In a small country, the “small stuff” in sports counts for a lot.

If you have a small population or a poor one, odds are pretty good you aren’t going to have a lot of success in regional — never mind global — sports.

And that explains why the Under 23 soccer game tomorrow between the UAE and Australia is such a big deal.

It’s not every day (or week, or year) that the UAE has a chance to get into the final stage of a major international competition. And the U23s here are two games away from making the London 2012 Olympics.

How do I know this is big?

At the “plus-one-day” press conferences today, the interview room at Al Jazira’s stadium was nearly stuffed. And it seats about 100 people.

I saw TV crews from three UAE emirates — Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah. The place was lousy with still photographers. (Half the time they were standing between me and the coaches/players, and I was sitting in the second row.)

Random VIPs slipped into the back of the room to watch the proceedings. And at least five newspapers were represented, including The National. By me.

In the U.S., it is assumed that the USOC will have athletes who qualify in nearly every sport on the Olympic menu, and it is further assumed that a high fraction of those athletes will have a chance for a gold medal. Major sports countries like China, Germany, Russia … same thing.

The UAE has one Olympic medal. Ever.  A gold in shooting in 2004. At the moment, it doesn’t look like that second medal (of any color) is going to be happening at London 2012.

In the U.S, and in major soccer countries, fans probably are barely aware of the status of their Olympic soccer teams. “Qualified for the London Games? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve got a lot of big club games going on, you may have noticed, not to mention the Euro tournament coming up …”

In the UAE, however, any team or person that rises to a certain threshold of competence … gets a lot of attention. He (and it’s nearly always “he”) doesn’t have a lot of peers.

As I noted in this comment piece for the Wednesday newspaper, the UAE U23 team has been spectacularly successful for four years now, which has come just as the senior national team seems to be bottoming out. The senior team already is out of qualifying for the 2014 World Cup, having failed to register as much as a tie in five group matches so far. The last group match is next week, and then it’s “wait till 2018!” for the national team, which has one World Cup appearance (in 1990) in its history.

This time around, the UAE didn’t even make the final 10 teams in Asia, and the trend seems to be downward.

Which is why this U23 team, which has finished well at a variety of tournaments, is getting so much attention. If it can scrounge a win and a tie from the game with Australia tomorrow and the match at Uzbekistan on March 14, the UAE soccer team is one of the 16 going to the Olympics.

And that would be the first spot, ever, in the Olympic soccer tournament for the UAE.

Which would be huge.

The Football Association believes/hopes that as many as 20,000 fans will turn out for the match against Australia. (The coach pointedly said that “anyone who loves his country” will be at the match.)

The weather is cooperating — sandstorms finally over, a bright but not-hot sun, a cool-but-not-cold night ahead.

It would not surprise me to see 20,000 in Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium for the 5:30 p.m. kickoff. Imagine 20,000 people turning out for a U.S. Olympic team qualifier. Would never happen because the U.S. doesn’t have all its Olympic eggs in one basket.

But here in the UAE, they take their successes where they can find them, and when it happens to be in football, the sport they care about most, people will pay attention — even those who don’t actually get to the stadium tomorrow.