Battersea Park is a weird place to play cricket. There’s just too much going on. You’ve got an endless deluge of runners, for one thing, circling the park like shit in a drainpipe — a constant steady bassline of slapping pounding feet. Further inside, on the green, sports of all kinds are being played out: ultimate frisbee, football, rounders games that just sound like girls having a collective panic attack. Some guy is setting up a large camera and a tent, for unknown reasons. A couple of nuns are taking a walk together. Another group is having a feverish argument about god knows what. Dogs roam around excitedly, heads moving side to side, taking in the tremendous amount of smells and activity on display.

And, of course, all those yummy mummies, wearing tight leggings and nervously sipping coffees, their sleep-deprived faces kind of glazed over and ash-coloured. Sadly, the presence of yummy mummies also means the presence of children — and, jesus, there are a HELL of a lot of them here on this cloudy Saturday morning. Leo Nieboer, walking into the park and cursing his phone for somehow being on 45% already, mistakenly cuts through Go Ape, a huge and terrifying nucleus of screaming kids, and he feels very very uneasy. Any man with a cricket bag and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth should definitely not be allowed within 100ft of these little f*ckers, by law.

Thankfully, Nieboer makes it through, and finds the Battersea Park Cricket Pavilion. Yanni Baveas is already there. Soon, by around 11:58am, every Plough player is here, present and correct, standing around and murmuring about how we absolutely must bowl first today. Only Giordy Diangienda reckons we should bat. The pitch, uncovered and hit by rain this week, looks like Nieboer’s face when he hasn’t shaved for three or four days — many ominous patches.

“Where the f*ck are these guys, man?” Giordy’s asking, looking around and shaking his head.

It’s a good question. Nieboer and their skipper, Gurpreet, had agreed to push for an early start, given the fading late August light and a forecast predicting steady rain from about 17:00 onwards. But now, at 12:35, only, like, five of them are here, and for some reason Gurpreet wins the toss and decides he’ll have a bowl.

Walking out to bat with Michael Ainslie at 12:55, Nieboer finds it very surreal to see just five fielders standing there. He feels a pang of sympathy for Gurpreet, then gratitude for his own unbelievably punctual Plough, who are excellent soldiers and would, I think, help Nieboer foster a military coup in Central America, if he asked.

He then quickly realises why Gurpreet wanted a bowl. He’s delivering the first over, and the pitch is spitting cobras. Balls on a good length and rearing up and absolutely flying past the noses of Ainslie and Nieboer. Some hit our gloves; one hits Ainslie flush on the throat. It’s unsettling, to say the least.

But the two manage to hang in there, taking advantage of the occasional wayward delivery, Ainslie looking especially potent today. He slaps a short one down the ground for a one-bounce four, and Nieboer’s about to turn around and do the glove tap thing with him before realising that the trajectory of the ball’s bounce is heading straight for a young woman, walking along the path with her headphones in. We all shout at her, but it makes no difference. The ball smacks her on the arm, and she’s not exactly thrilled.

Ainslie manages to put that episode of vicious battery behind him, though, and the pair are now dominating out here. Sinjun’s heads have completely dropped. By drinks, the score 96-0, Plough are in an unlikely ideal position.

On the sidelines, Nicko Dowell is here, doing some ‘parenting’, which turns out to be just sitting there putting away Tyskies while his daughter plays on an iPad. He has a conversation with her that goes something like:

“You want to stay here, or go home for nap time?”

“Stay!”

“Well, I’ll need to go and get another four-pack, then — or we can go home and have nap time?”

“Stay!”

“I think you want nap time, don’t you.”

“Yeah!”

After drinks, Nieboer throws away another 50, out for 43 (57). Chris Ovens comes in and the pair add another 60 or so, taking Plough to around 160-1 at the 30 over mark — a truly perfect position.

Then things somewhat fall apart. Chris Butlin almost skips out there, a huge beaming smile across his face, excited to bat with Ainslie, his dear friend, but then gets barbequed by the boy a few balls later for 1. Callum Daley, Benny Cobbett and Matt Spencer are out for 1 1 and 0 respectively, and suddenly there’s no momentum.

Even so, Ainslie — now with Yanni Baveas — is still finding boundaries here and there, including a monster six down the ground. He’s looking totally impenetrable and violent all at once. It’s a delight to watch. And when he gets to his 100, the boys absolutely erupt, bursting with love and admiration for a dynamite player and an even better bloke. Nieboer wants to get him the showers right now, to show his personal appreciation.

The innings ends with Plough 213-8, courtesy of two bombs from Yanni in the last over, including a six to cow corner that brings out a genuine “WHOAH” from everyone watching, not unlike that crowd reaction you got on Wii Sports.

During a tea that includes lovely samosas and sandwiches with suspiciously vague wet white matter inside, Nieboer is feeling pessimistic. Jon Ryves, down here to watch, brings up the Met Office forecast, and it’s not pretty. A radar shows a large patch of rain approaching — this unholy thick blanket that looks set to hang over the entire Greater London area and kill any chances of a result here.

In any case, the boys get out there, and it occurs to Nieboer that Giordy, for once, was quite right: batting first WAS the way to go. It’s getting dark now; the skies are grey and ugly; light rain is spitting down; and Liam Gray is getting this thing to move, baby.

He gets a wicket in the first over — a horrible slice caught behind — then elicits another edge, flying past Ainslie and too far away from Benny Cobbett at first slip. The ball is effectively past Ainslie. Somehow he sticks a hand out, his body nearly fully horizontal, and pouches it. The boys shriek like hyenas. What a day this gorgeous man is having.

Damon Greeney — or Raymond Beanie, as we have started to call him, Mr Beanie being a malevolent alter ego who steals cricket balls and practices witchcraft — gets in on the act too, just relentlessly doing Damon Greeney/Raymond Beanie things, bowling their dangerous opener, followed by another wicket, caught by Matt Spencer. Nieboer also takes a catch, and suddenly these blokes are 49-6 and oh god we can actually win this.

The boys are positively frothing. They are animals — a vicious breed of mammal that survives on wickets and wickets alone, and goodness gracious are they hungry. It makes Nieboer think of going to Old Trafford as a kid, when United were good, and how the Stretford End’s noise would sort of suck the ball into the net. Something similar’s happening here; our energy alone is drawing wickets into its ravenous maw, and it’s just glorious.

Damon grabs four wickets in total, Liam with three. Disturbingly, though, rain is steadily falling now, threatening to veer into ‘yeah let’s walk off’ territory, so Nieboer brings on Benny Cobbett to speed things up a bit, hoping we can get to the 20 over mark — the minimum overs required for a DLS result. He does the perfect job, taking two wickets in two balls, including one where Gurpreet treads on his own stumps and can’t quite believe it. Nieboer has to politely invite him to f*ck off, and — credit where it’s due — he does.

With one wicket to go, the rain is really falling now, and a team of worse blokes would have undoubtedly gone off and refused to come back on. Nieboer is unbelievably tense; only getting 10 points from here would be a real punch in the dick. Thankfully he has Matt Spencer, his fourth ball being caught amazingly by Benny — his third catch — and Ploughmans 2nd XI have a delicious 20 points.
Nieboer and Spence — vice captain today — make a swift beeline for the showers. We both laugh at our sports cocks, and congratulate each other on what has been a wonderful day. Ainslie comes in and we should really have given him a guard of honour, or something.

Sticking to the theme of cock stuff, we head to the Prince Albert, just outside the park, and settle in for a serious drinking session. Lewys Evans — who started drinking at 11:30 and came to watch and told one of the Sinjun players who’d got a golden duck that he’d ‘batted well’ — is bringing us beer after beer, seriously pushing his case for more games in the 2nd XI next season.

Butlin is struggling to find his rhythm, out here in the middle. The words aren’t coming easily; he can’t find the middle of his conversational bat. Nieboer tries to get him going by singing Don’t You Want Me by the Human League but only using the lyrics “you were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar”, nothing else, and suddenly there’s a glint in the eye and a smile across the face. We sing his new hit song, The Plough Are Pumping For Love, and now he’s really back. We start to discuss who at this club would be in the ‘Worst Shaggers XI’, and Ainslie and I realise we’d just be opening together again, which is nice.

The evening progresses — or rather degenerates — and it’s a gorgeous affair. Spence keeps demanding carafes of alcohol; Ainslie’s song gets a serious blast; Lewys is now dangerously drunk. We’re standing outside and some strangers, even drunker than we are, keep knocking glasses off the ledge. Nieboer counts about five separate smashes — one of which is his f*cking Guinness — and it almost becomes comforting, this high pitched staccato eruption of noise behind us, every few minutes.

Liam Gray tells me a story from Notting Hill Carnival that’s so funny we’re both leaning forward at 90 degrees and wheezing by the end of it, but is also so lurid that he had to insist on not talking about it here, in print — which is fair, I suppose, but upsets my journalistic responsibilities. I mean, what if Ed Snowden kept all that shit to himself?

More beers. More glasses smash. More degeneration. The boys move inside; Benny buys a jug. Nieboer and Liam’s friend, Muz, have a long conversation about breastmilk. Butlin has another song that just goes “The Nibbler boys are coming” or “The 20 points are coming” to the tune of We Like To Party by Vengaboys. Lewys is now non-verbal, head down in his chair and eyes closed like an old man at Christmas. Callum Daley is concerned: Lewys is supposed to pick him up at 10:30 tomorrow for a game in Highgate. Ainslie wonders whether Lewys has actually died. But no; suddenly he’s up and about, murmuring something about getting shots. Nieboer considers tasering him, out of general principle.

The night threatens to kick on. Daley’s place is not far from here. Nieboer thinks about it — gets almost bundled into a vehicle by Butlin — but decides against it. He’s had seven beers and his phone’s on 2%. Those are not good numbers. He orders an Uber, but then his phone dies, so he has to wander around, drunkenly and without a plan, just kind of hoping some poor bastard takes him home.

Amazingly, the Uber driver notices him, and now Nieboer is shooting back south, the world around him spinning, a broad smile across his face after a day where everything somehow managed to work out perfectly.