My newspaper, The National, here in Abu Dhabi, has one of those “most-read” lists on its website. One for each department. News. Business.

Sports.

These lists are handy, whatever the news outlet. It allows you to discover quickly which stories are getting clicked on most often, and lets you catch up to stuff you might not normally read … that somehow has achieved some momentum on the web.

In an international city such as Abu Dhabi, the “most popular stories” slug also tells us quite a bit about our audience. The top-10 sports stories list here certainly bears no resemblance to what espn.com’s top 10 would be … nor would they mirror the sports lists on The New York Times or The Times of London sites.

So, here is our current top-10 most-read sports list, as of July 24, 2010 … with explanations from me, where necessary. (No, we are not in Kansas anymore.)

Counting down from No. 10 to No. 1.

10. “Yao Ming  is on the comeback trail” … that would be the Houston Rockets center, who missed all of last season with a broken foot. So, some NBA interest here, yes. Good.

9. “No home Pro League debut for Fabio Cannavaro” … the aging former captain of the Italian national team is joining the local domestic league, to play for Al Ahli of Dubai. True story. Getting a bucket of cash, too. But his first match here will be on the road against Al Dhafra — which is in the middle of the desert and has a stadium that seats 10,000. Anyway, the UAE tends to attract international players on the back sides of their careers, as does Major League Soccer.

8. “Barrett to bring curtain down on his career” … Trent Barrett is a rugby player in Australia. He is retiring. Clearly, a chunk of our readership is interested. I never heard of the guy till I edited the story.

7. “Schleck and Contador are shoulder to shoulder at the top” … Is a Tour de France story, but a two-day-old story. It goes back to the top two guys in the Tour in an amazing duel up a massive climb in the Pyrenees. The story has legs.

6. “Jeremy Lin makes way to NBA via Harvard” … another NBA story, though the Harvard thing may be driving the hits, too. Lin signed with the Golden State Warriors and could become the first Asian-American to play the point guard position as well as the first Harvard man to play in an NBA game since 1953.

5. “Ponting leads Aussie’s fightback” … Cricket. Australia vs. Pakistan. Ponting is Australia’s leading scorer, but Pakistan won, to the surprise of our cricket fans. Also, “fightback” is British English … and is one word.

4. “Muralitharan makes it to 800” … a huge story over here that may not have gotten even one line in the New York Times. A cricket bowler from Sri Lanka ended his career with 800 wickets, a record, and a nice round one. Imagine thay Babe Ruth had quit with exactly 800 homers. Plus, Muralitharan got his final eight wickets against India, which is about as much fun as a Sri Lankan cricketer can have.

3.  “A week to forget for India” … is another cricket story, but about how awful India was in its “test” in Sri Lanka. One of those “why were we so awful?” stories that would seem to indicate we have a lot of Indians reading the paper, as well as cricket fans.

2. “Malaysian cleric ‘doesn’t want United shirts banned'” … is really a news pages story that we have on the sports home page. At first, we thought the cleric in question wanted ManU shirts banned … but then he didn’t. ManU, by the way, is almost certainly the most popular soccer team in this part of the world. Have a look: the problem is the depiction of “the devil” on the ManU crest.

1.  “Muralitharan: 800 and out” … is more of an analysis piece than the story sitting in the No. 4 position. What is interesting about this whole Sri Lanka-India match is that it generated three stories in our top 10 … even though the key events ended two days ago.

That’s what we’re reading, over here. Generally speaking.

Feel free to click on thenational.ae whenever you would like to see what sort of exotic stuff we’re excited about.