With the twos pushing top spot in the division, sitting narrowly behind Blue Wings and Park Hill, this game was a hotly anticipated affair. Stand-in skipper Oli Lonsdale made it clear that any lateness would be punished with extreme prejudice and perhaps even violence, so it was unsurprising to see half the team there at 12pm on the dot. Damon Greeney and Tom Elmsie were actually outside the ground before it even opened. Monster mentality.

Looking at the pitch, a collective sense of horror percolated through the Plough. Heavy rain had fallen the night before and made the deck Victoria Sponge-like. The earth visibly moved when you mashed your thumb into it. The thing was kind of fascinating from a scientific perspective. We were relieved to see Lonsdale win the toss and bowl.

The twos started beautifully. Greeney, as always, hit relentless line and length, while Lonsdale scalped both openers with vicious deliveries that found the edge and flew into the gloves of Michael Ainslie, reducing the opposition to 14-2. This was my first time playing with Londsale, and his send-offs were even more volcanic than I had hoped for. You could almost see the blood vessels bursting out of his skull.

Sutton Challengers enjoyed something of a recovery after Lonsdale’s assault. The pitch did behave a bit weirdly — one good length ball bounced so high over the batter’s head that it was called wide — but nor was it demonic. Short stuff sat up nicely for the batters. Soon they were 98-2, looking cosy and even dangerous. Up stepped Giordy Diangenda, hitting the top of off with a perfectly-pitched ball that confused the batter so much he forgot to play a shot. That’s two league wickets in two games for our talkative resident DJ — one of the most improved players at the Plough this year.

Despite that intervention, the middle overs were still, for the most part, rather sloppy. An 86-run partnership ensued, their No.4 racking up 84, and for a moment it looked as if they may breach 250. Thankfully, swing king Azharul Haque — who, based on current form, gets in the ones ahead of Jimmy Anderson any day — took three valuable lower order wickets, supported at the other end by Jo Hockings.

A couple weeks earlier, I wrote some rather cutting words about Hockings, likening his brain to that of a demented 15-year-old. His performance in Epsom showed something else. He fielded like a hawk and bowled with sensational control. He showed everyone the real Hockings: a man of genuine cricketing class, not just some debauched menace.

Sutton Challengers finished on 217-7 — 20 or 30 too many, you could argue, but still very much chaseable.

Openers Leo Nieboer and Ainslie, as you might expect, started the Plough innings conservatively, to say the least. After five overs the score read 1-0, and it made both batters slightly nervous. Nieboer took 24 balls to get off the mark — extremely snail-like even for his obscene standards and a generally painful thing to watch for all involved.

Conscious that we weren’t an Australia Test side hellbent on destroying Test cricket and in fact a very good-looking twos team chasing 200+ in a big game, Ainslie started to play some shots, launching a few beautiful drives to the boundary and running hard with Nieboer. The pair racked up 66 runs together, and by the time Ainslie departed for 38, the twos had the doable task of going at six an over for the last 20.

And with the excellent George Stanley at three, the twos more or less did that, for a time, bringing the Plough to the point of needing 70 off the last 10 overs. The was in the balance: two set batters, Sutton bowling intelligently, fuller and straighter than the Plough. Two young Surrey players, despite being almost unbelievably diminutive, were extremely impressive, one swinging the ball away from the right-hander and the other ragging leggies, nearly recreating the Warne-Gatting ball against Stanley early in his innings.

It was painful, being out there. The pitch was slow; Sutton gave Nieboer and Stanley minimal room, forcing them to hit to the packed long boundary and run endless twos and even threes. We even ran a four at one point, which nearly gave me the aneurysm I have long expected will come my way, sooner or later.

By the 31st over, Nieboer could see stars. He could see into his future, and it was full of horrors. He saw demons and bonfires on the hill and huge bats swooping down from the sky. Blood boiled behind the eyes. He had been out there for what felt like seven hours; the pressure of the chase and the need to run everything and find the boundary, while regularly failing to do so, turned his mind to jelly, leaving behind a manic mess. At one point, during another in-between-overs ramble, Stanley (who finished on 38 as well) begged Nieboer to stop talking, because his words were threatening to scramble his brain indefinitely.

Nieboer’s stand ended pathetically, run out for 80 after a dropped catch at cover, leaving Jo Hockings (9 off 12) with a difficult job at four. The twos needed to go big. And they had to do it while getting used to a strange slow pitch. It was too much to ask. Benny Cobbett (12 off 5) swiped some important boundaries, and briefly looked set to produce that big 20-plus over we needed, but he was stumped, the pressure getting to him too.

The Plough kept pushing right till the end, needing 25 off the last over, but it wasn’t to be. A sad affair. On another day, with better bowling in the middle overs and a faster start with the bat, the game could have gone very differently. The result still stings, two days on. As the skipper himself said, on multiple occasions: “I f&@king HATE losing, boys.”

Me too, mate. Me too. But that dark hatred will fuel us, like Bane or Glenn McGrath, when we take on Park Hill next week, as the twos continue their rabid chase for wickets, bulk runs, and, of course, promotion.

Match report produced by Leo Nieboer