At 8 p.m. Sunday night, Theyab Awana was not particularly well-known even in the UAE. A 21-year-old right-side midfielder for the Baniyas club, a rising player but not quite there yet, he was getting some playing time with the UAE Olympic team and had just made a breakthrough onto the senior national team, though not as a starter.

One penalty kick and a few hours later … and now he has to be the best-known, most-discussed player in the history of UAE soccer.

Yes, this is the guy who scored on the backheel penalty. If you follow soccer at all, you probably have seen video of it.

I was there for the kick, and over the next 24 hours I followed the sudden fame/infamy of Theyab Awana.

Let’s pause to go to the tape.

So, here is a link that has not been taken down. At least as of this writing.

The situation: UAE vs. Lebanon, international friendly played in Khalifa Stadium in Al Ain, a city about 100 miles east of the capital of Abu Dhabi. Both teams are getting ready for a round of 2014 World Cup qualifying: the UAE home and away with India, Lebanon home-and-away with Bangladesh. Winners on aggregate join a 20-team system of pool play.

Lebanon arrived with a small squad; I counted 15 guys in uniform, two of them goalkeepers. Turns out, they weren’t very good, either. The UAE is missing some of its veteran players, out with injury, but the local guys were scoring early and often, so often that a goal was missed. The final was 7-2, but it was 6-2 on the scoreboard at the end of the game.

Whatever the score, it was the last goal that got worldwide attention.

Theyab Awana came on with four other guys in a mass-substitution in the 70th minute. In the little I had seen of him, I was impressed. The starter there for the past few years is a small, not-very-athletic older guy. Awana has speed and aggressiveness. Early in January, he was doing a nice job in a friendly with Austraia, and he looked like a guy who was about to join the first XI. But he was injured in that game, missed the Asian Cup (the continental championship) and several weeks of the league season.

So, he’s on the field, and in the 78th minute he carried the ball into the penalty area and was taken down by Lebanon’s Akram Maghrabi.

Earlier, a defender, Hamdan Al Kamali, had taken and made a penalty, but Awana quickly picked up the ball and put it on the spot, and everyone just sorta seemed to shrug and say, “OK, then, you take it.”

The video picks up with Awana just moving forward.

Just before reaching the ball, he turns 180 degrees to the left so that his back is to the goalkeeper. He plants his left foot almost next to the ball, raises his right foot and brings it down onto the ball, striking it with the back of his heel.

The shot had decent pace, and rolled into the goal past the stunned goalkeeper, Hassan Moghnieh, who moved hardly at all; he might have been able to save it if he hadn’t given in to a second of “what the?” …

And it’s been reaction ever since. The handful of spectators, some of whom can be heard on the video, cheered. Sorta. The reporters there (a guy from Sport 360 and me) just glanced at each other in a “never can tell what will happen around here” look …

But, this is key … the match was being nationally televised. Within two or three hours, as the team manager, Ismail Rashid later said, the goal was already up on YouTube and by the next morning it had gone viral.

I wrote about that whole process for The National, and here is that story.

It’s worthwhile to follow the link, because our web guys put together a pastiche of other famous/creative penalty shots, if you want more.

So, the immediate aftermath? Some of it you can see on the videos. Awana doesn’t really celebrate. Teammates hardly seem to acknowledge him as he jogs back for the kickoff. Almost like they don’t know if the coach, the country, the world (if they had thought that far) would be all right with what just happened.

At the end of his jog, Awana gets a sort of high-five from Amer Abdulrahman, the team’s playmaker, and from a defender, Yousef Jaber.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the coach, a Slovenian named Srecko Katanec, is steamed. He took Awana out of the game in the 80th minute, or almost immediately, considering that someone had to be sent to the fourth referee to ask to go in, etc. But as Awana came off, Katanec held up his hand to be slapped, and said nothing … as far as I could tell. Didn’t even seem to give him a stern look.

But Katanec was talking soon after. He said the shot was disrespectful, and he was right. Lebanon was already being routed, and the backheel was just the final indignity, albeit a creative one.

I doubt that anyone, even in this age of instant media connectivity, knew where this was going. We still have a sense of lag between the reality of an event and the X-million hits the video of it will get. Even young people seem to face a disconnect between “actions taken in a nearly empty stadium” and “where this will be 24 hours from now.”

By now, Theyab Awana has to be the best-known UAE soccer player. Probably ever. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people have seen that goal or will see it. They’ll see Awana’s big hair, and his blank expression, and the tepid celebration … forever. And the hits will keep on coming.

And then they will debate the PK. Was it right? Was it bad sportsmanship. Was it an act of daring and bravado and massive risk-taking? (Because what if he had missed?)

One of my colleagues wrote a commentary on it, condemning it. The Brits in the room later assured me that had a player attempted that sort of PK in England the opposition would have been trying to break his legs.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.  I give the guy credit for audacity and self-belief. I can understand the Football Association and the coach being upset, because it can bring a bad reputation to the national side — not to mention the whole idea of bad karma just ahead of a potentially scary home-and-away with India that could end the World Cup qualifying process in the next 10 days.

But hadn’t he been practicing that shot for months … years? Didn’t other guys on the team know he is just crazy enough to try this? Hadn’t they seen him taking that shot in training? Hadn’t the coaches? Why did the whole team acquiesce in his taking the shot?

Anyway, now it’s out there. I was one of maybe 150 people who saw it live. By now far, far more of you have seen it thanks to the worldwide web. Theyab Awana is famous and/or infamous.