Dulwich is absolutely thronging with parents and dogs and unbearable children today. One dad, standing outside a Pedder, motions towards a home advertised in its window, explaining to his son why the brickwork on this property in Herne Hill is especially rare, the little sprog staring at his feet, swaying from side to side, not listening at all. Another dad, Leo Nieboer notices looking over his shoulder as he queues for coffee, is texting his wife about how to discipline his recalcitrant teenage daughter. Other smaller children are simply screaming, shattering the morning calm with their senseless entitled cries.

Plenty of energy in these faces; a lot of confidence. These are not your chronic worriers, Nieboer thinks to himself. He feels a pang of jealousy at the way these f*ckers seem very relaxed and content about what they’ve decided to do today. Perhaps because, as the first league game in 244 days draws ever closer, Nieboer is a bag of nerves, feeling anything but relaxed and confident.

League cricket is a thrilling, all-encompassing high, an assault on the pineal gland; but the things that make it so damn addictive can also warp inside your brain and turn your insides to jelly. It’s basically morphine that costs £13 a hit, only most of it is pain. And there’s no methadone programme, either.

After losing the toss and being sent into bat, suspended in the subhuman funk of that weird liminal soldier’s minute prior to going out to the crease, Tom Lonnen pipes up.

“We’re all a bit nervous, aren’t we?” he says. “It’s good. Shows that we care.”

It suddenly occurs to Nieboer that everyone is a bit quiet, that he isn’t alone in this feeling, by any stretch. Now he’s very conscious of the rarefied air percolating through the group. The only two people who seem normal are Liam Gray — who never seems bothered by anything, apart from wind — and Giordy Diangienda, who’s telling me about how his For You page on Instagram is just boobs and wrestling, and how that’s a good thing.

“You need the Bible,” Nieboer says to him.

“I bet you don’t read the Bible,” he shoots back.

“I do, actually. Big fan of the Old Testament. Some superb writing, some ghastly images. Very, very good.”

For some reason, this Bible stuff really gets Nieboer talking. Normally he’s totally non-verbal before batting, but here the boys are getting an unsolicited lecture on the Book of Job, poor Benny Cobbett arranging his coloured pens while being told that vengeance is His, and so on, before Nieboer and Suri Poleboina eventually have to head out there and play some cricket.

It’s a good start. Suri initially struggles to get purchase on this slow pitch and even slower — still a bit sandy — outfield, but does start getting them away, eventually caught for 18 (20) after going for one too many, having added 38 with Nieboer for the opening stand.

For the next 18 overs, Nieboer and Lonnen grind out a 69-run partnership, toiling under the heat and some reasonably tight bowling. This is anti-woke cricket, a gross middle finger to the Hundred and IPL and AI generated videos of sexy strawberries with big bulging arses and full lips. We’re nudging and weaving and leaving and grunting hard between the wickets, both content in the notion that whatever we’re doing doesn’t look especially good but is essentially working.

On the sidelines, they’re having more fun. Oscar Sawyer mumbles something about shipping containers, and Liam jumps all over it.

“Oh, yeah? Know a bit about shipping containers, do you, mate?” he booms, his unique register carrying all the way out to the middle. The boys laugh. After Nieboer whips a four over square leg, Butlin mimics his weird spin movement, turning round and round like a hammer thrower, and this makes Nieboer himself chuckle as he fiddles with his pads and box between balls.

Tom Lonnen misses a straight one, out for 22 (48). “I’ve just missed a f*cking straight one,” he confirms, walking off. The score is 107-2 off 26 overs.

Chris Butlin, Nieboer’s new vice captain, comes out, and after just his second ball — a cover drive for four — you can feel the air going out of Sinjun’s lungs. Just the way Butlin sets up, the way it looks, is enough to make Sinjun dissolve like a muffin in the rain, especially after 26 overs of graft. He is eminently classy and correct in everything he does, guiding the ball to the boundary, never forcing it; just perfect timing. More drives; flicks over mid wicket; punches past the bowler’s head; plenty of quick singles — all while captaining his captain, reminding him to not force it, take breaks between twos, reset, think about his scoring areas, and just generally make him feel good as his brain starts to melt beyond recognition.

And so it’s something of a shock when another perfectly timed drive over mid off somehow sticks in the guy’s hand, and Butlin’s out for 28 (23). But the damage is done, in a way. The pair have added 61 in just eight overs, and now Plough are well in the driving seat.

Benny Cobbett comes out and immediately gets to work on punishing Sinjun further, hitting one drive to the boundary so hard that Nieboer only sees the ball when it hits the rope, before barbecuing himself for 13 (14), shouting a pained “Oh NO!” as he lopes towards the non-striker’s end, knowing he’s well short.

Oscar, lover of shipping containers, comes out and looks decent, only to get unfairly triggered by Giordy. It’s Nieboer’s fault, really, letting such a pro-bowler player stand at umpire. In any case, it doesn’t matter. Plough have made 206, a very defendable total, with Nieboer finishing on 91* (114), his highest ever score but also somehow a disappointment. As Sean McGurn sums up later: if you bat 40 overs and only score 91, that is an avoidance.

For tea… well, there is no tea. Not exactly. Stuart, our new tea lady, has only just started the preparations by the time we come off, so both sets of players stand around awkwardly for 10 or 15 minutes, waiting for the spread, which is actually fine with Nieboer, whose whole body is cracking and popping like some pensioner being forced to break dance, and could use a moment to sit down and think about what comes next.
With the light going from harsh bright yellow to a hazier amber gold, Giordy and Liam open up, both taking a wicket to remove Sinjun’s openers, leaving them 49-2 off 8 overs. But then the torture really starts. At one end, John Walton is delivering beguiling left arm variations, and at the other Qammar Jamshaid is simply too fast for them to hit, the boys cooing like pigeons every time the batter starts playing their shot by the time it thuds into Suri’s gloves. They take three wickets between them, Qammar with a delicious yorker followed by an even more delicious primal roar, Walton producing a titillating change up and standing there pointing at the batter, face beaming, as if to say: “Ohhhhh you fell right into that trap, didn’t you, old boy!”

By drinks, even with Sinjun five down and not really going anywhere, Nieboer is frustrated. Sinjun are calling a lot of wides that aren’t wides, and at one point he goes up to the umpire and makes himself clear. Lonnen tells him to leave it.

“I didn’t play a league game for two years because of this shit,” he’s saying. “Every oppo is going to do that. Just the way it is.”

Nieboer nods, grateful for the more experienced heads around him. With Lonnen, Butlin, Liam, Suri, and Benny, his role as captain is less about dictating every last detail and more just processing the wisdom going into his ears and distributing it most effectively, like an immune system pumping white blood cells to sickly areas that need it.

Back on the pitch, Oscar is experiencing every possible emotion you can feel on a cricket field, from joy to dread to outright ambivalence. One over is pretty catastrophic; the next one yields two wickets, removing a player who didn’t move his feet and looked like a walking wicket but somehow managed to make 18 and hang in longer than anyone else.

With Sinjun seven wickets down, they make a little recovery, frustrating the boys with some cross batting that does once in a while find the boundary. But it’s not sustainable; Sinjun are a dam waiting to burst, a fish egg just wanting a little poke, and the man to deliver that little poke and release those lovely eggs is Benny, doing what he loves to do: taking three wickets for hardly any runs, mopping up the tail, smiling malevolently as he works over a batter, like a mother cat goading her kittens to belt away. Suri takes the final catch, bringing up his 100th dismissal for the club. He’s just the most phenomenal man. The twos win by 55 runs.

It’s been a good day. Perhaps he should talk about the Bible before every game, Nieboer thinks. Maybe even deliver a sermon… stand in the middle of the Griffin, the U14 girls games still going, and shout things like:

“BEWARE! For the devils also believe, and tremble!”

“And whosoever was not written into the scorebook of life — and uploaded properly to Play Cricket — was cast into the lake of fire!”

“Revelations! Revelations! Revelations! Say Hallelujah! I said say Hallelujah you sinful bastards!”

Or maybe not. Either way, it’s time for some soft play in our favourite creche, the DSG. The 1st XI have also won, so it’s 40 points and a lot of snogs, and Sean McGurn, having gone daddy ton in his first league game as 1s skipper, is in a riproaring sort of mood.

“Any f*cking DANGER, Nieboer??” he booms, before hugging him so hard his feet leave the ground. A few of us take a little walk. We decide that the 1s under Duray Pretorius were guided, politically, by a sort of data-driven South African centrism, all the high ground in the middle of the road, a meritocracy. We’re not sure what Seanism is, just yet. Nieboer can’t figure out whether it’s extremely far right, or perhaps far left, or possibly rooted in something ancient, like a Bantu version of animism, or something even more primitive, where the jungle is the guiding force. Or maybe it’s just: bat first.

Now inside drinking many many beers, Sean, reflecting on his knock, explains to us that he played one shot — somewhere between a drive and a punch — that was so special it doesn’t have a name, at least in the English lexicon. We suspect that there may be a word for it in Tamil, or perhaps Japanese. Butlin and Nieboer discuss the possibility of learning Japanese, so that the oppo can never understand what we’re saying, between the wickets.

Giordy is in good spirits following another good display for the 2s. We reflect on his offer to suplex Tom Lonnen off the DSG roof, which Lonnen declined.

“What if I pay you?” Giordy had asked, but still the offer rang hollow. Which makes sense, as Liam points out, because Lonnen is a pretty stable homeowner, with children, who doesn’t need any kind of WWE cosplay side hustle to make ends meet, as far as we can tell.

More jugs arrive. Butlin wants to know how heterosexual relations typically commence, so we get into that for a while, people’s contributions varying to a worrying degree. Nieboer’s vape gets interrogated and passed around so vigorously it’s basically like some prisoner at a CIA black site. James Barron and Benny Cobbett — who was bound for Islington but then decided against it because Islington is “stupid” — speak to Nieboer very heavily about golf, and he understands about 40% of it.

It’s time to get out of here. Butlin doesn’t fancy it; he’s going to Turkey tomorrow, presumably to do something about that shiny bald head of his. Sean is VERY keen for it. Nieboer’s central nervous system appears to be giving out completely, his words slurring and eyes unfocused, so he lurches back to East London and eats egg fried rice completely naked in his room, his legs like jelly, a wide smile on his face after what was a wonderful start to the 2026 league campaign.