I love World Cup qualifying matches. It’s a lot like the World Cup, except everybody participates in qualifying.

Even India. At least for another five days.

The UAE played India tonight in the first half of a home-and-away pair of games to determine who moves ahead to the final 20 in the Asian Football Confederation.

It did not turn out well for India. But then, when it comes to soccer, it never turns out well for India.

I wrote about this in a column for The National. In theory, I should have given the piece more of a UAE cast, but I find India and India soccer fascinating.

A country of 1.2 billion, most of whom at least are familiar with the sport … but apparently want nothing to do with their sad national team.

In a way, that puts India where the U.S. was 30 years ago — that rare concept, a country that isn’t really following soccer.

Arguably, the three biggest countries in the world that don’t care about soccer are all on the Asian subcontinent — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. (The latter lost 4-0 to Lebanon tonight, and I saw Lebanon lose 7-2 to the UAE back on Sunday. Lebanon is awful, so how awful must Bangladesh be? Could you and 10 pals from the neighborhood beat Bangladesh? Maybe so.)

India won a friendly 2-1 at Qatar last week, and that engendered some hope, in India. Hope that was dashed inside of 25 minutes when the referee (from Qatar, one of the UAE’s closest allies) red-carded two Indian guys. Both calls seemed a bit harsh, which is what I mentioned in the column.

India wasn’t going to score many goals, if at all, but going down to nine men with more than an hour still to play on a punishingly hot night in Al Ain … the game was over.

The India coach afterward blamed the ref for killing the game, and that is what my colleague Ahmed Rizvi wrote about in his game story.

The UAE won 3-0. Two of the goals came on the penalty kicks that resulted from the red cards, and finally in the 81st minute they got one more. Actually, if the UAE didn’t have a three-goal lead ahead of the second game, they might be worried about their inability to score in the run of play.

Now they go play in Delhi, on Thursday, and India needs to win 3-0 to push it to an extra 30 minutes or, if the UAE scores, to win by four goals to win the series outright. Which will not happen.

India has very few athletes on their team. They also aren’t in particularly good shape. And did I mention they have very little size or speed? They try hard, but cricket seems to sucks up about 99.9 percent of athletes in India.

So, India is pretty much done. And those 1.2 billion people can begin another four-year wait until qualifying in Asia for Russia 2018 gets going.

The UAE will move on to pool play in the group of 20. Still a long ways from getting one of the 4.5 Asia berths, but at least still alive.