Right from the start, there’s a strange feeling about today. Even before he wakes up, in fact, Leo Nieboer is on the backfoot. His sleep is fitful, disturbed by dreams, including one where he’s at the dentist and Peter Schmeichel is going to work on him. He shows Nieboer his teeth in a mirror and he’s shocked to see he has thousands of little sharp fangs, like a piranha, all black and brown and covered in blood.

Adding to the strange vibe is the fact that Nieboer is now commuting to Dulwich from Shadwell, rather than New Cross, having moved there this week. Duray Pretorius — whose name will indeed come up again in this report, I reckon — wondered if they could travel down together, but that was out of the question. Everyone has their pre-game rituals, and Nieboer’s has nothing to do with getting Ubers and everything to do with very solemnly and quietly sitting on a train, saying nothing to no one, nibbling on a solitary royal gala apple and visualising all the ways he might get out today.

At Redemption Roasters — another part of the Dulwich ritual — Nieboer bumps into Sean McGurn. He’s got a big game: the chance to beat Burgess Park 1st XI and get promoted. You can see a layer of nerves and Heavy Thoughts etched into his face. James Barron also appears and his expression seems to say: today is just another day. Come to think of it, Nieboer has never seen Barron in any other state. Not too happy, not too sad. Just relaxed, calm, unbothered.

F*cking weird, Nieboer is thinking, feeling not relaxed and not calm and very much bothered as he heads down the road to the Griffin for the last time this year.

Once again, the clubhouse is locked, so Nieboer rather unfairly makes George Tunnacliffe climb through a very small window into the women’s toilets, opening up the possibility of injury to his opening bowler and No.4 and also, more ominously, a potential court appearance and place on the sex offenders register. Nobody needs that. Especially someone as nice as Tunna.

In any case, the clubhouse gets opened. Southwark Park players arrive. Their captain, Chris, asks Nieboer “what happened” to them this season – firmly in 1st place at the halfway point and now 4th, with no chance of promotion. Nieboer laughs harshly, lights another cigarette, and decides to have a bat.
It’s not the best start. Rob Mead is bowled on the first ball of the game. Plough are 0-1 off 0.1 overs. Nieboer heads in and it’s a chorus of noise. The Southwark Park boys are having a fine old time, out here. Chris asks Nieboer how often he thinks about them rolling us for 53 earlier this season. What he doesn’t realise is that Nieboer actually gets off on episodes of public humiliation like that one, so to him thinking about it isn’t all that bad.

And just like last time, today is indeed an examination of the most vicious order. The opener who got Mead is basically their Damon Greeney, going at 2s, potentially even more metronomic and unhittable, if possible. The other bowler, Soman, who took 7-14 back in July, has them absolutely hooping in, dislodging Stephen Britto and leaving Plough 12-2.

Nieboer and Tunnacliffe scrap hard. Both get hit in the dick. One shoots and takes Nieboer’s edge and flies past the cordon so quickly that their 2nd slip doesn’t even move and nearly gets bonked on the head. Nieboer looks up at the sky and says “Thank you sir may I have another”. It’s a serious battle — the kind of thing we live for, really. Tunnacliffe grows into it nicely and produces some silky drives, pushing twos wherever he can. Nieboer is swaying and nudging and feeling like a grasshopper at the top of a reed when the wind whips, just about hanging on.

The pair add 66 runs. They’re not easy runs. At drinks, however, the score 78-2, Plough are in the game.

At the same time, though, there’s an ominous calm about Southwark Park, relaxed and patient in the sinecure of their league-winning methods. They’re a bit like vultures watching goats tread uneasily on steep rocks, knowing full well that sooner or later one will slip and fall to its ugly death.

And so it proves. Tunna is bowled for 34 (51), and very quickly Plough go from 79-2 to 110-7. Nieboer does his best to hold the innings together, to keep a sense of momentum and good feeling out there, but he eventually goes in the 30th over, out for 46 (90). Matt Spencer produces some nice later order hitting, seemingly getting dropped every other ball, making 25 (23), but apart from that it’s a limp effort, in the end. Southwark Park have to chase 141.

And following another superb tea from the iconic Claire Hood — who was going to watch Coldplay later that day and probably knows more about field settings than Nieboer, and definitely knows more about making green curry — Southwark Park do indeed chase 141.

It’s not worth dwelling on, this particular innings. One of their guys, Waqhar, gets hold of everything, which is not what you want when defending such a low total. There’s sharp bowling from Spencer and Azharul Haque, but nothing goes our way. Sandeep Goel nearly produces a stumping. With the scores level, Nieboer wants to shake Waqhar’s hand, and he nearly goes for it.

Yes… a day of “nearly”, one might say. It’s been a season of “nearly”, in fact. Nearly promoted, but not quite. Nearly beating 2nd placed Croydon both times, but, ah, well — why dwell on this, eh? There’s a stonker of a game happening over on the Hollies, so let’s throw over to that, shall we?

Clenched Arseholes on the Hollies

Walking towards the Hollies from the clubhouse, you can tell everyone’s nerves over there are jangled to oblivion. From so far away, everyone’s just a silhouette, an outline, but still you can sense something rapt and frozen in their demeanours, as if each body were afraid to move in the wrong way, lest the universal balance be disturbed.

Getting closer, Nieboer can now see the crowd, also suspended in time — apart from the girls (the “baddies”, as Duray’s fiancee, Cath, rightly calls them), who sit facing away from the cricket and talking about normal life stuff, humming at a much calmer frequency. Those watching have the long searching and expression of someone seeing their car get washed out to sea.

It’s a painful watch. Burgess Park need 30 runs. Plough need three wickets. The golden September light now fading, it’s almost a carbon copy of the 2nd XI’s championship deciding thriller against Epic CC last year — that same painfully charged hysteria hovering around every ball in a low-scoring thriller that looks doomed to go right to the bloody wire.

Burgess Park hit a couple of boundaries. They need, like, 15 runs now, with three wickets left. There’s a sense that it’s slipping away.

“One good ball!” booms Chris Roden-Smith.

Not a minute later, Aman Jain doesn’t produce a good ball — straying onto the pads a bit — but Duray, in his last game as 1st XI captain, takes a blinder of a catch at mid wicket, diving horizontally to his right. The crowd erupts. The boys are howling. A new energy washes over the Hollies.

And yet… and yet… it’s not done. Burgess Park hit another boundary. Now they need just 8 runs. Thankfully for Plough, Tom Lonnen has done this sort of thing before. Many times. He’s won more big games than most of us have had sexual partners. So it’s with a fair measure of calm and pure method that he blows their No.10’s front pad off and gets him LBW. Plough are so close to promotion they can touch it.

And, of course, it falls to Aman Jain — the man who hit the league winning runs for the 2s last year — now here with the ball, in the 1s, absolutely resplendent in the white heat of this contest, looking about 10ft tall, as locked in as anyone could be, steaming in with that diagonal run up of his. Up he goes, down goes the ball, as if flung from Satan’s very own slingshot. Full. Straight. Staying very low. Absolutely dead in front. The Ploughmans 1st XI are promoted. Aman Jain. Aman f*cking Jain. Aman for the occasion.

There are tears in Sean McGurn’s eyes. He hugs Nieboer and lifts him up with such gusto that Nieboer almost gets a fresh hernia. Sean can’t understand why everyone is still wearing clothes.
Good point, Nieboer thinks. The pair start rounding up every clothed man above the age of 18 that they can find and herd them in the direction of the bar, for jugs, and then, ah, the shower.

And let me tell you, it’s a tremendous bit of steamy fun in there. Calum Daley and I conclude that neither of us have ever showered for this long. There’s a jug in the middle, acting as a sort of reference point and source of life. A speaker is blaring out Don’t You Want Me by the Human League, so Duray’s song gets a huge blast. In comes James Barron, as calm and relaxed as he was at 10:50 earlier today, looking typically fantastic, taking his middle spot as always, and gets a huge ovation. Then Tom Lonnen arrives, and the decibel levels double. We give his song an almighty rendition, and I swear the shower is shaking, at this point. We’re banging on the tile, beer and steam everywhere, ensconced in what Fitzgerald called the “high white sound”, happy and delirious in our little bubble of wet euphoria.

Now clean and already a little drunk, we launch into one of the great nights at the DSG. Sean is especially keen for it. He’s right off his long run tonight. Terrible, terrible day to be a beer. The man is so amped up he may explode; he doesn’t know if he wants to fight people or give back to back fellatio to everyone around him. Daley reckons he’s had more STIs than sexual partners, which doesn’t add up. Umar meets someone whose bollock he hit with a cricket ball, years ago — an injury that led to surgery. He buys him a baby guinness shot, as a kind of recompense, which, again, doesn’t quite add up.

More beers. More obscene chat. Everywhere I look, there’s a jug of beer sitting there, absolutely begging for it. Jimmy Anderson (not that one), a new Plough this year, gets a lovely cap presentation from Umar, then proceeds to fall in a bush. He gets the inevitable “Jimmy gets battered, everywhere he goes” chant, and you can tell he’s one of those guys who’s gonna fit right in here, in our weird little South London creche.

Nieboer speaks to Cath, hoping for some slightly more normal chat. There is a limit, even for me. We discuss Duray’s brain, how it works, how it doesn’t work. Apparently he wakes up every day and goes: Yes, THIS is the plan for today, which is kind of remarkable and unthinkable for both of us. Cath likes to kick ideas around a bit more, mull it over, while Nieboer much prefers to wake up desperately terrified and confused, a sort of nausea of the cells and soul, wondering about things like who bowls first change on Saturday and Jesus Christ where the HELL are my cigarettes.

It’s a night that never seems to end. The full moon hangs low, and everything feels vaguely dreamlike. Matt Spencer and his wife, Jess, tell me all about their wedding. Apparently Liam kept going up to people and telling them: “Yeah, you need a water, mate”. Duray came up to them at one point and said: “I hope you have insurance, cos I’m going to TEAR up this dance floor”.

Grayzer tells me a story about the time Josh Kerr challenged him to throw a glass bottle across the Danube, which is at least 100 metres wide. Apparently Kerr’s effort only just made it into the water. Nieboer gets menaced in the toilets by Sean. Nieboer and Duray blast Aman for not wanting to open the bowling, despite his insane ability. It’s like: oh, Picasso won’t PAINT.

At this point, Nieboer needs a water. Lewys Evans mumbles awful things into his ear. People are talking of Hootenanny, but Nieboer wants no part in it. He joins Duray and Cath in an Uber, and shoots east.

Sprawling in the back, there's a distinctly post-coital vibe about Duray.

“It’s never going to get better than that,” he’s saying. “League champions and then promoted on the final day? Why try and win any more? It’s not gonna get any better.”

Nieboer smiles. Must be nice, he’s thinking, sat there in the front, quietly frustrated that we only had one promotion party tonight, rather than two.

“I don’t need to play that much anymore,” he continues. “Now I can just enjoy it, go bully bowlers on a Sunday.”

“But you LOVE it,” Cath interjects. “You LOVE league cricket.”

He shrugs. “I’d rather watch and enjoy; see Plough evolve from the sidelines. I’ve done my bit, you know?”

Nieboer smiles again, nodding. He’s done more than his bit, I would say. Duray is like a star among planets at this club; the sheer weight of his energy lights up anything he goes near. He’s been more than excellent; he’s helped so many others be excellent, too.

At the same time, Nieboer doesn’t believe a word of what Duray’s saying. We’ve all been done with cricket at various points in our lives. Prithu Banerjee is done with it every week; God knows I’ve had some moments too. But we don’t decide, really. Cricket decides when it’s done with you.

And as we head through the Rotherhithe tunnel, lights blinking in the distance, Nieboer starts to feel rather sad. He realises that cricket is done with us, for now. There’s something particularly cruel about how you can go on this incredible journey that starts in April and stretches all the way through what feels like a neverending golden summer — surrounded always by amazing people and green spaces and making memories, off and on field, that last a lifetime — and then it just… ends.

What a painful and beautiful sport. How lucky we all are — to have this club, this game, and most of all each other. What a curse that it ever has to end.

Jesus, this match report definitely needs to end. I’ll round off by simply saying: it’s been a pleasure, everyone. We’ll be back. The 2nd XI certainly will, and with a serious vengeance. I miss you all already.