I’ve written fairly often about Diego Maradona. I know that. Almost unavoidable. El Diego coaches the Al Wasl team up in Dubai, and I cover a lot of domestic soccer/football here in the UAE. So Diego comes up a lot.

We are trying to find the latest answer to the great sports question: How rare is it for a great player to be a competent coach? It seems as if it is rare, indeed, and Maradona is doing nothing to buck the trend. I have decided that he is a kick-ass celebrity — but a lousy coach. So far, anyway.

Today, I drove the 100-plus miles to Al Ain to see a President’s Cup match involving Maradona’s Wasl team and Al Wahda, an Abu Dhabi club. Al Ain being a neutral site.

I had framed this match, in the morning paper, as a last chance for Maradona’s club to get within shouting distance of a major trophy in his first season here.

What happened?

Wasl led 1-0 in the 47th minute, gave up a goal three minutes later, bled two more to trail 3-1, got a consolation goal in injury time and lost 3-2.

I wrote two slugs on the event. Here is the game story, in which I note that Maradona fielded a starting 11 missing six players who started against this same Wahda team 11 days previously, and with four players changed out from the side who lost to Dubai five days before.

What I was getting at, and should have made clearer was that Maradona essentially has blown up his team four months into the season. He changed out two of his four foreigners last week (including a guy he had hand-picked), and he gave significant minutes to three guys who previously were best known for their activites with the Wasl reserve squad. Yeah.

El Diego was angry, see, at the veteran Emirati guys. They were not focusing. They weren’t doing things as he instructed. So he hoped to find guys who could “focus” — even if they had never been in a big match in their lives. Great plan. That’s how you take an Argentine team of Messi, Tevez, Aguero, Higuain, Mascherano, et al, and finish fourth in South American qualifying for the 2010 World Cup.

So, anyway, Wasl lost to a mid-table Wahda side who are missing several players, and Wasl are out of the President’s Cup. And with Maradona already conceding his side won’t win the league, only one trophy is unaccounted for, and that’s the Etisalat Cup, sort of the Carling Cup of the UAE. And even in that, Diego’s team is fourth in their six-team group, with six of 10 games played, and only the top two sides make the semifinals.

Two interesting things about his corporeal self. 1) After three months of hugging everyone in a Wasl jersey, given any provocation (a goal, a victory, guys walking off the field) he has stopped. Quit. Gone cold turkey. No hugs. Zero. Now his players get handshakes. Hmm. Also, 2) after weeks of postgame rants directed at … whomever … he was quite calm in the interview room. Completely reserved. As if he had become resigned to a nothing-much season.

The other item I wrote out of the match was a 300-word column that was fun, if a bit saucy. I asked the Wahda coach, a guy named Josef Hickersberger, who has been coaching in the country since 2008 and knows how things work here … what would happen to a UAE coach, given a job by a big club, who was out of league contention in 10 games and out of the President’s Cup in the quarterfinals.

Read here to see what Hickersberger said about that.

The upshot of this is … that Diego Maradona is getting a second (and third and probably a fourth) chance at coaching success here, a chance other guys wouldn’t get, because he was a great player. Not because he ever has been a good coach.

Does that make sense? Of course not. But Wasl, and the UAE in general, like having Diego around. So do I, in that people are interested in him and seem to want to read about him. But if you want a team to succeed, even in the UAE, it is not at all clear Diego Maradona has the skill to make it happen.

He is getting a coaching Mulligan. It will not be the last before his lucrative, two-year contract is up. Not that Wasl should plan on winning anything in the interim.