Farhan, Nasiruddin and another friend, Amar, are from Penang Free School, which was founded in 1816 making it the oldest English school in Malaysia and the South East Asia region. Amar is 15 and he says he plays for the schools Under-19 team. The games in the Under-19 World Cup are the first international games he's watching live.

They hesitate when I ask who their favourite cricketers are - they haven't watched much of the sport on TV. After further coaxing, one of them says Brian Lara, another Andrew Symonds while Farhan picked a Malaysian cricketer - Thomas Mathew - who once came to his school to talk about cricket.

There is an older group of boys near by - one of them is sleeping - from the SMT Technical School. They're hostelites and they hadn't heard of Malaysia's win against Zimbabwe. This is their first exposure to international cricket too and they haven't watched the Malaysian national
team play either.

Curiously, there are a large group of schoolgirls as well but most of them are talking among themselves or fiddling with their phones and cameras. "Do you play cricket?" I ask hesitantly. They said that they didn't even know what cricket was. So I sit for a while and begin to try and explain the game. Where do you start when you have to explain what a run is? They were eager to learn, though, and asked more than a few questions but they were aghast and amused when they learnt that a one-day match spans seven hours.

For them the visit to watch Namibia and Nepal was a field trip. They clapped when the ball crosses the ropes but they didn't know that it meant four runs for the batting side. They were clapping because the boys next to them were! The girls play a multitude of sports at their convent school - hockey, netball, basketball, volleyball, squash and even golf, I was told - but not cricket. Not yet.