United Arab Emirates vs Iran Prediction: Both sides won their opening game

United Arab Emirates host Iran at Hazza Bin Zayed Stadium in Round 3 of the FIFA World Cup Asian Qualifiers. Both sides won their opening round. Who will come out successful after the minutes are all played?

The United Arab Emirates has played in the finals of the World Cup only once, in 1990, whereby it had been knocked out in the group stage, losing all three matches. This team, under Paulo Bento, was doing quite well in this ongoing qualification campaign, where it won six and drew one out of seven games, scoring 19 and letting in a meager three. In the recent game against Qatar, UAE was behind and then scored three goals in the second half and won 3-1. UAE won Group H during the second qualification round and managed 16 points from games with Bahrain, Yemen, and Nepal. They have beaten Iran only once, in September 1997, while their last six games against this nation ended in defeat.

Eisa; Ebraheim, Al Hammadi, Kouadio, Idrees; Suhail, Hamad, Nader, Al Ghassani; Al-Zaabi; Canedo

The last encounter between the two teams was in January 2004, when Iran emerged as 2-1 Asian Cup winners. Iran had recorded a fabulous result against Qatar, having conceded only one goal in their six previous games with Qatar, quite indicative of their current dominance. On Thursday, Iran struggled to a 1-0 victory over Kyrgyzstan courtesy of Mehdi Taremi's strike in the 34th minute. Iran led in Group E of the second round of World Cup qualification with 14 points from six games. They boasted of five victories and two draws from seven matches for their quest to a 2026 World Cup ticket. Despite appearing in six World Cup finals, including the last three, Iran have never emerged into a knockout stage. The team are nevertheless expected to top this group, even if they struggled to win their most recent game against Kyrgyzstan.

Beiranvand; Yousefi, Hazbavi, Khalilzadeh, Mohammadi; Gholizadeh, Ghoddos, Noorafkan, Ghayedi; Taremi, Azmoun

Iran have beaten the UAE in the last six clashes between the two and we feel this run will extend to seven victories come the end of this game, even though the match can be close. So we think Iran, because of the presence in their team of potent attacking weapons, will win another three points from this match to total six points from their two matches in this group.