There is something uniquely maddening about a game that will (1) almost certainly be rained off but which (2) you still have to prepare for. The former makes the latter extremely difficult. You don’t know where the hell you stand; one ends up going a little insane.

Even as early as Wednesday, Leo Nieboer found himself refreshing Met Office so frequently that it’s now on his Most Visited tabs, along with other lesser-known websites that have absolutely nothing to do with the weather in Herne Hill.

The Met Office prognosis didn’t change. In fact it worsened, telling Nieboer in no uncertain terms: look, buddy, it’s gonna shit it down all night, basically, stop in the morning for a bit, then hammer down over like 95%+ of London from about 13:00 to 18:00, so essentially you can forget about playing any sort of cricket tomorrow and, as such, have a fair crack at some beers tonight, with no possibility of repercussions.

So of course, waking up at 08:30 on Saturday, having seen Massive Attack the night before and in the process inflicted a fair measure of damage on himself, well and truly rain-carded, Nieboer wakes up to find that we will be playing cricket today — that the rain overnight wasn’t all that bad and the rain later will now come at around 16:00.

Well… why not? This is how the world works. All energy flows accordinging to the whims of the Great Magnet — not the f*cking Met Office. What a fool I was to defy him.

Now Lime biking through faint drizzle, the skies above relentlessly grey and ugly, Nieboer wrangles with a range of permutations. Captaining a league game has its challenges; captaining a league game menaced by rain is another headache entirely. Do we bowl first now? Do we promote a pinch hitter to No.3, to move things along? Spin from both ends? How the f*ck do you calculate DLS?

Now at the ground nervously sipping his iced coffee — the Griffin clubhouse packed like sardines because Lambeth Tigers are hosting an awards ceremony — Nieboer consults the Surrey Cricket Championship guidelines section, for a bit of, well, guidance, and his sleep deprived brain and shrivelled cortex simply cannot process the following paragraph:

“A result can only be achieved if both teams have had the opportunity of batting for at least 20 overs, thus if the team batting second has scored more runs than its opponents, or has achieved its target score, in fewer than 20 overs but could have received that number of overs had they needed to, a result will have been achieved.”

Eventually Nieboer gives up on trying to understand these words and heads out to toss with their captain, Chinmay, a nice man wearing an NFL jersey of some team Yanni Baveas describes as “f*cking dog shit”. The only thing more “f*cking dog shit” is Nieboer’s form at the toss. He loses again; Ploughmans are sent into bat.

Angus Osborne and Iskandar Eaton head out there and look sumptuous, incorrigible. We notice two things about Burgess Park right away: (1) their keeper, wearing black gloves, can’t catch a damn thing; (2) the other 10 players are excellent in the field, stopping everything. Osborne, in particular, keeps timing it so well that the ball goes straight to the fielder.

On the sidelines, Dom Scott offers up his gilet to someone.

“You love a gilet, don’t you,” Nieboer says to him.

“I do,” he nods. “I’d say it’s the best clothing item out there.”

“What about lingerie?” Nieboer asks after a pause.

“Haven’t found lingerie that fits me yet,” he says sadly, shaking his head.

Meanwhile, the score 60-0 off 15 overs — a testament to Burgess Park’s tight bowling and strong Angus/Iskandar resistance, producing a real test cricket-like stalemate — everything implodes. Iskandar barbeques Angus for 28 (50), then gets out for 31 (46) the next over. Scott and Nealon Francois are both bowled and suddenly Plough are 73-4.

Nieboer and Edmonds stem the side for a little bit, but the fact that Edmonds can only manage 8 (15) — striking at almost 50, which is just unheard of — before being bowled himself is a testament to the fact that it’s hard out here. By far the biggest challenge so far this season for the 2nd XI. Everything is straight and nearly everything we hit doesn’t beat the ring. The ones that do sporadically make it through hold up in the wet grass. Nieboer feels like he’s wading through treacle.

Greg Wills also gets bowled and now Nieboer and Tunnacliffe, the score 100-6 off 28 overs, have to really fight out there. They need a big over — three or four big overs, actually — but it doesn’t come. Nieboer smokes a couple of uncharacteristic drives for four, but apart from that it’s mainly frustration — a slowly boiling mania that leads Nieboer to cloth one to cover, out for 27 (46).

Tunnacliffe, Nieboer’s stand-in vice captain for the day, keeps fighting, but this is no day for the engine room or anyone who enjoys timing the ball. He’s bowled for 18 (24), and apart from a couple lusty blows from Azharul Haque down the order, it’s a pitiful effort, Plough all out for 150 — quite the reality check for a team that’s scored 316, 240 and 276 in their opening three league games.

The time is now 15:00, and Nieboer, weirdly, is not actually thinking too hard about his bowling lineup and field placements and the sticky prospect of defending 150; he’s thinking about how he can delay this damn thing until the rain comes.

Thankfully, he has the perfect excuse. Our tea lady at the Griffin, Claire Hood, is not here with our tea yet. She always comes at precisely 15:30, without fail or even minor deviation; she hasn’t banked on our batters shitting the bed and Burgess Park’s rapid over rate. My thinking is that the boys must take tea. Tea must be taken. And this is what I say to Chinmay, who is determined to get back on and play the 20 overs required to make a result possible.

“You don’t think we could start soon and have a longer drinks break, maybe?” he pleads.

“No, no. I wouldn’t have thought so. It’s a 16:00 start, at best.”

He frowns, shakes his head. “That is no good. The rain is coming.”

“And so is the tea,” I shoot back. “And the boys must have their tea. About this I am certain, if nothing else, Chinmay. Believe me, it’s a good tea. You’ll like it. We restart at 16:00.”

Chinmay’s frown deepens. “Let’s compromise. 15:45?”

“Sure,” I grin, “15:45 it is.”

We shake hands and walk in separate directions, Nieboer smiling malevolently, knowing full well the boys will still be tucking in hard to the Claire Hood spread at 15:45.

And indeed they are. There’s pesto pasta, two types of pizza, cookies, and a bunch of other stuff, none of which Nieboer can enjoy, as always, his mind awash with permutations and admin concerns and crippling uncertainties about his and his team’s current predicament. It’s a strange hour, rather Kafkaesque, everyone standing awkwardly not knowing what to do with themselves, murmuring about the weather.

Aman Jain, still injured and just here to watch, keeps eating pizza.

“I’m eating too much pizza,” he says to me. “I’m lactose intolerant, so I really should stop, but I can’t.”

Eventually the second innings does start, but it’s a bizarre and stilted affair. George Tunnacliffe bowls one over. Greg Willis bowls another. Then the rain’s severity increases, and we’re off, Nieboer convinced that’s that. He lights a cigarette and sits down, not speaking to anybody, just staring grimly at the downpour.

“Should have gone to Cyprus,” Iskandar mumbles.
The rain then recedes, almost stops. Chinmay wants to get back on.

“Gotta wait for it to stop fully,” Nieboer says tersely, shaking his head. “Can’t start in this.” I don’t see the point in starting again. My old friend Met Office is showing that a vicious downpour is, like, 15 minutes away — the radar showing not just dark and light blue but green and yellow. I’m tempted to relay what Duray Pretorious — not on tour and not playing this game — has texted me:

“I don't know if you've heard but DSG and surrounding areas are actually reclaimed marshland so once it rains a single drop. It's basically marshland. No point waiting.”

Eventually, though, we do get the covers off, nice and slowly, and bowl four more overs. Nieboer takes off Tunnacliffe after two overs, despite the guy doing absolutely nothing wrong, in favour of Aza — the idea being that suddenly being 10-3 would make Burgess Park less inclined to start again, once we do go off for rain. Aza bowls one over and it’s a delight — five unplayable balls, including one edge that flies past Tunna for four. Willis bowls an excellent over as well, and suddenly we’re thinking we could get bang into these boys.

It doesn’t matter. The green and yellow stuff arrives and now the game really is dead, abandoned, Kent and Dover. We disappear into the shed for some indoor cricket, Greg continuing his good spell with some vicious stuff past the nose, Tunna claiming everything at gully, which is less than one pace away from the batter. Aza comes in, smoking a cigarette he’s found from somewhere. Champion Boss makes a signal to me basically saying: “It’s done, man”.

We head for the showers. Standing next to Harry Edmonds, Nieboer gets the urge to speak to the boys about a couple of things, so he heads into the changing rooms, wearing just a towel, and says something like:

“There’s a belief among some Plough that we’re going to ‘walk this league’. I find that totally unacceptable. It’s arrogant and dangerous and quite frankly pisses me off. Today has proved that we need to be better, that we’ll have to be better, if we’re going to be champions. We’re going to need fight f*cking hard and be more disciplined at the crease. So cut that f*cking chat about ‘walking’ anything, please.”

It’s a sour note to end on, but one Nieboer feels strongly about. He puts some clothes on and we head to the Greyhound, just round the corner, the rain still hammering down. We get into some far less sour areas, including how one can get “dividends” from their partner in the bedroom through one’s voluntary generosity, the difficulty of speaking Hindi as a German, and England’s complete superiority over India.

Iskandar, having declared after the Beddington that England and Australia’s combined XI was an “8:3 split”, drawing extreme nibbles from Alex Jullienne and Joey Anderson, rips India apart in the same way.

“It’s a 9:2 split,” he’s saying. “Only Bumrah and Gill get in. The rest is England players. You’re having Stokes over Jadeja. Bashir over Axar Patel. Duckett over Jaiswal. Yeah, it’s easily a 9:2 split.”

Aman very nearly bites back at this. “Let’s just see,” he declares coldly.

Iskandar and Dom leave, so it’s just Nieboer, Yanni and Aman now. Yanni heads for a piss, comes back, and says: “Mate, I’m pretty sure that’s Jason Statham over there.”

We look over and, f*ck me, it actually is. It’s Jason bloody Statham, standing by the bar, wearing a cap, laughing with friends. I’m tempted to go over and ask him if he’s managed to find Gorgeous George, or show him a caravan catalogue. “Magnolia blue, for me ma”. But I think better of it. Today has been weird enough as it is.

Yanni and Aman head off, Nieboer jumps on a Lime bike and gets his shoelace caught in the pedals, nearly causing him to face plant on the wet tarmac. It feels like a good metaphor for today: all tangled up in the wet, confused, narrowly avoiding disaster, ultimately coming out of the thing unscathed but nonetheless still wary, determined to not let it happen again.