Malaysian kids make cricket-watching debut

University Sains Malaysia in Penang is one of the biggest educational institutions in the county: it has about 20,000 students and is spread over 500 acres. And nestled on the border of its campus, by the main road, is the cricket ground where the Under-19 World Cup matches are being staged.

Nambia are playing Nepal today, a match which will decide the third and fourth spots in Group C. There are between 100-200 schools kids in the tents so I head over to have a chat. Malaysia beat Zimbabwe on Wednesday so I assume they'll be pretty excited about it.

There's a solitary net with a matting surface in one corner of the ground and a couple of boys, who are about 13, are having a hit. A red plastic chair is being used as a makeshift set of stumps and the batsman isn't wearing pads. "Aren't you afraid of getting hit in the shins?" I ask. "No!" says Farhan. Soon enough, the bowler, Nasiruddin, bowls one on the legs and Farhan gets hit on the thigh. He rubs it off, smiles, and is ready to bat again.

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.