Once again, in these murky early season weeks, we didn’t even know if this game would go ahead. From Thursday evening until Friday afternoon, the London metropolitan area sat glumly under a sheet of constant rain, making me fear Saturday morning would be a nightmare of mud and madness.

But no; opening the curtains on Saturday, after a good four hour’s rest, the sun shines through. Perfect day. No wind, no humidity. Leaving the big Sainsbury’s in New Cross, having grabbed my usual Alpen bars and apples, a voice behind calls out to me.

“Good luck today!” the man says, noticing my cricket bag. He’s a grey-haired, red-faced man, wheeling a trolley packed with meat and booze. He looks successful, at ease with himself.

“Thanks.”

“Hopefully the rain stays away for you.”

I look up at the blue sky. “Yeah… I mean, looks alright, doesn’t it.”

He smiles again. “Good luck.”

We go our separate ways, and I find myself resenting this friendly stranger. I wonder what he’s doing with his Saturday. Perhaps family stuff. Perhaps a Day With The Boys. Maybe the golf course. Maybe an affair, or some fiendish sex party. Maybe just… nothing. Rip the top off a few and watch Antique Roadshow, or something. What he’s not doing, for sure, is humping it to some far-flung corner of Surrey for a day of being anxious and making noise in a field. Whatever he’s doing, it probably makes more sense than this.

On the train to Reigate, returning from the toilet, I sit down and look to my left and, my god, there he is: Alex Jullienne. (Not the Sainsbury’s man… that would be deeply strange).

The thicc Aussie is smiling back at me, and for a moment I’m slightly overwhelmed: my favourite opening partner (sorry, Harry Edmonds), who I hadn’t seen in months, somehow finding the seat right next to mine; another strange example of the universe inexplicably bringing me next to my opening partner, two weeks after the same thing happened with Chris Butlin on the way to Shepperton.

As we make our way to the ground, he tells me about his recent travels to Medellin, Colombia — Pablo Escobar’s hometown, a place he sort of de facto governed for years by simply being a Big Boy with Big Drugs that everyone in America wanted. From what he tells me, Cakey had a reasonably relaxed time. He speaks lovingly about the avocados there, which apparently find their way into every meal. I think to myself that, had the roles been reversed, and I’d been to Colombia, I simply wouldn’t have made it back: either kidnapped or chopped up and lashed into the sea for Lack of Payment for Rendered Goods and Services, or maybe just consciously decided to stay there: forget this vicious sport and this cold proto-fascist country and marry some auntie out there instead.

Maybe in another life, I think to myself. For now we’re at Reigate’s second ground, staring down at a sticky-looking greenish surface, and Matt Spencer fancies a bowl. We all do. Apart from 2s debutant Niraj Thakker, maybe, because the friendly Australian is down to open alongside Spence, but isn’t actually here yet, after a nightmare morning of travel where he narrowly missed his train and then went to the wrong ground.

He arrives somewhere in the second over, and it clearly does something good for Spence’s brain, now reassured by having a full complement of Plough under his wings. The next over, he castles their opener, bowling what I’m learning is his trademark delivery: full and straight, spraying pegs, spreading their legs.

With Hari Vignesh at the other end, the No.1 and No.3 are nudging and missing a great deal. Not much respite on this slow gripping surface. And now it’s Azharul Haque, down the hill, absolutely flinging them down. Their No.3 goes to leave one, probably thinking, “Ah, lovely, this is well outside off”, but then he’s turning around and seeing his off stump clattered, the boys whooping and hollering, marvelling at what was simply the perfect inswinger. The batter gives a rueful smile, of sorts, half amazed at the brilliance, half embarrassed because, well, you missed a straight one, champion. TWO TYPES, BROTHER. TWO TYPES!

At drinks, the score 50-2, Plough are very much on top. Spence insists we can keep the final score under 150. Niraj Thakker and Aza are keeping things wonderfully tight, and you figure something has to give.

And it does. After a deeply (and rather fittingly, given the voting intentions of this part of the world) conservative first 20, Reigate go from batting like Ian Duncan Smith to plundering the ball with almost Chairman Mao Tse-Tung-like levels of indiscriminate violence. Ihtesham Aslam, bowling for the first time this year, has the Over From Hell, just wide after wide, sinking deeper and deeper into that dark place many of us have been to, including yours truly, visibly dying on stage. One of his balls even hits a helmet. Five runs. It’s quite funny, in a way.

With Reigate ‘letting one hundred flowers bloom’, as Mao once put it, Plough need some control, and in comes the star of the show: Benny Cobbett.

After just three balls, I can tell the OG Nets Daddy is having fun. He has the faint smile of a man whose brain has already worked out what the batter wants to do, and knows how to lure him into his swamp. Sure enough he does, pitching one perfectly and ragging it and trapping their captain, who had started to look set. The next ball, he darts one through fast, bowling their No.5. He’s on a hat-trick. More importantly, he’s changed the entire flavour of the game. The next ball, it’s once again on the money, coaxing the batter forward: he pops it up, falling just short of Aslam, just short of making history — and also a flex that he would no doubt bring up in every conversation, all the way to September and beyond.

He goes on to get a lovely caught behind, which is especially impressive, because our umpire — a sweet small old man — can’t actually hear. Yep. You read that right. The umpire… couldn’t hear. See, this is the kind of chickenshit nonsense you just don’t get in the 1st XI.

Cobbett finishes on 5-24 off his 8 overs, made even more impressive by the fact that his last over went for 12. Thakker comes on for a second spell — Spencer choosing to “Thakk around and find out”, as Leo Nieboer put it, which justifiably earned him a fine — and bowls neatly, but Reigate’s runs are coming too fast. They finish on 194-9, 50 too many… 47 of them extras.

The tea is lovely, but I can’t enjoy any of it, because I’m batting soon and myself and Cakey have some work to do. Cakey has a different view on tea.

“Always cash in on tea,” he says, nodding, with a mouth full of tuna sandwich. “Always cash in on tea.”

The pre-batting fear creeps in; the sun comes out. Leon Parks turns up with his daughter, who wants me to give her some throw downs, but I completely ignore her, which I still feel a bit bad about.

Out in the middle, it’s an examination. The score is 20-0 after 10 overs. These bowlers are bowling much better than we did, purely by not bowling anything short. It’s all full and on the stumps. One of them has good gas, about 65mph, nibbling it away; the other is just pure stump-to-stump accuracy. With the sun beating down and the field full of what feels like about 42 fielders, there’s a powerful intensity to the whole thing.

Again, something has to give, and it does, Cakey bowled for 9 (33). For a few overs, Michael Ainslie and Nieboer tick along, but then Nieboer, for some perverted reason, hits a cover drive at their tallest fielder, and he’s gone for 18 (57).

A collapse ensues. The ball is sticking in the pitch and the outfield is painfully slow — Ainslie hits a shot so beautifully hard it’s actually kind of insulting when it stops short — and the opposition know how to bowl on this deck. Plough are going nowhere, wallowing in the Surrey mud.

With the score 79-7, the rain comes in hard, and Nieboer — umpiring at square leg — just calls the damn thing, runs off, and starts congratulating Reigate on a “hard-fought draw”, starts planning movements for later. I think we’re done here; most agree. But no; the rain abates, and Aza and Hari go back out there.

And it’s good that they do. With the tweakers on, and the ball slipping in their hands, the pair take advantage, Hari making 19 lovely runs (including a particularly village two where he dropped his bat and ran the last one raw dog… a jarring but very funny sight) and Aza, to everyone’s delight, making a delicious 55* (46).

He can f*cking bat, this guy. When I first saw him at Brockwell Park, back in 2021, he actually seemed like more of a batter to me, despite his vicious inswingers. He is a bonafide starboy, is Aza. He hits a ball better and further than pretty much all of us. He’s also working on his defence a lot more this year, and it’s paying off. I doubt he’ll be batting at No.8 for much longer.

Despite this late experimentation with Good Batting, it’s not enough, and the game now really is over. We walk what feels like 17 miles to Reigate’s actual clubhouse — a gorgeous place — and Benny buys a pair of two pint jugs, which look all kinds of wrong.

Over beers, Will Curtis reflects on how he studied Spanish, with the hopes of meeting that alluring aforementioned Colombian auntie, and ended up with a girl from Harrow instead. Hari Vignesh accuses Ainslie of being 35. Matt Spencer accuses Matt Spencer of ruining Matt Spencer’s figures with a wayward last over. Hector Barnicoat-Hood accuses Nieboer of only doing one funny thing all day, which is fair enough, in a way, because if you spend your day on the boundary quietly moaning about your sore finger, and score 1 run, you probably do need some fun injected into your life.

And there’s plenty of it on the train to Clapham Junction. Hector buys an astonishing amount of cans for a 35-minute journey, and suddenly we’re locked into some kind of vicious stag-do, where everyone has to sink beers quickly and crush them in their hand. Hector keeps making this gormless noise while aggressively shaking his head up and down, like some awful caricature of the worst frat boy you’ve ever met, while also giving some genuinely helpful batting advice. Benny eats a medium chips and battered sausage in record time. Cake makes even easier work of his beers. Nieboer insists Aza is better, technically, than all of the top 7, which upsets the top 7.

It’s been a lovely day, despite the loss, and it ends, fittingly, at The Plough in Clapham Junction. Many of the 1st XI are still there, celebrating a great win. I get locked into some heavy Cold War chat with Jo Hockings and Sean McGurn, who can’t stop laughing at the fact that there’s an author of a book on Stalin whose actual name is Simon Sebag Montefiore (who my dad, funnily enough, went to school with). Benny and Duray teach me some Afrikaans that I immediately forget. Hector hits me in the balls, and I decide it’s time to leave.

Until next time, you gorgeous 2nd XI kings. We start the proper stuff against Epic CC next week, so I’ll end this ridiculous screed with a very clear message Benny sent us all later in the evening, which captures our mood nicely:

“Let’s f*cking win the league.”