Getting to the ground, Leo Nieboer notices it’s a real slice of last season: just some totally anonymous green space marooned somewhere in the anonymous bowels of Morden, which has nothing going for it, from what I’ve seen, other than the fact that it’s easy to leave Morden for literally anywhere else via the Northern Line.

The only toilet facilities are a good five minute walk away, so Nieboer plods over there and notices a laminated sheet with a series of ‘toilet guidelines’ sitting above one of the bogs. There are nine bullets in total, the first one proclaiming:

You use these facilities at your own risk.

It’s an ominous note; almost feels like a threat. What terrible things have happened here? Snakes in the toilet, perhaps? Friendly strangers offering lollipops and tickle fights? The whole thing makes Nieboer think of a guy he met in a Manhattan bar who told him about the time he got jumped in a bathroom by three blokes with cornrows who mistook him for someone who owed them money. He laughed harshly at the memory and took a sip from his Coors Light and thought for a moment, shaking his head, looking down at the sticky floor.

After a long pause, he concluded: “You have to be willing to die in any bathroom you walk into.”

Quite right, Nieboer thought. The same rule applies to games of league cricket, he surmises, walking back to the square and noticing Matt Spencer hitting the ball in the middle, surrounded by nobody at all — just a lone grey speck against the green, employing his familiar tactic of making it seem like he’s a batter, to intimidate the opposition, who aren’t even here yet.

Eventually players trickle towards our slice of anonymous green. Nieboer heads out to toss with their captain, Toby, a nice enough 20-year-old who tells me it’s “his turn” to captain Old Ruts 5s this weekend, which makes it seem like they treat captaining the same as taking the bins out or doing the weekly shop — this ugly role you have to create a rota for, to avoid punishing anyone disproportionately. I kind of get what he means.

Miraculously, Nieboer wins the toss and Ploughmans are batting. Yanni Baveas and Steve Britto head out there. Four balls in, Yanni calls Britto through for a run that probably isn’t there and the latter is well short — a direct hit. Britto is out for 0 (0). It’s a weird decision to do that to your landlord; Yannin will no doubt get a rather formal email tomorrow, we all conclude, with the subject line “Your rent increase” and a lot of heavy talk about property tax increases, insurance premium hikes, operating expenses, inflation indexing, etc.

Nieboer and Baveas rebuild, putting on 51 in 10 overs, Nieboer scoring a breezy 33 before completely throwing it away, like the god damn fool that he is and always will be. Greg Willis comes in and the two take Plough to 98-2 at drinks, both ticking along nicely, Greg producing an excellent sweep shot, Yanni just incorrigible, those sensational levers smoking drives down the ground. He’s in the form of his life, is Yanni, less and less fearful and starting, with each good score, to believe in the skills he’s worked so hard to develop. He belongs here.

Both Yanni (41) and Greg (23) are out shortly after drinks, however, ushering in Nicko Dowell and Nealon Francois AKA Champion Boss, the sheer levers on display now surely exceeding some kind of legal limit. Champion Boss in particular has a shoulders/hands ratio that may actually be illegal in certain US states.

In their early innings, however, with the pace off, they’re finding it a little tricky. It’s not the best pitch — some stuff is shooting; most of it sticks, so it’s not easy to get forward.

But these guys are experienced, Nieboer remembers. They have that unflappable quality you often get with dads: the sense that it would take a LOT — like being attacked in a bathroom by three cornrowed dudes with all kinds of felonies on their waist — to drag them into the realm of the Genuinely Flustered. So it’s no surprise they do indeed find their rhythm and start decimating the Old Ruts attack. Between them, they hit 20 fours and 8 sixes, adding 126 and killing any semblance of a contest — completely moonballing Old Ruts into a narcoleptic coma. Some sixes are hit so clean and far that there’s a momentary silence across the ground, everyone lulled into a trance by that sublime “thWACK” sound and the ungodly parabola that follows.

Nicko departs for 65, Matt Spencer, promoted ahead of Tom Lonnen, now getting his chance to do some thwacking of his own. Throughout the week, Nieboer had been telling Champion Boss that Spence can hit further than him, and vice versa, so it’s just a dick swinging contest now, out there, both of them smoking more sixes after a slowish start for Spence, which Britto attributes to Nieboer’s ‘poor definition’ of Spence’s role.

Any any case, the duo add 62, Champion Boss walking off with 91*, Plough posting a truly imposing 294-5 off their 40. Britto is adamant that Old Ruts won’t make 75.

Tea is a strange affair. There’s loads of perfectly square sandwiches and about 100 large Galaxy bars — like way more Galaxy bars than anyone would ever need — along with some surprisingly flavourful samosas. The whole spread gets menaced by a dog, its owner absolutely miles away, in no control at all. Nieboer gets the warm up started and throws Spencer the new ball.

Like predicted, it’s a furious start from the former 2nd XI captain. His first ball nearly hits their opener flush on the nose and he removes him with a slower ball shortly after. He removes the other opener with the same ball, standing there, arms aloft, shouting: “AND AGAINNNNN”.

It’s Nieboer’s first game with Spence since the captaincy changed guard. It occurs to him that he never really saw Spence as a bowler — more like our caretaker, guardian of his creche, his ability to fling them down at close to 70mph just an added bonus, a nice thing to have.

Looking at Spence now, unburdened and more muscular than last year, Nieboer sees what he was all along: a guy who only really wants to blow stumps apart and hit sixes; someone not that bothered with the smallprint of cricket, more a large child with an unquenchable thirst for blood.

At the other end, Damon Greeney is being more Damon Greeney than Damon Greeney has perhaps ever been. The numbers speak for themselves: 8 overs for 11 runs. 46 dot balls. For a team chasing 295, it’s just as much of a death blow as Spence’s wickets at the other end.

Qammar Jamshaid then comes in and, with his first ball, does what Spence couldn’t do in his 36 balls: smash the stumps with a yorker. The next ball, he has their batter completely plumb, salmon bloody trout, but their umpire — one of their openers now visibly sulking and who kept telling us he was a ‘qualified umpire’ — doesn’t give it, for reasons that needn’t be explained here.

At the other end, Benny Cobbett has forgotten how to bowl. We’ve put Tom Lonnen under the lid at short leg, under the condition that Benny doesn’t bowl short. But he does, relentlessly, which has Lonnen cowering and ducking like a man under machine gun fire. Having not batted and unable to bowl due to injury, it’s turning into something of a suboptimal day for the club legend.

Benny decides he’s bowling at the wrong end, so Nieboer gets Nicko to bowl a chop out and puts him on at the other. He immediately takes a wicket, Old Ruts now 59-4 at drinks. From this point on, it turns into a bloodbath.

Qammar takes two more wickets, finishing on truly ridiculous figures of 3-3 off 5, while Benny – now totally comfortable at this end, resplendent in his awful South African speed dealers — has their lower order flailing like reeds in the wind, grinning and even clapping as the ball kicks up huge puffs of dust and flies anywhere other than the middle of the bat.

He ends with a five wicket haul, which makes it 11 wickets in two league games for the burly South African, who has had a truly superb day, what with his side winning that big golden lollipop as well. He attributes his success today and average of, like, 7 to his newest regiment of ADHD medication, which makes Nieboer think of creating some kind of graphic, like the ones they do on Sky Sports — a side-by-side list of “Benny Before Being Medicated” and “Benny After Being Medicated”, to see the extent of the change.

20 points sealed, we head over to the Old Ruts main ground, and it’s a superb clubhouse. They have real prison showers, as Lonnen points out, the nozzles coming from directly above you, activated by an old-style red lever. Nieboer has an excellent time in there with Yanni, whose insistence on wearing sandals in the shower is perhaps the most Greek thing I’ve ever seen.

Back outside, we watch the conclusion of the Old Ruts 1st XI game — one of those that looks like a foregone conclusion, the oppo, SinjunGrammarians, needing 70 with two wickets in hand, but then mushrooms into a gripping affair as their No.10 starts teeing off. They just about fall short. Damon suddenly appears to be deathly ill, breaking into a cold sweat, staring straight ahead. I offer him a cigarette, which he politely declines.

We hang out there for a while longer. Grant Wooledge appears. Nicko wonders who out of Nieboer and Grant is hairier, and I briefly consider inviting Grant into the showers, go around again, settle this damn thing once and for all. We grill Yanni about his sex life, which he doesn’t appreciate, and castigate the 1st XI for telling us to come all the way to them, in f*cking Putney.

“Classic 1s exceptionalism,” Nicko shakes his head.

We eventually decide on a good middle ground — a pub called The Bobbins, near Clapham Junction, and place ourselves outside. Iskandar Eaton, Angus Osborne, Dom Scott and Duray Pretorious join us. Nieboer and Duray embrace, look at each other, and say, almost in unison: “20 POINTS AND A SONG”.

The WTC final was won earlier today, so there’s a good deal of cricket chat. With Nicko there, the affair inevitably descends into an all-out war, just the most vicious back-and-forth. He’s doing his usual fishing exercise, branding James Anderson as “an average bowler”, and Angus and Dom — who have literally just met Nicko — are beside themselves with anger and exasperation. Angus actually has his head in his hands at one point, as if trying to ward off the words he’s hearing.

The shooting match only intensifies. Dom Scott is pulling up stats. Angus, normally the nicest guy ever, is saying things like: “you are f*cking OUT OF ORDER, MATE”. Iskandar wades in, explaining, once again, that the combined England vs Australia Combined XI is “an 8:3 split”, with the top 7 all England players. He tells Nicko to put his house on Zak Crawley being player of the series. Nicko says he’ll think about it. Iskandar concludes that the Ashes this winter is essentially “the most exciting team in the world against a bunch of old men who couldn’t even beat a B-rate international side”, which is not wrong.

And it just keeps going, right up until we’re all kicked out. Nicko is holding his own brilliantly, it has to be said. We’re now into the Steyn/Anderson debate. Dom can’t get his head around it.

“He COULDN’T BOWL INSWINGERS,” he howls, truly incandescent.

Duray asks Chat GPT and it reckons Steyn is better. Something about that calculation makes Nieboer genuinely quite sad — that we can push decades of discourse to one side and just let f*ckers like Dooz put in a prompt and show you his phone and go: “See? There you go. Confirmed”.

Nieboer insists that he’d much rather face Steyn over Morne Morkel, that he could actually handle Steyn just fine. He also tells Nicko, for good measure, that Glenn McGrath wouldn’t have taken anywhere near his tally of wickets if it weren’t for Shane Warne.

Duray and Nieboer disappear to the urinals and have an impromptu selection discussion for next weekend. Benny walks in and we both look sheepish, as if we’d been caught dogging.

Time to leave. Nieboer jumps on a Lime bike and lurches away, narrowly dodging pedestrians, happy in the knowledge that England will win 4-1 this winter and that the Ploughmans 2nd XI, despite there being a long way to go, have already made a strong statement in this league.