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Just around the corner from Sri Lanka's Libyan Embassy in Colombo, a crowd well in excess of 3,000 people, half of whom were waving green flags, were being kept in check by a security task team bearing AK 67 rifles.
But this was no protest march. Nor was there even any hint of unrest. The guns are customary for security personnel here, a hangover from the civil war, but their prevalence rarely feels particularly oppressive.
The police, who numbered approximately 100, had to be there in force, as a mass gathering was guaranteed at the Sinhalese Cricket Ground, the Test match venue in the Colombo 7 district.
This was one of the biggest engagements on the city's sporting calendar: the 48th meeting of Isipathana and Thurstan, two rival schools.
For the uninitiated, the popularity of a fixture involving unknown 16 and 17-year-old schoolchildren seems a little peculiar, yet it was followed passionately.
On the streets outside the ground, which is the headquarters for the Sri Lankan cricket board, hawkers peddled wares, including green flags for Isipathana, and red, blue and yellow ones for Thurstan.
The beat of a band played incessantly from a party stand renamed for the day the Green Bash - an Isipathana haunt.
"This is a big match," Upul Induwara, the adult in charge of two nine-year-old boys, who were decked head to toe in green and dripping ice-creams on to their shoes, said.
"I didn't go to either of these schools, but I wanted to bring my son and his friend to watch as they go to Isipathana."
Some supporters wearing "Thurstanians - 1993" polo shirts drifted out of the ground. "We don't care too much about the game," Tharanga Dishapirya, an assistant sales manager and former pupil of Thurstan, said.
"We know it is most likely going to be a draw before we get here, but we are just here to have fun and meet our friends. It is tradition."
Schoolboy cricket in Sri Lanka is clearly huge. In the sports section of the national newspaper, the Sunday Observer, three broadsheet pages are devoted to it, trumping the two devoted to the World Cup. And that the morning after a Sri Lanka match.
The report of day one of the Isipathana-Thurstan meeting is a page lead, relegating a story on the International Cricket Council's condemnation of the baton-charging violence in India to down page.
To add to the surreal atmosphere, Sri Lankan Test players such as Farveez Maharoof and Suraj Randiv go blissfully unnoticed as they play a club match just over the barbed-wire fence, at the neighbouring Nondescripts Cricket Club. Entry to watch them is free, but admission costs as much as SLR500 (Dh17) for the school match.
As a marker of just how popular the school games are, Maharoof is neither concerned, nor remotely surprised, so many people opted to watch the schoolboys rather than his stylish half-century.
And, despite having other things to think about, seeing as he is on the standby list in case Sri Lanka pick up an injury at the World Cup, he can even reel off the schools fixture list.
"School big matches are big in Colombo, with 10 schools playing each other," Maharoof, who was a pillar of the Sri Lanka side which reached the last World Cup final, said. "This is the first, and there are about five or six to follow.
"Club matches like ours are most probably a bit dull so aren't followed much, but school big matches get a big following," he said.
"It is tradition. Some of these teams have been playing each other for 130-odd years.
"My school, Westley College, do not have a big match, so my first real test was Sri Lanka's A team tour to Kolkata in 2003, playing in front of a 100,000 capacity at Eden Gardens."