I’ll be honest: a lot of this day is a blur. Partly because it’s my absolute right as a middle class Englishman to repress awful stuff and push it way back to the murky part of my brain — cosying up alongside all those drunken ravings about the evils of General Pinochet to terrified girls at bars, and those times servers at restaurants told me to “enjoy” my meal and I said “you too” back at them — and partly because I just had a contrast injection at St Thomas’ Hospital and I feel more jellyfish than human, at present. Nonetheless, we shall endeavour to have a crack. To wit:

Leo Nieboer gets to the DSG and it’s raining. Him and the boys huddle under the canopy and remark on how strange it is to be the away team, here at our home, and wonder about what to do at the toss. Nieboer really isn’t sure. For the first time all season, he’s actually hoping he loses.

He doesn’t. Southwark Park’s captain, Chris, has a weird large coin with no head or tail, and Nieboer apparently calls correctly and feels like having a bowl. Chris would have done the same, he reckons. He’s also the second oppo captain in two weeks to ask about Matt Spencer and his whereabouts, clearly a bit disappointed to not see him there — not unlike, from what I’ve heard, when the waitress at Electus in Cyprus apparently called in sick and wasn’t there to collect her tip, following what sounded like a sustained alcoholic assault from the Plough that would, to be fair, turn most nerves and immune systems to jelly.

The game begins and it’s a carbon copy of last season’s fixture against these blokes. On that day, their opener, Waqar, hit Matt Bolshaw for a six so terrifyingly large it actually landed in the velodrome next door. That was the second ball of the game. On this day, it’s the third ball, delivered by Callum Daley, that disappears into a different postcode — so technically an improvement from the Matt Spencer era.

And like last season, he scores a breezy 30 odd, giving Southwark Park another rapid start — 45-0 off 4 overs. Mercifully, he then smokes one right up in the air, so high it’s almost in the exosphere, and Nieboer — to everyone’s surprise, most of all his own — holds onto it. Daley then removes the other opener, the ball flying into Yanni Baveas’s pouch, just kind of disappearing into his belly, and Plough are back in the game.

Now we’re into a stalemate: Nieboer brings on Benny Cobbett and Qammar Jamshaid and their No.3 and No.4 recognise that this is Good Bowling, and take no risks, just knock it around, slowly adding 50 together, Benny eventually getting a deserved wicket on the penultimate ball of his spell.

Their No.5 comes in and gives Nieboer nightmares that may actually be too lurid for the murky back part of his brain; more of a ‘sever the nerve fibers between my frontal lobe and thalamus’ type situation, Nieboer reckons. And it’s not because he’s good. No. He’s far from that. It’s because we drop him FIVE times, twice off Oscar Sawyer in the same over with him on 0 — the final drop, shelled by Nieboer, so hilariously bad that Southwark Park are howling with laughter, over there on the sidelines.

It’s a head**ck of a situation. On the one hand, Plough are shelling catches and bowling wide after f*cking wide — 39 in total, a bad day for Nieboer to agree on doing legside wides — and on the other, they are taking wickets, Southwark Park going from 144-4 off 25 to 201 all out. Niraj Thakker, following a shaky opening spell, comes back and bowls beautifully, Nieboer packing the offside and the Aussie bowling accordingly, taking six wickets seemingly out of nowhere. Nicko Dowell also delivers a strong eight overs, taking two wickets himself.

All in all, we’re feeling pretty good, coming off for tea. A chaseable total, we conclude.

The next hour is like the Somme. It’s one of Dante’s circles of hell. It’s unbelievable psychic pain, a kind of peritonitis of the soul, something that doesn’t leave you sad or angry but more just plain shocked, numb, wordless.

One of their bowlers takes seven wickets. He removes Yanni with a vicious inswinger, Nieboer with a yorker. What really kills the game, however, in Nieboer’s view, is a shot by Suri Poleboina that flies through the corden and somehow sticks in 3rd slip’s hand even though the ball has actually passed him. Southwark Park go ballistic.

With the pitch spitting and the ball swinging both ways and Southwark Park’s field looking like something you’d see on Day 1 of a test match with cloudy overheads, the Hollies feels less like a cricket field and more like a ravening maw — some cold lightless hole with sharp teeth and taloned hands beckoning you towards imminent death. It’s not exactly fun. Only Jay Patel (18) and Benny Cobbett (10) show anything of vague substance, out there in the ravening maw, and an innings that started at 16:40 is over at 17:37.

Nieboer sits the boys down and decides to strike a positive note. No need for a bollocking, after that. We’re halfway through the season now, he tells the boys, and that’s the first time we’ve been truly outplayed. He reminds them that they’ve been excellent, so far, that they’re an excellent group of boys — and that these defeats do happen and don’t define us and that, actually, sometimes you need a result like this to lean trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst sound that you didn’t even know you needed to hear.

We head over for jugs and start watching, via YouTube, the 1st XI attempt to chase down 234. One of the Burgess Park bowlers is quite clearly chucking, and Jo Hockings can’t understand why nobody appears to be making a big deal out of it. Another bloke is wearing an England test shirt, which feels like it should incur a points deduction of some kind.

Nieboer heads over to chat with the remaining Southwark Park boys. One of them got in at 05.00 last night and asks Nieboer if he ever shuts up in the field, asks why he does the things he does, more generally, which is something nobody has ever been able to answer conclusively. Benny Cobbett tells them his unpopular opinion: that leg spin should be abandoned as an art form. The two bowlers who did all the damage are there, and we all agree that Ravi Ashwin is an awful bloke, but that awful blokes should nonetheless be picked, if they’re good enough — very much the Ploughmans selection strategy, Nieboer tells them.

Some of the 3rd XI, who have won today, descend on the DSG, and we get locked into a strong beers session. Tom Lonnen tells us about the one argument he’s ever had with his partner, which involved them both throwing yoghurt at each other. Giordy Diangienda asks me why we got all out for 53, and whether we’d considered, like, not doing that. Tom Elmslie and Nieboer reminisce about playing cricket as a kid and coming up against those taller, better kids with facial hair at 13, somehow, whose parents both came to games and didn’t argue or anything like that.

“Fuck that,” spits Yanni, who has had a less than optimal weekend.

Nieboer heads off, in search of distractions. He heads to the Grove DIY, right opposite Streatham and Marlborough’s ground — a sort of half skatepark half DIY garden place, where people are getting up to all sorts of evil.

One Norwegian guy tells me a story of how he got kicked out of a threesome, halfway through, which I imagine feels similar to being dropped from the 3rd XI. Some other guys start a fire that we all agree is far too big and threatens to burn down multiple trees. Others are focused on breaking this large wooden pallet; one guy basically breaks his ankle, trying to crack the wood. Someone hands Nieboer a bottle of prosecco. He takes a swig and admires the chaos around him and decides that, well, both bonfires and the game of cricket can just get a bit big on you, sometimes.