Like predicted, today’s sun is an absolute hammer. Highs of 34C are expected today. Even as early as 09:00, the faint dew of quiet sweat is already resting on Leo Nieboer’s forehead as he stands outside with his morning cigarette, feeling sick and still half asleep and looking up at a clear blue sky that’s fat and glossy with heat, thinking: “Yeah, Jesus, we better bat first today.”

A few hours later, it’s possible we may not even need to toss. It’s 12:35 and only six Croydon players are here; they’re five minutes away from not having their requisite eight men required for a legitimate toss and forfeiting it to us.

At 12:38, there are now three Croydon players whose directions have somehow taken them to the velodrome next door, all of them peering nervously over the fence and having a feverish discussion with their captain, who’s stood next to Nieboer.

“See?” he says to him, motioning towards his stranded boys. “We have eight players now.”

Nieboer shakes his head. “You need eight players on the grounds by 12:40. They’re awfully close; I’ll give them that. They’ve done well. But, again, they need to be ON THE GROUNDS.”

“Oh, come on, man,” he whines, throwing his arms up in the air, then turns to his boys and shouts at them to just clamber over, which they do — a very sad sight — looking a bit like those January 6 protestors scaling the walls at the Capitol, despite there being, like, actual stairs right next to them.

So we do toss. Nieboer wins; Ploughmans are batting anyway. The boys are thrilled — none more so than Greg Willis, who spent last night surrounded by drag queens and tearing the arse off several martinis, then drove two hours in the sticky heat from Hastings to Dulwich this morning, so he’s not exactly a picture of luminescence.

He lies down; Umar Iqbal and Yanni Baveas pad up and head out there. The latter is bowled in the fourth over and Nieboer comes in at No.3 and discovers that this is not actually the belter of a pitch and rapid outfield that we all just kind of assumed it would be. It’s actually rather slow; none of the bowlers are that quick so it’s a particularly sticky affair. Shots that normally go for four are holding up, so there’s a lot of lung-busting twos that Iqbal manages just fine but Nieboer and his sports hernia and 10-cigarettes-a-day habit could certainly do without.

For 25 overs, then, it’s a vicious war of attrition. Umar and Nieboer fight hard; Croydon keep things tight. Every now and again the Plough duo manage an 8+ run over but never really manage to get hold of them and push the knife in. Even with Umar batting as well as he’s batted all season — both solid and inventive, determined and attack-minded, ending up with 80 (99), Nieboer out for 36 (67), each dismissal borne out of sheer brain-busting exhaustion more than anything else.

Chris Ovens comes in and suddenly Nieboer is thinking that maybe it is quite easy to bat out there. He’s absolutely lacing shots to the boundary. He had never seen the guy bat before — never even met him — but as soon as Ovens arrived at the Griffin, and Nieboer heard the Kiwi accent and saw the rig and those long, long levers, he knew he had something to work with.

And now, out there in the middle, he’s using those levers to bypass the slow outfield by simply hitting it hard and long — which Nieboer and Umar, the cuckold virgins that they are, just couldn’t really do — and ends up with a 35-ball fifty, taking Plough to a decent score of 212-6.

Tea is a typically excellent affair. There’s bhaji wraps popping with flavour; tuna bagels with what Umar deems to be an ideal amount of tuna; flapjacks so good that Callum Daley is finding it hard to get his head around them; and also those long thin ice lollies in tight thin frube-like packaging that’s maddeningly impossible to break open.

Aman Jain, still injured, is here to watch us, not the 1s (take note, Duray), and fancies a drink. But the clubhouse is booked out for a first birthday — an extremely dumb but popular excuse for adults to get fall-down, weeping drunk — so he can’t access the bar. Thankfully there’s a youngish bald lad behind the bar who brings out beers and sodas for us (Aman). We call him Good Jake.

I suppose the existence of Bad Jake always implied the existence of a Good Jake, out there somewhere, but Daley and I are astounded to find him here, just down the road, hiding under our noses this whole time. We should really organise a meeting of Jakes, at some point.

After the customary warm up, during which Qammar Jamshaid describes Yanni’s hip rotations as “very funny”, Daley and Niraj Thakker make a decent start, bowling heat and control respectively. The former dislodges their opener, caught nicely by Greg Willis.

Even at this early stage, though, Nieboer can sniff something wrong in the air. For one thing, the pitch is playing better now — slices are racing the boundary in ways they very much weren’t earlier. Additionally, and much to the entire 2nd XI’s mounting anger, their umpire — doing it from both ends, which kind of tells you everything — has a decidedly different idea of what constitutes a wide ball.

And as the overs go by, we just can’t get these two f*ckers out. One of them is a classic cross bat opener; the other is a child with more technique than any of the supposed ‘men’ on this Croydon side but who doesn’t use any of it for his first 10 overs, just kind of prods and survives. “Too young to drive,” was Daley’s contribution there. Yanni, at mid off, sticks his tongue out at the child and swirls it around, which I’m pretty sure isn’t allowed.

The cross batter should be out for, like, 15, looping up a catch to Ovens. Dropped. A little while later, he does it again, this time off the bowling of Benny Cobbett. Dropped by the big man again. In total, the 2s drop five catches, and the score just keeps ticking along, and no matter how often or how loudly Nieboer corrals his boys, heads are dropping.

Meanwhile, heads are also getting hot, especially Nieboer’s. Qammar smashes the child on the foot — on the FOOT — and it’s not given out. The cross batter wants to retire and come back in; we tell him he can’t do that, and now that’s a whole argument. We argue over whether something’s a four or a six. At this point, Ploughmans 2nd XI and Croydon 4th XI are like a married couple whose relationship has soured to the point where every verbal interface morphs into an argument. And still, the wides. The f*cking wides. They give 18 of them, in total. Maybe five are valid.

Still, it’s on us, being in this dire position. We haven’t bowled well; we’ve fielded even worse. The 2nd XI haven’t really been in a fight this season. It’s like we’ve expected this to be easy, unsure how to operate in this rarefied oxygen, used to the simple act of just mastering the opponent and not at all used to the fact that with tight cricket games it’s actually one’s own self out there, in the middle, to be fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms.

The 1st XI are now here having, as Giordy Diangienda would put it, “smoked their oppo”, and Nieboer kind of hates that they’re seeing this. It’s a little bit like having a veteran pornstar watch you lose your virginity, sadly observing you fail to impress from the other side of the room, unable to help. The score is 186-1 and they’re just a few overs from what will now be a routine win.

But then, well, cricket happens. Nieboer and Willis combine to run out the cross batter, then Nieboer catches the child, and suddenly a game that felt like a dry sponge five minutes ago is now ablaze with life and energy. Willis, bowling in tandem with Qammar — both men just bowling yorkers, as instructed — gets a catch behind, and now Croydon are quiet and The Boys are roaring, howling like hyenas. Every ball is an event. We are up and about. They need about 12 runs from three overs and oh my god we can actually do this, somehow.

But then, well, cricket happens again. A couple of swishes fly close to fielders but not close enough, and that’s the game. We have lost. The 1st XI come over to console us, but Nieboer doesn’t really want to hear it. We’ve shat the bed and that’s kind of all there is to it.

“Yeah, you can’t drop five catches,” Suri puts it bluntly.

But this is Ploughmans, so the sadness doesn’t last long. Soon we’re at the DSG and having beers in the shower and discussing very animatedly all the different kinds of beers you can have, the various contexts for beers, and which one is the best. It’s a lively debate, and we bring it outside to the 1st XI.

“Airport beer is up there,” Daley offers.

“The first beer on club day,” Umar muses.

“That cheeky lunchtime beer, when you have to go back to work,” Duray suggests.

“The half day lunchtime beer,” Nieboer adds.

“Curry beer,” Daley interjects.

Sean McGurn shakes his head. “HATE a curry beer. HATE it.”

“4pm Friday beer — that’s a very good beer,” Iskandar Eaton nods.

Nieboer concludes that post space exploration beer would probably top all of those beers, by some distance. Think about it: for months you’ve been without good food, good drink, normal sleeping arrangements, f*cking gravity itself, your bone density changing — and then you land in the sea and get whisked to that decompression chamber and finally they let you out and stick a cold frothy one in front of you. HORRIBLE day to be that beer, let me tell you.

Giordy summons me over and just starts talking at me, which is actually quite nice, because I’m a bit tired of being asked things by this point, so I just sit there as he rattles through his trifecta of topics — cricket, work, women — that never changes and whose content is essentially the same, with only minor variations, me just kind of making the right noises at the appropriate times.

Now Duray has an idea: a 1s vs 2s bowl off. Nobody can hit the stumps. Niraj Thakker keeps chucking it. Iskandar keeps reminding us of his average of 11. Ritik Jaat insists on coming off his full run up and flings down these awful full tosses. We’re all so sh*t. The first person to hit the stumps, of course, is Sean — a lovely yorker. He sprints off into the distance and basically gets fully naked, then realises he’s running straight towards a group of total strangers who have now most likely seen his cock, so in a way they’re also a Plough now, having seen that thing.

His partner, Alice, watches it all with a detached amusement. I ask her if Sean also brings beers into the shower, at home, and sings We’ve Conquered All of Surrey while banging on the walls. She declines to comment.

Later on, I’m speaking to her and Aman about the extremely bizarre rituals cricket players — particularly batters — inflict on themselves.

“It’s the kind of behaviour that should land you in an asylum,” I’m saying. “Imagine someone — and I’ve seen this A LOT — leaving their jockstrap unwashed game after game until the thing can stand up by itself. Or a 200kg tradesman insisting on sitting down to pee, on matchdays. Don’t even bother picturing what wives and girlfriends have to go through.”

Alice nods; she gets it. Aman, though, can’t understand. These routines to protect one’s precarious balance in the delicate interplay of forces at loose between the living and dead just don’t make sense to people who can bowl like him.

What does make sense, however, is more jugs. Many many more jugs. And as the solstice light goes from orange to purple to dark blue and finally to blackness, everything else starts to recede, the boys laughing together in the balmy heat, no longer caring about anything at all.