hour. The Jazira coach, the Belgian Franky Vercauteren, suggested it was about fitness, and Wasl has been training longer than has Jazira, which hired Vercauteran away from Genk only about three weeks ago.

But Wasl showed real signs of coherence and quality that weren’t only about Jazira gasping for air. (Lucas Neill, Australia’s captain and now a Jazira defender, tweeted that it was “Possibly the hardest game I have ever played in due to the conditions.”) Wasl showed an ability to hold the ball, to move it forward quickly and incisively, and to distribute well in the attacking end. The three South Americans, the Chilean midfielder Edson Puch, Olivera and Donda, seemed to have an instinctive understanding of each other, and if that spreads to a few more of the Emiratis, this team is going to be a contender for the championship.

After the match, chaos reigned at Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium, the 48,000 seat home to Jazira. The home team clearly did not anticipate the kind of ruckus a Maradona appearance would raise. He was mobbed by fans, many of them from Argentina’s tiny expat community, inside the home side of the stadium, and the fans pushed their way in to the press conference room, carrying jerseys and paper for autographs, and hung on El Diego’s every word when he finally showed up, some 40 minutes after the match.

At one point, Jazira officials said that Maradona would not be doing the press event, that he had refused to come, and suggested that all of the Argentina fans (including two babies) should leave the room. A teenager sitting behind me said, “He is very arrogant, yes.” But a moment later, the Argentina fans were streaming back into the room, and one of them shouted, “He is coming!” The same kid who described him as arrogant followed him out of the room, after the conference, clutching the sheet of paper he hoped El Diego would sign.

The fans were a nuisance, and their presence in the interview room could be described in no other way that a complete breakdown of security inside Jazira’s offices. They clearly did not anticipate what sort of situation Diego Maradona would bring to the stadium.

(Maradona said he had not been told of a post-match press conference, and that the “organization here is not good” and complained of being mobbed by people wanting to take photos of him.)

He said his side deserved no worse than a tie, that Jazira was essentially not competitive in the second half, and said he was pleased with his players. He made a point of clapping every one of his Emirati players on the back, after the match.

I wrote a column before the post-game session, in which I took note of the many moods of Maradona, as recorded by the local TV producers/directors, who quite rightly had a camera trained on El Diego for the entire match. I did a comment piece on this for The National, which can be seen here.

So, yes, I am reconsidering my ideas on “Maradona the coach.” He may be more than a celebrity manager. Quite a bit more.