No, you are not wrong; it’s only that like most Filipinos, you are accustomed to reading American English, where a noun denoting a group, team, company, or organization is considered singular in form. The paragraph you quoted is evidently from a British publication or from a publication in a country that uses British English. As a rule in British English, a group noun is considered plural in form. This explains why that sports story used the plural past-tense form “were” for the group noun “UAE,” which, of course, is a reference to the team of the United Arab Emirates. So with the use of the plural present-tense form “are” for the Bahrain team.
So, when reading something published in countries that use British English, we must mentally recalibrate our subject-verb agreement prescriptions with respect to group nouns. They must always be reckoned as plural in form.
