A narrow 2-1 victory, and a lack of smooth movement in the later half, was the nature of the Chinese national soccer squad on Thursday evening in a friendly match against the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Coach Jose Camacho showed his beautiful Spanish football in the team, but it maybe still too short to save the struggling Chinese team from the danger of failing to qualify for the 2014 World Cup.

After winning an unconvincing match over Singapore and losing a disappointing one against Jordan in the World Cup qualifiers in early September, Camacho's team gave thousands of fans a big surprise in the first 20 minutes in the friendly against the UAE.

It took only five minutes for the Chinese eleven to show off their smooth attacking that was rarely seen before as Sun Xiang screwed a curving freekick to gift the home team a comfortable lead.

Only 10 minutes later, Sun participated in another connection before Feng Renliang picked up Gao Lin who enjoyed his comfortable header to double their lead. The first half saw the home side's over 70 percent ball control while the visitors made zero goal attempts.

But the remaining 45 minutes saw an old version of the Chinese team, giving the ball easily in the midfield and lacking creativity in attacking.

"We have done really well in the first half, but our performance in the second half seemed terrible," Camacho said at the press conference after the match.

"We were losing our tempo and passion, I am not satisfied with the substitutes in the second half, they had to know if they play like this, they would never appear in the my squad again," he added.

What the 56-year-old Spanish cares most would be China's next World Cup qualifier, a must-win clash against Iraq next Tuesday in the same city.

Both teams win one of their first two matches and lose another, three points behind their group leader Jordan.

"We must make troubles to the Iraqi side, like we did here in the first half; But if we do it like the second half, they will crash us easily," Camacho said.