Our original opposition, Becs Old Boys, conceded the fixture on Thursday night, and for a few nervous dark hours I feared these gorgeous 1s boys may be looking at two cancelled games in a row. That would have been unacceptable. There’s a lot of feverish energy in this group — Sean McGurn and I alone have enough to charge a Toyota Prius — and misdirecting any of it can have severe complications, on both ourselves and the general public. Much better to keep us at the DSG, where we can be kinky in peace.

Thankfully, and somewhat unbelievably, despite it being such a normal thing now, Leon Parks has found another fixture before I’m even out of bed on Friday morning. We’re playing Newham CC, supposedly taking on a mixture of their 2s and 3s. “A strong oppo,” Leon tells us. None of us have played these blokes before; Saturday is now something of a mystery box. Perhaps their opening bowler produces left-arm thunderbolts; maybe they all produce left-arm thunderbolts, one by one, a rotating carousel of pure hell.

I’m keen to have a look at them, maybe even get close enough to give these mysterious Newham boys a big sniff and a kiss on the forehead before play starts, but when I get to the DSG on Saturday morning, none of them are here. The only person here is Sean.

He’s had a nice evening. Nothing too silly. The leading run-scorer for this season went to Peckham to play some bowls, then demolished some cocktails. I wonder whether the bowls thing was a subconscious effort to just do some bowling, because he’d asked Duray if he could have a roll today and got told to f*ck right off. With no wickets to look forward to, he occupies himself with putting the stumps in instead, and has an intrusive thought while doing so.

“For a second, I really wanted to grab the stump and just fling it into the pitch,” he tells me, shaking his head, clearly bothered by this bizarre urge. Quite the image: Sean, all alone, wanging a stump into the lovely Nursery deck, lodging it in there deeper than Arthur’s sword. There’s a bit to unpack there. I think that’s what Freud meant by the ‘death drive’. Maybe it’s got something to do with the penis. Who knows. I’m not going to spend any more of this paragraph trying to figure it out.

As we’re warming up, Sean stops me and points to the sidelines. It’s Newham CC, who have won the toss and decided to bat first. They’re all watching us with a slightly confused, pensive look on their faces. They’re a blend of teenagers and adults, and the sight of us warming up very seriously has spooked them a little. It’s dawning on them that Duray’s Boys are indeed quite a serious group of Boys.

The game begins and now Newham really are spooked. Muhammad Waqas has been given the new ball and he’s producing his finest Plough spell to date. It’s simply too quick. Just watching the corden’s expressions is entertaining. And it’s quite the corden: three slips, two gullys, a fly slip. He’s slinging thunderbolts down the offside, bowling to his field, and it feels like any ball could find an edge. One does and flies to Tom Lonnen, but he can’t hold it.

At the other end, courtesy of all this pressure, James Barron gets our first breakthrough with a nick behind to George Stanley. Lonnen then takes a wicket with his first ball, also nicking behind, and it’s 35-2.

A challenging start for Newham, but at least, they may be thinking, the worst is over. Next up will probably be just, like, a normal bowler.

Instead, it’s Azharul Haque. He’s bowling at their opener, nicely set on 20*, and we’re all waiting for that first ball with evil smiles on our faces. It comes down, and the batter doesn’t really move. He’s seen it start miles outside off, but by the time it’s passing him, the ball’s practically kissing off stump. Now he looks deeply concerned. He looks like he’s just seen his own corpse. He looks like he wants his mummy. Next ball, he’s clean bowled, bowled by the same ball Aza has bowled a million times. He’s probably relieved, if anything.

The next batter is a child. He’s far too small for a scene like this. Aza smacks his pad first ball, and it’s obviously swung too much, going miles down leg, like all of Aza’s LBW appeals, but for some perverse reason the umpire gives it. Duray decides to withdraw the appeal, and he’s called back. He spends a few overs being menaced, then departs anyway.

At the other end, their No.4, more of a teenager, a large child, with a peculiar tuft of hair sticking out of his helmet, is absolutely full of chat. He keeps comparing Tom Lonnen to Jimmy Anderson, essentially commentating his innings. Max Gumpert’s patience, down there at long on, is wearing thin. In fairness to the Cocky Child, he plays a few nice shots, hitting Duray for three successive boundaries, all with the wide worry-free eyes you get with kids who haven’t yet learned that life is mainly just sadness over what has come before and fear for what is still yet to come.

In any case, Ashish Paul, who just seems to take wickets effortlessly every time I play with him, removes said Cocky Child and takes another, reducing them to 84-6. Sean and I decide that it’s time for us from both ends, just blow this tail away, but the other nine players in this side are all gun bowlers. This side has 1,402 Plough wickets between them, Sean and I taking just two of those, so Duray is finding it slightly difficult to juggle all this talent. Discovering that Sean and I are actually more effective than any of these posers would be just too much of an existential headache for a friendly.

Instead he turns to Rohan Paul, who despite being slightly injured is sending down molten lava. He cracks their No.8 in the rib with a vicious bouncer. “He hit me for four, so, yeah,” he says with a total blank face as the No.8 lies there on the ground, contemplating the ogre of midnight. He gets him shortly after with another snorter that has him twisted and tangled, giving Stanley his fourth catch of the innings.

The innings finishes with Newham on 139-8, the final act being a strange form of public humiliation whereby the captain decided to retire a batter and bring out some poor lad in black trousers to face an over of Waqas. He lasts two balls. Hari Vignesh is watching from the sidelines and tells me the dismissed batter should have “just done a sweep”, which I guess is one way to go about dealing with 70mph yorkers.

After five overs of the second innings, the game is effectively over. Duray has decided to open with George Stanley and Leo Nieboer, leaving our dear Sean down at No.4, and Stanley is decimating anything even remotely in his arc. After 11 overs, the pair have taken Plough to 113-0, Stanley scoring 66 of those in just 40 balls. He brings up his 50 with an obscenely large six over long on. It’s basically travelled to Herne Hill. The captain, understandably shellshocked by this incessant plundering, tells Stanley that he can retire now.

“You don’t want what’s coming next, bruv,” Lonnen replies. And it’s true. In the wings we have a Middlesex academy starlet, a man with 800 runs already this season, and Max f*cking Gumpert. Oh, and Duray at No.8.

“Trust me, boys, you want to be bowling at me,” I feel like saying to them. “If anything, I’m protecting you. You should thank me. You should all give me 50 euros, in fact, right bloody now.”

The cocky child, who of course is a keeper, has gone weirdly quiet. He drops Nieboer — the second of three drops off yours truly — and now it’s his mother, on the sidelines, doing all the talking. She’s driving the boys mad, just going on and on about this child whose cocky behaviour now makes perfect sense.

Note to all parents: NOBODY GIVES A FLYING F*CK ABOUT YOUR CHILDREN — PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT THEM, unless they can bowl 75mph bouncers at terrified fully-grown adults.

Or hit perfect flicks off the pads for four, I should say. And that’s exactly what Rohan does, finishing off the innings for Plough before drinks, ending on 18* (12), Nieboer wrapping up on 43* (47).

After a delightful shower, standing in between Barron and Duray — a humbling experience — it gets decided that Nieboer’s score is in fact 44*, which qualifies him for jug avoidance, which in turn qualifies him for jug purchasing. Stanley, on the other hand, who definitely has to buy a jug, has disappeared altogether, just vanished. He ends up sending Duray £30 for a jug he never even got to enjoy.

Thankfully, though, the rest of us did. And a lovely jug it was. We try to console Sean about his TFC. I tell him he would have scored 200* against that attack, me just standing at the other end, wearing a gimp mask while he did it.

He gets very confused about a selection quandary ahead of tomorrow: we’re one short for a game in Isleworth, but Theo Burns, set to play in one of the DSG games, offers to play the Isleworth one instead, opening up a space for someone to play a DSG fixture ahead of the Euro 2024 final. Sean, set to play in Isleworth as well, thinks this means he can directly swap with Theo, and play at the DSG instead. Duray tries on several occasions to explain that this is not the case, but it’s not really going in.

Conversation wanders elsewhere, but Sean keeps bringing us back to this issue he simply refuses to understand.

“So, where are we at with this whole me playing at the DSG thing?” he says every now and again, and the whole argument starts up again. It’s perhaps my favourite part of the day.

Things go downhill after that. Someone nearly flattens me with their car on the way home, and I get home to discover I’m out of eggs, ruining my visions of a gargantuan nighttime omelette. The next day, Sean plays at Isleworth, like he was always doomed to do, and we all get our hearts broken by a Spain team that made our Brave and Beautiful Boys look like Year 10s playing against Year 11s.

But so much for all that bad nonsense. Football is a broken corrupt homogenised nightmare anyway. Time to nurse our wounds, drink a nice tall glass of milk, and let cricket resume its role as the primary tormenter of our weekends. I wouldn’t have it any other way.