Fellow employees at Abu Dhabi Media watching the India-Pakistan match on the sports department’s TV.

A huge day in sports for this part of the world. India vs. Pakistan in the semifinals of the Cricket World Cup.

What? Arabs are interested in cricket? Well, no, they’re not. No more than Americans are. But the UAE, remember, has a population of about 7 million and about half of them are Indians or Pakistanis. Those are the two largest groups among the expats who make up 85 percent of the total population.

And cricket is huge in the subcontinent. Enormous. Practically the only sports that matters. And here were Pakistan and India, regional rivals across the spectrum of the human condition, playing in the semifinals of the six-week event.

The enthusiasm almost overran my end of the newsroom at The National. I became part of the event, just about, because the sports department has the big-screen TV with the exotic array of sports channels, and we got the game, live, from India.

Many of the guys from the subcontinent who work in the building were allowed to take breaks to watch the game, and they congregated behind me. The photo shows the crowd, but I’m just out of the frame, to the left.

Instead of being agitated about all these guys watching TV, the company was actually quite cool about it. Some employees on the management side of the newsroom actually brought in some chairs so that the guys up front could sit and the guys farther back could see over their heads.

Chuck Culpepper, sports columnist at The National, did a very nice job of capturing the mood of the city — at least among Indians and Pakistanis — in his column for Thursday morning. Among the conditions he noted: men congregating around the open door of a delivery van because the radio inside was tuned to the game.

Our guys were very quiet during the time the match was running because most of them were Pakistan fans, I believe, and India led off by scoring 260 runs, which they (far better than I) realized was a pretty big number.

It was too big for Pakistan, anyway. As the day went on, Pakistan wasn’t up to reaching it, and India won fairly comfortably.

Next, the final, between Sri Lanka and India. Another enormous game, but aside from my colleague Amith Passela, I’m not sure we have any Sri Lankans in the newsroom. So the crowd around our TV won’t be as big as it was (above).