Class of 2012 a fearless batch

The phrase self belief is usually a much-abused one in the context of sportspersons, but if you are looking at defining moments to explain it, one doesn't have to look beyond the heroics of Mahdi Ali's boys in Tashkent on Wednesday.

The shoulders had actually begun to drop in our office when into the second half, hosts Uzbekistan were up 2-0 and chances of a turnaround in a high pressure away game like this seemed to be getting remote by the minute. What happened after that, as they say, is now history.

The resilience shown by Hamdan Al Kamali & Co was not really a chance one, rather it was the coming of age of a rare bunch of precocious talent - nursed well with some long term planning for which the game's administration also deserves lot of credit. And of course, it was also about an almost missionary zeal of the self-effacing coach Mahdi Ali, who himself has grown as a coach along with the boys for the last eight years and even spurned offers of the more high profile job of the senior team.

The UAE teams, while never really lacking in individual skills, were known to be poor travellers both at the club and international level over the years - but that's a perception that these bunch sought to dispel with a rousing performance little more than year ago at the Guang Zhou Asian Games. Under alien conditions and with no backing from the crowd, they had accounted for two much superior footballing powers - North Korea in a tiebreaker in the quarter finals and then South Korea, led by Monaco striker Park Chu-young, in the semis to make their first-ever appearance in an Asiad final.

While such demanding contests had definitely instilled a can-do feeling in this team, the players themselves seem to have tremendous faith in each other's abilities - having grown up and participated in top flight youth tournaments together - starting with winning the AFC Youth Cup in 2008. The depth of quality in this lot has seen the senior national team drawing from their resources for quite a while now, with the likes of Kamali and Ahmad Khalil being regular teams of both teams.

They are certainly a fearless batch - a big plus for ambitions in the international arena. Remember the late Diab Awana's backheeled flick for a penalty in a senior team's encounter against Lebanon last year? It was an act of indiscretion no doubt for which he later regretted - but in an unique away - it also sumps up the free-spirited attitude of what is now the ‘Class of 2012.'

As the soccer-crazy UAE is now gripped with mass hysteria, one should heed what someone like Khalid Esmail - who scored the UAE's only goal in Italia' 90 - had to say. The former legend feels they have it in them to go a step beyond Olympics and look at qualifying for the World Cup once more - and we should back them for that!