Leo Nieboer gets to the ground and it’s completely encircled by a cage. There’s no way in. The ground feels like one of those levels you haven’t unlocked in a game yet, or perhaps a monkey enclosure of some kind, only the monkeys are all hiding, fornicating in some bush somewhere.

Suri Poleboina, Tom Glynne-Jones and Greg Willis are all here. Eventually we’re allowed into the enclosure. Suri didn’t play last week; his miso soup, he explains, had understandably gotten sick of her partner being away for literally every Saturday and Sunday since April, so he took her to Portugal, presumably to relax but mainly, I think, as a kind of restoring-some-credit-in-the-bank expedition.

Tom and I muse on whether one can quantify an accurate games-to-partner-holiday ratio.

“10 games is a weekend in, like, Estonia, I think,” Tom muses.

Nieboer nods. “15 games, you have to take them somewhere with a beach.”

“25 games — you’re looking at a luxury cruise in the Caribbean, or maybe Dubai.”

Speaking of Ploughmans holidaying in expensive places, Nicko Dowell, Nieboer’s dear VC, got back from Fiji this week. More concerningly, he’s just back from Matt Spencer’s wedding. The man looks alright, though — Nicko can hold a tremendous amount of beer with little to no impact, it seems — and is at present mainly preoccupied with finding a place to park his Lime bike, which turns out to be very frustrating.

Nieboer and Burgess Park’s captain, Chinmay — the top runscorer in this league by far — head out to toss. There’s goose shit everywhere. Chinmay wants to know “what on earth happened” last week, getting bowled out for 50 odd, which feels like an unnecessary bit of small talk. I think about countering with some facts about geese — namely that the oldest Canada goose lived to the age of 33. Would this impress Chinmay? Would he have better geese facts than that, giving him an advantage before a ball is even bowled? Goose chat out in the field? “Only one goose fact, this guy!” etc etc.

But so much for all that bad gibberish. Nieboer wins the toss. Ploughmans are batting. Yanni Baveas and Nieboer head out there.

Their opening bowler is an especially odd specimen. He gets to the ground exactly two minutes before the start time. His name is Hamza, and looks, like, Eastern European, with a very very high voice and the most wig-like real hair I’ve ever seen — a proper “I lost a bet” haircut. He also has the longest run up ever. It’s a good thing we have the cage, actually; without it he may have started his run up in Elephant and Castle, which would have been very hard to line up, trigger wise.

In any case, he bowls a vicious first ball to Yanni Baveas — on the stumps and swinging. Yanni, who hasn’t played in a month, is out on the first ball of the game. Nieboer, stood at the other end, winces, almost shocked by just how cruel this damn sport can be.

Greg Willis goes a few overs later, leaving Plough 20-2, and Nieboer’s mind drifts to last week, to that heinous collapse that meant we were drinking beers by 16:00. The idea of it happening again was unacceptable. Thankfully, Nieboer and Suri manage to dig in, adding 52 together, Suri being patient and smoking some silky drives, bringing up his 3,000th Plough run in the process.

Still, it’s a challenging time out there. Many distractions. There’s a festival happening in Burgess Park today, so we’re playing against the backdrop of filthy UK house — a sort of rampant steady bass line to the hollow high-pitched chaos of our game. There’s also a constant stream of girls, high and wild on Bad Chemicals, almost all of them in black and wearing fishnets, making their way past our cage towards the music.

On the other side of the cage, geese wander around aimlessly, adding to the din with their senseless honks and shrieks. Buses, cars, and lime bikes stream past relentlessly, making their own dumb noises. Some kids come by, loud and cocky, and want to know who’s winning. It’s all deeply overstimulating — almost like this cricket ground was plonked here by accident, some sort of glitch in a video game design.

And on the pitch, the ball is shooting low. Proper two paced stuff. Suri departs for 18 (26), so now it’s Nieboer and Nicko out there, both scrapping hard. Nieboer, now pumping sweat, tries to take the discomfort in the name of dignified caution, and when it’s especially bad — either it stays super low or holds and whistles past the handle — he looks to the sky between balls and he says to the sky Thank You sir may I have another. Thank You sir may I have another.

In the end, Nieboer is out for 29 (63), which brings Sandeep Goel to the crease. After some early running-between-the-wickets chaos, the pair start plundering boundaries, taking Plough to 164-4 in the 29th over, giving us a real chance of a 250 score.

Sadly, they can’t quite kick on, both out for 33, and now the momentum shifts. Harry Davies smashes one into his own foot and fractures it. Qammar Jamshaid is out cheaply and now Plough are 173-8, in all sorts of bother.

As Damon Greeney walks out to bat, Chinmay comes over to Nieboer, now umpiring barefoot.

“You are very Indian, Leo,” he says.

“Come again, old chap?”

He points at my feet. “The way you walk around without shoes. The way you bat, with the crouch. It’s very Indian.”

“My strike rate isn’t very Indian.”

“We have Pujaras too!”

Nieboer smiles. “Fair point. Yeah, man. Gora on the outside, Indian on the inside. That’s me, brother.”

We both have a good laugh, and the game starts again, Tom Glynne-Jones and Damon showing some excellent resistance, adding 33 for the last wicket. Damon, especially, produces some delicious slaps for four, which has the boys hollering on the sidelines. And meanwhile, Burgess Park are getting frustrated, angry, bowlers swearing at fielders, bowlers swearing at themselves.

They’ve been sloppy, Burgess Park. Out of Plough’s final score of 208-9, 56 of those runs are extras, the top scorer by some distance. It feels like Plough have a real chance here. With that little partnership, they have recouped the momentum.

Three balls into the second innings, Ploughmans have that good old Lady Momentum by the balls. Greg Willis has nicked off their opener first ball, and the boys are screeching. He then traps the danger man, Chinmay, absolutely dead in front — Nieboer at gully can’t see it himself but he can see Greg’s veins bulging out of his head, so he knows it’s out. He also knows the umpire is never giving their MVP out, when he’s only on 2.

The next 10 overs are something of a blur. Willis and Greeney bowl just fine, but seemingly everything is going to the boundary. It’s one of those days where slices don’t go to hand, and the ones that do go to hand get dropped. Nieboer keeps doing this thing where he moves a fielder, then the ball flies to where that fielder just was, and goes for four.

Giordy Diangienda bowls very nicely. He creates three chances in one over — one dropped by Nieboer, the other by himself. Nicko, at the other end, isn’t doing a whole lot wrong, but it’s just brutal, out here. That breakthrough won’t come. It’s maddening, infuriating, because after these two, there isn’t much batting, we reckon. But by drinks, the score 120-1, it’s hard for the boys to keep their heads up.

Nieboer tries spin, but that doesn’t work. He brings on Qammar far too late — a major major mistake. I can’t even remember how many catches we dropped. The festival music is really pounding now. Around the cage, people are hanging by their cars, a rare bit of British tailgating, some of whom are peering in and watching this foul spectacle.

As a final insult, Plough do end up getting a breakthrough, Nicko taking two wickets in two balls, and suddenly, of course, it all looks rather difficult. Very typical of Mother Cricket to choose NOW, with 8 to win, for us to get a shift in the tide. Where the F*CK was this at, say, 40-1? Nieboer muses to himself.

It doesn’t matter. Burgess Park win comfortably, and deservedly so. They have been the better team. At the same time, Ploughmans had many chances to win that game, at various junctures. Nieboer walks off and just kind of sits there in dumb animal pain for a moment and thinks about all these chances, curses himself and everything around him, then shrugs it off. Tom rightly points out that it’s time to go drink.

We end up at a pub called the Lord Nelson, on the Old Kent Road. It looks so dingy from the outside that we’re not sure it’s even open. On the inside, there’s no light, ugly black panelling everywhere, very muggy and full of blokes who probably haven’t even heard the word “macha” before.

Over beers, we get locked into a debate about The Hundred. Giordy’s position is clear: it’s a pile of hot steaming garbage, and the ECB should be imprisoned for taking test cricket off free-to-air after the 2005 Ashes.

Nieboer takes it further, insisting that The Hundred is symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with the State of Britain Today.

Maybe it’s his surroundings, or just that his temper is hovering on the far edge of control after that shitshow in the field, but now he’s launching headfirst into a vicious diatribe. That The Hundred is part of the same national illness that has families doing choreographed dances on TikTok and getting all excited about Dubai chocolate. That it’s part of this wider ‘Masterchefisation’ of UK culture that explains why China is so far ahead of us and why we can’t win in India anymore — a generation of soft pampered little f*ckwits, obsessed with “what’s in their bag” and access to plush toilets at football games and whether they can add an extension to their two-bed in the suburbs.

“We need a Cultural Revolution, like Mao did in the 1960s,” Nieboer concludes. Damon Greeney is nodding.

As the beers go down, Nieboer’s temper recedes, and it turns into a lovely evening. Speaking more on the subject of England’s inability to win in India, Tom agrees that we should look at breaking young children’s hands with hammers, so that they grow back in a way that allows them to bowl a delivery that looks vaguely illegal. No more of this copy-and-paste Dom Bess shit. Or perhaps just conquer France, invade that talent pool.

Giordy, once again in his dad’s brand new Hyundai, drives Nieboer, Harry Davies and Bisi away, dropping Nieboer right off at his home — a lovely gesture. Nieboer drops his cigarette down the side, and it’s disappeared, nowhere to be seen. Giordy is apoplectic with rage. Eventually we find it, and crack a few more jokes. There’s a smile across his face again.

“This is why I can’t leave this club, man.” he says. “This club is too funny.”

And that, I suppose, is the handle: that no matter what happens out on the field, this club is always, at its core, about friendship — that giddy feeling of being a few beers in and laughing at nonsense with people who are as masochistic and twisted as you are.