Hatta U23

Reserve football in the Emirates gives young players a rivalry they inherit rather than choose. For the under-23s at Hatta, the team sits eighth or ninth in the Pro League U23 table this season.

Hamdan Bin Rashid Stadium holds 5,141, a figure that reads oddly precise until you stand in a ground where the reserve fixtures are watched by a few hundred at most. The senior team plays there too, and the U23s take the same pitch.

Sky blue and white are the colours, and the nickname carried down from the parent club is Tornado — an unlikely image for a place where the wind comes off dry mountain rock, though the senior side has answered to it for decades. The club also fields an under-21 group in its own competition, so a player passing through Hatta can spend several years in the system before anyone above him has to make a decision.

None of this predates 1981. That is when Hatta Sports Club was set up, in a settlement that had no professional football to speak of, and every side the club now fields — the U21s, the U23s, the first team — traces back to that year and that decision.