In a way, this game starts the night before, at AJ Prasad’s engagement party. Leo Nieboer gets there with his girlfriend, Livia, and is vaguely haunted by the fact that almost all of his 2nd XI are there, drinking away, clearly set in for a big night on this mild Friday evening.

It’s a lovely affair. There’s a keg of beer and a proper food spread. Within five minutes, Liam Gray is accusing Rahul Nair of India having “maybe one good bowler out of 1.4 billion people”; Yanni Baveas apologises to Livia, who is sadly quite used to this nonsense, by now.

We talk about the size of Bad Jakes’s balls. Sean McGurn tells us about the time he first made a meal for his girlfriend, Alice — a carbonara — and her only comment was that the pasta, Rigatoni (or “Bigatoni”, as Sean calls it), was rather big. Chris Butlin advocates creating a charity dedicated to teaching Thai ladyboys CPR. Simon Carson gives Nieboer a hard time in the toilets. Duray Pretorius tells Nieboer about a dream where he’s on a plane that’s crashing and everyone’s panicking but he’s all good, just going through his deep breathing exercises. Nieboer counters with a recent dream where he’s with his brother and they’re in a graveyard digging their dad’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, but Nieboer can’t help with the digging because he’s really hungry, irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge bags of crisps so he can’t really dig.

So, yes… a good night. Nieboer comes away from it in fine spirits. The morning after, however, is pure sticky hell. Jo Hockings has pulled out, so Nieboer will now go up to open, and for some reason he feels deathly ill, almost like every cell in his body wants to vomit, needs to vomit, but can’t. On the train to West Croydon, he just kind of sits there in dumb animal pain, wondering if there’ll ever come a time when he doesn’t feel like this.

At the ground, him and Tom Elmslie can’t quite believe the pitch. As Elmo put it, the thing looks like some rare and heinous skin condition. It reminds Nieboer of those videos of drought-striken landscapes you’d see on TV back in the day. We may honestly need another Liveaid, just for this pitch.

Thankfully, we’re not playing here, it turns out. Their captain, Niraj, informs me that our pitch is down the hill, through the bushes, so we all bivouac our way to a pitch that’s not a whole lot better — on a big slope and both run ups at a serious upward incline.

Niraj is very adamant that we can’t piss in the bushes, because they get in trouble with Croygas, the sports center whose grounds we’re on. Grayzer has serious problems with this.

“No way am I f*cking walking up there every time I need a piss,” he says flatly, pointing over at the main clubhouse, which is pretty far away, maybe five minutes on foot. “How much is the fine, Leo? I’ll just pay it now, so I’m covered.”

“Yeah,” Nieboer nods, thinking. “They can only fine you once. They surely can’t fine you for every piss, can they?”

“Exactly,” he says triumphantly. "How would you keep count? You'd need a piss log of some kind."

He walks off towards the bushes with a spring in his step.

Nieboer wins the toss and decides to bowl. The very first ball of the game, bowled by Liam Gray, is dropped. After two overs, the score 19-0, you can already sense a measure of frustration percolating through the group. John Walton, in particular, is close to having an aneurism. Croydon’s umpires are outright refusing to give any LBWs, and at one point, after a particularly ridiculous denial, Nieboer is briefly concerned that Walton may actually maim and possibly kill the poor bastard.

At the same time, we’re not helping ourselves. On this tricky pitch, there’s too many short balls sitting up for them to hit. And… yes… more dropped catches. Like syphilis or a toxic partner you just can’t help going back to, dropped catches are embedding their long tendrilly fingers into our very souls, it seems, infecting our central nervous systems and turning our brains to jelly.

Thankfully, at least, we have Damon Greeney, a man immune to syphilis or toxic partners, his only true love being line and length (and maybe his wife and two lovely daughters, who Nieboer met the night before and feels worried about what he said to them, because he can’t quite remember). Combined with Nicko Dowell’s challenging medium pace, they help bring about a stem in the tide that reduces Croydon from 102-1 off 20 to 134-3 off 30 overs, bringing Plough right back into the game.

But then heads start to go again. More catches go down. Nieboer briefly considers setting himself on fire. It’s something of a messy last 10 overs, despite picking up some wickets. On the last ball of the innings, it goes straight through to Yanni Baveas, but they manage to run two, somehow — it’s like those clips you see of really awful games in India where batters are sprinting up and down and it’s pandemonium, the fielding side missing and missing, slipping into the realm of Genuine Farce.

The final score is 202, and there’s an unspoken feeling that it should have been 160. The boys make the long walk to Croygas for their tea. Nieboer, Grayzer and Greeney stay put. Grayzer assures the Croydon boys that they’re fine to leave their bags.

“Don’t worry about it getting nicked,” he’s saying. “I’m hard as f*ck, mate. I’ve got tattoos. I’d love to see them try.”

Five balls into the chase, Nieboer is out, nicking off, a real opener’s dismissal, f*cked by some late swing and frozen feet — hardly the ideal start when chasing 200+ on a tricky deck. Callum Daley, promoted to No.3, comes in and counterpunches, looks excellent, him and Steve Britto doing something of a rebuild. Grayzer is trying to cheer Nieboer up by getting him to imagine certain Australian men’s test players engaging in mutual masturbation. It kind of helps.

Britto departs for 11, and finally Chris Butlin gets a bat, despite constant threats of being moved down the order for less noodly-armed more alpha pinch hitters. Him and Daley look excellent, taking us to 70-2 at drinks, Ploughmans, at this stage, well in the game. The 21st over is perfect, exactly the plan agreed: push quick singles, punish bad balls, grind them down. This pair can get us there, Nieboer is thinking, now umpiring.

But then, well, cricket happens. Butlin holes out, Daley gets bowled by one that stays low for 45, Nicko chops on. And by the 28th over, something in the air has shifted, some departure of the essence of absolute rage from this doomed contest. Elmo and Yanni are out there scrapping, but it’s hard to find boundaries now. Nieboer stands on the boundary and motions for them to pick it up, shouting “GO TIME, BOYS!” and everyone agrees that Nieboer could have done that in a subtler manner, perhaps.

In any case, it doesn’t matter. Despite some good hitting from Walton at the end, Plough’s innings peters out, and with it their hopes of promotion. There is a real sadness among the group for this one. We had chances to win this game, many chances, and now we’re wallowing in a tide of regret and loathing.

Thankfully, this country is great at accommodating the regretful and the self-loathing. That’s what pubs are for. And, of course, the nearest one is called The Plough. Jumping out of Butlin’s car, you can hear The Plough before you can see it. There’s some sort of rave happening inside, it appears. The sign out front promises “Live DJs, two rooms, 4pm till LATE!” and it’s a proper Croydon scene: countless single mothers with too much fake tan, bouncing about with zero coordination; red-faced old boys in collared shirts slithering around with Bad Intentions; groups of young girls plastered in foundation and the tightest clothing you could imagine, sipping gin after gin. Sticky floors, sweaty smells, people so drunk they’re literally hanging on to each other to stay up... a terrific scene.

“What the F*CK is this,” Butlin mutters. “This isn’t London. This is NOT London.”

Grayzer is happy. “Absolutely BOUNCING in here.”

We settle down for a proper drinking session, perching on benches as far away from the vapid music as possible, and drink a toast to Damon, who played his 100th Plough game today. Put simply, there is no nicer man at the club. The world would be a much better place if Damon Greeney was all of our dads. Damon Greeney, Father of Earth. How good.

Butlin keeps oscillating between fits of almost terminal despair and pure giddy joy. Five minutes of laughs will go by, then he’ll think about The Game, and his face will disappear into his hands, briefly stranded on an island of grief. We find a good way to counteract this — through a song, dreamed up by Butlin then and there, which goes:

From Chennai to Berlin
[LINE REDACTED BECAUSE IT’S QUITE FRANKLY DISGUSTING]
the plough are pumping for love, pumping for love.
We’re turning ones into twos
and everything that we do,
the plough are pumping for love.

Butlin has to drive back to Walthamstow, so he shoots off, but Nieboer, Yanni, Grayzer, Nicko and Damo hang around. Nieboer is telling Nicko about certain dom/sub activities that he’s heard people like to engage in, like pouring cold water on the old boy to yield maximum shrinkage and ultimate humiliation. He nearly doubles over, hearing this. Grayzer insists that no amount of money could make him live in Dubai. Nieboer reckons that there IS an amount of money that would make him live in Dubai.

“I mean, I’m nearly in overdraft over here,” Nieboer explains. “I’d do things that would put me in the bloody HAUGE for a surprisingly small amount of money, believe me — things that would make Milošević seem like Mother Teresa.”

Anyway… so much for that bad gibberish. Time to go home. Nieboer shoots off to a friend’s birthday for a bit, but he’s so drunk and tired he can barely see. He heads home and for some reason ends up watching the whole of Anora, which is not a good film. It’s a distinctly unenjoyable watch — mainly just Russian people shouting at each other and really bad sex scenes — but it does, at least, make Nieboer forget about the game for a bit and remind him that no amount of Bad Chemicals and high end escorts can make you happy — and certainly not as happy as the boys at Ploughmans CC make you feel, even after a day that was more or less a nightmare from start to finish.