Many months we had waited for this day. Over the winter my thoughts would periodically drift to that defeat to London Welsh — a big loss, one that killed any chances of promotion — and the Phil Brown-esque circle we formed afterwards, where we discussed Serious Cricket Things in the glow of the warm September sun.

Much talk and even more thinking. But no more. The time had finally come to get angry and tune the instruments — to play this wretched game.

Sitting on the train at Waterloo, anxious and still half-asleep, Chris Butlin emerges out of nowhere, panting, the faint dew of quiet sweat resting on his shiny forehead. The Victoria line had been giving him troubles, he said, going painfully slow, and he’d had to run for the train, bursting through the doors less than a minute before departure time.

As the train churned into gear and lurched west, a number of critical questions began to dawn on us. How late do these trains run? How is my phone battery already on 54%? Where’s my jumper? Are we really going to spend eight hours outside in this vicious cold? Can I actually see the ball any more?

These are the terrible realities that you don’t consider from the comfort of your home in January, but they were at the forefront of our jangled minds now, as we walked into another new ground, a new place — Shepperton CC.

A gorgeous ground, as it turns out — the kind of thing you just don’t expect to see inside the M25. The pitch is encircled by large trees rustling gently in the wind, creating a pleasant nestled effect. You felt hemmed in. The clubhouse is modern, well-stocked, weirdly clean. Plenty of benches and tables. Showers. Bog roll in the toilets. A distinctly hospitable vibe here.

The actual deck, by contrast, looked menacing, filthy. I briefly considered calling my Mum and asking her to pick me up. The colours were dark, mud-like, with a weird wet shine. These were not the markings of your normal god-fearing beige-green surface. This was some mutant April concoction. It made me think of playing Brian Lara Cricket on the PS2, where you could select a Day 5 pitch that was ‘poor’ and ‘sticky’ and made the ball rag round corners.

In any case, it was a grass wicket, not that awful tedious astro — something very rare in April. And with an extremely short boundary on one side, there was indeed the possibility of runs for anyone who dug deep and got themselves in.

Openers Leo Nieboer and Chris Butlin didn’t. They found themselves hounded and menaced by a pair of opening bowlers who both played for the Shepperton 1st XI. The ball skidded and nipped off the surface and made us rather uncomfortable. Everything was on the stumps. Hardly the ideal thing for April, when the movements and eyes just aren’t there yet. Nieboer faced seven balls and could have been out three or four times before being castled. Butlin followed shortly after. 6-2. Trouble. Burning existential questions on the sideline.

Debuant Max McCreery and veteran Steve Britto had a mammoth job on their hands. The hounding and menacing continued — balls beat the bat, pads were hit. The score hardly moved. I believe they call this an ‘examination’. Yet they survived it and went beyond mere surviving to eventually cutting loose and producing one of the most impressive 100-run stands I’ve ever seen at this club, not just turning the game around but effectively winning it for the Plough.

McCreery, before this game, was known as a destructive LMS player. Here, on this nasty deck, he was something much more interesting. While Britto (51 off 82) gives off a busy and talkative and domineering aura, his brain visibly whirring, McCreery (62 off 104) is perfectly still, almost monk-like. There was no noise in his head. He sets up very elegantly and plays the ball late and decisively. He waits patiently for balls he can hit to the boundary and keeps out those he can’t, and views them all with the same calm neutral glare. I think we have a serious player here.

Ben Fletcher and Benny Cobbett came in to add some useful late runs, taking the final score to 157-4 — a hard score to chase on this demonic surface.

At tea, we had something I hadn’t come across before: a kind of build your own sandwich situation, with buttered baguettes and a range of cold meats and cheese available to deploy at one’s leisure. I briefly considered, in my post-low-score funk, to build a complete monstrosity, packing the thing with eight or nine slices of cheese and lathering the outside with branston pickle, then doing the Shivnarine Chanderpaul face paint thing, but with hummus — just to get inside the oppo’s heads. But that seemed a little too heavy for a pre-season friendly, so I made a normal ham and cheese thing instead.

Matt Spencer had a much better idea vis-a-vis intimidating the opponent: a jog around the pitch, followed by some intensive catching practice, during which Tom Glynne-Jones took some catches that would have sent the nation of India into a three-week meltdown if MS Dhoni had taken them. It’s a small thing, the warm up, but it’s also an example of those extra 1% details that separate decent teams from proper teams — something we spoke about during that end-of-season circle-jerk, all those months ago.

In the field, the boys were Keen For It, making endless noise. Muhammad Waqas, also on Plough debut, sent down some rockets, clattering the opener’s stumps and then putting his blue jumper straight back on. First-changers Matt Spencer and Lewis Wilby didn’t need any looseners, taking four wickets between them (three for Wilby, one for Spence) in a short space of time, reducing Shepperton to 41-4 on the stroke of drinks.

Spence’s wicket, a lovely clean bowled, should really be attributed to Chris Butlin, who, alongside looking devastatingly handsome at cover, expertly stopped probably the best cover drive that particular No.3 had ever played, which very clearly turned his brain to jelly and caused him to play a way-too-early drive the very next ball.

In the field, Nieboer and TGJ were finding their rhythm — not in any useful fielding sense, but more just reacquainting themselves with the phrases one says while out in the field. It had been a fair few months since I’d told anyone to “work hard”, especially after being reprimanded at Christmas dinner for shouting it at my 83-year-old grandmother across the table, so it was nice to dust off these generic phrases and let them breathe again.

“One brings two here, lads!”

“Use that extra ball, Waqas!”

“Don’t get bored, Spence!”

“Walking in with the bowler!”

“Quickly round, boys, quickly round!”

“Anyone heard from my nan? She keeps ignoring my voice notes!”

With all this extremely useful chat going around, combined with tight fielding and precise good-length bowling, Shepperton crumbled to 46-8. TGJ joined the party with a two-wicket maiden, turning one so brutally that you could see it jag from mid wicket. We only had one more wicket to take — a member of the Shepperton side was at the local police station, reporting a theft, which was weird, because I really thought nobody saw me taking those catalytic converters.

A brief rally ensued. Benny Cobbett came on and found himself on the receiving end of some classic tailender swinging. Spencer told Nieboer to get warm, to entice either a wayward big shot or a 30-run over that brings the game alive again. But it didn’t come to pass; a player called ‘Totti’ — who looked and behaved nothing like the former Roma forward — attempted a two that wasn’t there, the bails whipped off expertly by Fletcher, and that was that.

After the game, we whisked ourselves off to Spelthorne CC, where the 3rd XI had romped to a Prasball-inspired victory of their own. A good number of us hunkered down in a large dingy clubhouse, sipping Kronenbergs while a wedding party happened in the room next to us. I briefly considered heading in there and mumbling some obscene entreaties to the bridesmaids and grabbing the microphone, Kanye West style, and hitting the unsuspected guests with a full rendition of Dirty Old Plough.

But this manic notion passed quickly. I was happy in our booth, admiring the remarkable size of Yanni Baveas’s hands and ripping Benny to shreds for thinking olives and anchovies on a pizza isn’t absolutely insane — but most of all just grinning at the fact that we were finally back, all of us together in some obscure part of West London again, with so much to look forward to over the next few months.