He came, he saw, he stunk it up. If anyone has the Latin for that (after the veni, vidi part) … feel free to pass it along.

Diego Maradona‘s first season as a coach in the UAE came to an ignominious end on June 10 when his Al Wasl team blew a 3-1 lead after the away portion of a two-leg final … couldn’t hold a 3-2 lead in a shootout … and ended the game with two guys sent off for butting opponents and El Diego telling reporters he didn’t regret any of his decisions in Wasl’s zero-trophy season.

I was there for the festivities, and I wrote about it for The National.

Summing up:

The 12 teams in the UAE’s Pro League play in three domestic competitions — the league, the league cup, the President’s Cup.

Wasl was eighth in the league, with 26 points in 22 games, behind even little Ajman, a promoted team with hardly any money.  A year before, without Maradona’s help, Wasl finished sixth with 31 points in 22 games.

Wasl went out of the league cup in the semi-finals, which ended with goalkeeper Majed Naser (more about him later) slapping Al Ahli coach Quique Sanchez Flores.

And Wasl exited the President’s Cup in the quarterfinals, losing to an Al Wahda side that didn’t have their full team for one day in 2011-12.

That left Wasl and Diego chasing a really random trophy, for an event that goes by various names but of late seems to be called the GCC Champions League.

It’s really more like the Europa League — for teams that finished in mid-pack in the UAE league or Qatar, or from a country (say, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman) that isn’t part of the Asian Champions League. Saudi Arabia, which has the strongest league on the Arabian Peninsula, didn’t take part.

So, Wasl just ran through this 12-team tournament which is easily the most rinky-dink competition a UAE team can chase, and beat Al Muharraq 3-1 in Bahrain in the first leg of the final.

That set up the second leg, in Dubai, and all Wasl needed was to lose by one goal — and even 2-0 loss would have worked, with the “away goals” tiebreaker coming into effect.

But Wasl’s goalkeeper, the aforementioned Majed Naser, went mental in the 10th minute, threw a body block at one Muharraq player and butted a second, and got a red.

The thing about Naser? He had been suspended for 17 games by the UAE Football Association after slapping/hitting the Al Ahli coach, and announced his retirement, but Wasl (Maradona?) called him back for this goofy competition, which is not under the aegis of the UAE FA, and a man who has serious anger-management issues was in goal — and then was in the clubhouse in the first 15 minutes.

In 2007, Naser struck a linesman, leading a sports writer to suggest that Naser had completed a hat trick of assaults — on an official, a coach and a player.

(Update: A day later, Wasl asked the FA to suspend Naser for the whole of the 2012/13 season, and the ruler of the nearby emirate of Sharjah made a point of criticizing him.)

Later, another semi-rabid Wasl player, Rashid Essa, also was red-carded for butting (does Maradona coach butting?), and Muharraq finished with a 3-1 lead, which deadlocked the score at 4-4 — and sent the teams to a shootout on a really hot night.

One of Diego’s hand-picked expatriates, an Argentine named Juan Ignacio Mercier, blasted his spot kick over the goal, and Mubarak Hassan missed the sixth kick, and it finished 5-4 for the Bahraini team.

What made it much worse was that Wasl fully expected to win, and had arranged a post-match celebration, complete with fireworks, a confetti blower and an on-field podium to award medals. Their efforts were directed, then, on the victorious Muharraq.

Wasl fans also turned out in force, nearly filling their little stadium, maybe 6,000 of them, which is a huge crowd 1) while the Europe 2012 competition was live on TV and 2) in mid-June, when the UAE is shockingly hot, even at night.

So, the celebration went off, but for the Bahrain team, and Wasl and Diego Maradona did not win something else.

The only bright side to this is that he lasted a full season with a club team for the first time. And another positive note is that nobody back in Argentina will grasp that he couldn’t win even a low-level competition.

It is nice, too, that stopped complaining publicly about his roster — after the club sat him down and, no doubt, reminded him of how posh his life here is.

(In many ways, Wasl is perfect for him, because he makes good money, has a soft life and apparently doesn’t have to win anything to keep his job. He has a two-season contract and said he intends to honor it.)

Wasl has a choice to make: Do they want a celebrity coach or do they want to win? So far, they are coming down on the side of “celebrity coach.”