In two years in the UAE, I’m certain I have written or edited more than a thousand stories for The National. But I’m not sure even five of them were about the emirate of Ajman, one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates — but the smallest and, if our newspaper is any guide, one of the quietest.

Think of, say, South Dakota. Except a lot warmer.

Ajman is only about 100 miles square, which works out to 10 miles by 10 miles on a map, and it is bordered on three sides by the emirate of Sharjah (which is no huge political entity itself), with the Gulf forming the fourth side. The population of Ajman is 360,000, or not much bigger than Abu Dhabi’s second city, Al Ain. Like most of the major cities in the UAE, it came into being as a port for pearling boats.

(Here is a UAE map, if you want to get a sense of Ajman’s location, north and east, up the Gulf coast, from Abu Dhabi.)

I got a chance to write about Ajman today, and I was actually glad for it. Their biggest (and I believe only) soccer club is back in the top division of UAE football, and their team somehow has won twice and tied once in its first three matches this season, and that seemed newsworthy.

So I did this comment piece for The National, noting the quick start by Ajman Club.

Previously, what I knew about Ajman was hardly more than this:

It is where people from Sharjah go to smoke shisha in mixed-sex social clubs.

Sharjah, which surrounds Ajman, remember, is the most culturally conservative of the emirates, and shisha smoking is banned there. So to have some fun, Sharjah residents drive over to Ajman, and Ajman merchants are a bit worried about a public smoking ban that apparently will be enacted in the UAE … eventually.

Beyond that … Ajman seems to fall into a black hole of news, as do the emirates even further north of it, Umm Al Qaiwain, Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah.

The point of my piece on Ajman was to note how their club is probably the smallest in the Pro League in terms of resources. Smaller even than Ras Al Khaimah, the other promoted club.

The coach at Ajman is an Iraqi who has been around the UAE for several years now, and one of his assistants is also an Iraqi, a man who previously was sports director (athletic director) at the American University of Sharjah, which is one of the best schools in the country and the most American — to the point of fielding a panoply of sports team rather like an American college would.

And that gentleman, name of Saad Abrahim, talked about his view of the club, and its place in the league, and about its one and only goal: Staying in the top flight.

If you want to compare them to a club in the Premier League, Norwich City is perhaps a good match. Not as much money, geographically a bit isolated, not much history of success in the top division, a club with a goal of staying in the league, not to win it.

Ajman seems to have done a good job of identifying some competent foreigners within their budget, led by a Senegalese forward named Ibrahima Toure, who has five goals in three Etisalat Cup matches, and an Ivorian playmaker named Olivier Tia.

But Ajman is still made up mostly of Emiratis (only four foreigners per team, remember), and not even one of them is considered competent enough to be called in to the national team, which plays in South Korea next week.

However, at least one executive in the league has suggested that Ajman may be in place to take advantage of what sabermetricians would call an “inefficiency” in the league. A fair number of players quit playing youth football at 18, to concentrate on college, and they then are lost to the system. Abrahim was around a lot of those guys, at the American University of Sharjah, and he may be able to recruit some of them. Remember, the U.S. national team was almost entirely college guys, until fairly recently.

Ajman doesn’t have any college boys yet, but it could happen.

Meanwhile, Ajman’s coach, Abdul Wahad Abdul Kader, has been in the top league before, and actually had Ajman off to a 5-3-3 start in the 2008-09 season, which is just crazy good. But Ajman fired him after the club lost three straight, which was madness; to have won 18 points out of 11 matches was a miracle, and even with the three losses … to have won 18 points out of 14 league matches was still better than they could have hoped for.

They lost seven of their final nine games under a Brazilian guy (but managed to avoid relegation because of their strong start), then were 2-2-18 in the next season, one of the worst performances in UAE history and were relegated with extreme prejudice.

After winning the First Division under Abdul Kader, they were promoted and here they are, ready to cause some damage. They already have victories over Al Ahli and Sharjah in the bag.

I like the idea of Ajman (as well as Ras Al Khaimah) in the league because it broadens it geographically. Last season, the league didn’t have a member north of Sharjah. Think of baseball’s major leagues in the 1950s, before they expanded west of St. Louis. Well, now the league is playing in the geographical equivalent of California, when it has clubs in Ajman and RAK.

And I also like the idea of sports teams as a reflection of a community, and how a club might impact that community. The small towns of the world often care very much about their teams, and that can be revelatory. In another lifetime, I liked the idea of Needles, Trona and Baker all in the same California county. It brought a sense of the exotic.

Ajman does that, too. If I smoked, maybe I would make a point of driving up their soon to do the shisha thing.