I have mentioned how big cricket is here. Huge. Not just big. Monstrous.

A big match will stop traffic. If I see 50 guys from the subcontinent massed outside an electronics store, jostling as they try to peer in the window, the odds are about 100-to-1 they are trying to see a cricket match. (World Cup soccer would be the “1” in the 100-to-1.)

I also have mentioned the other World Cup. Cricket’s version, which is going on now.

Well, last night, in Bangalore, they had a remarkable match. One that not only involved two of the handful of elite sides in the world, one that somehow finished in a 338-338 tie.

If you want to get a bit of insight into what really matters, in the sports world, to a majority of people in the UAE, just keep going with this. Some cultural anthropology.

Dileep Premachandran is a free-lancer for The National. He lives in India and mostly covers cricket, though he also has done pieces on other sports in India, none of which really matter. India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) is a country with, really, only one sport. And it is cricket.

Here is his day-after piece on the remarkable India-England match. Go ahead and read it now, then come back.

I’m trying to think of what sort of context I can provide to an American audience to make this understandable. It would have to be a big sport (American football, perhaps), two of the best teams out there, and thousands of ups and downs before yielding a tie. The best I can come up with is Notre Dame 10, Michigan State 10 in, I believe it was, 1964. Top two college football teams in the country. Except the score should have been 49-49. Or maybe a 20-inning baseball World Series game that ended on account of darkness … if such a thing had happened.

Backing up. A curious thing about the United Arab Emirates is how little the actual citizens of the country, the Emiratis, care about cricket. Pretty much not at all. And it’s not just them. The entire Arab world pretty much doesn’t care about cricket. No, it doesn’t care at all. Period. The Arab world loves soccer and horse racing. Cricket? No, and as an American, I get that.

However, only 15 percent of the people in the UAE are Emiratis. The rest are expatriates, and Indians constitute about 30 percent of the total population here, with Pakistan coming in at about 20 percent and Bangladesh about 10 percent.

Those guys are all nuts about cricket.

Add in the Brits, the Aussies, the Kiwis and the South Africans, who also come from cricket countries, and we begin to approach perhaps 75 percent of the full-time population falling into the “cricket mad” category. (The Filipinos, Indonesians, Emiratis and North Americans being the main exceptions.)

The India-England match in the World Cup was always going to be big. India has a strange relationship with England. They ought to hate the British for having colonized them for more than a century. (Think about it; kind of embarrassing. Country of 500 million people, even a century ago, controlled by a tiny island nation which is getting rich off the deal.)

But my New World take on this is that Indians admire the British/English more than a little. They sent some culture back to England, too, but India also absorbed some veddy English institutions. And one of them is cricket.

(A famous quote over here goes like this: “Cricket is an Indian game that was accidentally invented by the English.”)

So any match between the two sides is big. It will entrance India. And a World Cup may not be the biggest event in cricket, but it can be, when the right teams are involved.

And this one ended in a flat-footed tie.

If this match had occurred in the United States, where we statistically parse all our sports, we would be talking about the odds of a final score of 338-338. We would be able to tell you whether any match anywhere, any time (right down to the county level in England) had ended 338-338. I’m a little surprised more hasn’t been made of that.

Instead, what people like Dileep are talking about are the final moments and how fixated the crowd was by the spectacle.

The match came down to the last ball. England was behind 338-337. If the batter got what we will call (for the sake of American readers) a “double”, worth two runs, England wins. If he pops up the ball and it is caught, England loses.

What he did was put the ball in play, but barely, and he got from one end of the wicket to the other, which counts for one run — and there’s your tie.

Anyway, this is almost all the average sports fan — and that would be subcontinenters and English — were talking about today. One of the greatest cricket matches in World Cup history, and maybe one of the greatest cricket matches anywhere, anytime.

I still don’t quite understand it, but I know it’s huge.