Sitting on the platform at Balham, surrounded by nervous Arsenal fans and others looking to escape the city and its many nervous Arsenal fans, Leo Nieboer gets a very troubling text from Narvin Ganesh, down to make his Ploughmans league debut today.

“I'm so sorry... something bad happened, I don't think I'll be able to make it today.”

“What?”

“Yeah…”

“You all good?”

“Not really…”

“...”

“I’m stuck with this guy”, he says, and sends me a photo of Giordy Diangienda, driving his car, wearing his Manchester United shirt, a big shit-eating grin on his face. He’s absolutely done Nieboer there.

At Hackbridge station, the city now feeling far away, replaced by a mixture of verdant foliage and big Lidls, he bumps into two much more trustworthy individuals: Ajit Prasad and Damon Greeney. The three of them walk through Beddington Park, which is sun-dappled and pretty but largely empty. Prasad and Nieboer discuss the best possible ways to doctor a pitch.

“Big cheesegrater,” Prasad is saying. “Rub the ball and the pitch really hard.”

“How about just setting it on fire?” Nieboer asks. “Douse it in petrol and light it up, make the thing look like the opening scene from Apocalypse Now.”

“That just feels like criminal activity.”

“Yeah, but it does still fall within the remit of doctoring pitches, technically.”

“That’s true.”

“What about doctoring the ball? You could put it in the freezer.”

“Like a conker.”

“Yeah… dip it in vinegar, maybe.”

“...”

“Did you play conkers, Damo?”

“Of course!”

“What was your strategy?”

“Oh, nothing really.”

“Just good line and length?”

“Just good line and length.”

And we’ll need plenty of that, because Nieboer loses the toss and Ploughmans are sent into the field. It’s a perfect batting deck and a ripping fast outfield, and the sun is hot. We’ve got six players — Narvin, Ean Smith, Josh Kerr, Bisi, Ajay John, Van Naidoo — making their Ploughmans league debut, so it’s a potential baptism of fire.

Nonetheless, Ploughmans start nicely. Damon Greeney claims the first wicket, smashing top of off with a perfect ball, then wheels away, arm up Alan Shearer style. It’s the most Nieboer has seen him celebrate anything. Giordy Diangienda coaxes their captain into an ambitious shot, slapped right at Damon, who catches it despite having a battered left hand.

Then things drift a little. Narvin, the impish shithouse who nearly gave Nieboer a heart attack earlier, comes on and struggles to find rhythm. And yet, when he gets it right, it’s totally unplayable. He shatters their No.3’s stumps. At the other end, Bisi appears to have pivoted to being a left arm spin bowler, and it’s rather handy. He also takes a wicket. And while Beddington are making a few too many for Nieboer’s liking — 100 runs from the first 18 overs — Ploughmans are chipping away.

Nieboer then makes a captaincy mistake. He thought he ended the Narvin and Bisi spells on 20 overs, in time for drinks, but it’s actually the 19th over, so he needs an over from someone. He decides to bowl himself. Amazingly, it only goes for two runs, nearly getting an LBW, and Prasad, vice captain for the day and doing nicely behind the stumps, insists that Nieboer must keep bowling. What was meant to be a simple chop-out over has now turned into a full-on spell.

Mainly it’s a tragic spell, with too many full tosses, but Nieboer does manage to extricate their dangerous-looking No.5 simply through packing the legside and saying: well, have a go. Ajay John holds it at long on, and Nieboer now has as many league wickets this season as Damon Greeney, Liam Gray, Duray Pretorius, Tom Ryder, and Chris Roden-Smith. Step it up, boys. Bowling is SO easy.

Van Naidoo delivers some handy stuff, finishing on 1-31 off his six overs, and along with Giordy — who grabs a wicket maiden — and Damon keeping things tight at the end, Beddington can only finish on 229 — which seems high but is actually a very stellar effort on a pitch where anything that beats the outfield goes for four. Ajay reckons they’re 50 short. Special commendation to Josh Kerr, who didn’t bowl and didn’t bat in this game but absolutely lashed himself from fine leg to fine leg all innings, making a great deal of his unique brand of Noise.

Tea is a very decent affair indeed, replete with generously-filled sandwiches and pizza slices and, as Bisi points out, “real Kent water”, which does indeed have a fresher taste to the swill Nieboer ingests in east London. In any case, Nieboer can’t really enjoy any of it; he can never enjoy tea before batting, because it’s like he doesn’t have a stomach. There’s an empty expanse where his stomach ought to be. There’s a big job to do.

Alongside Ajit Prasad, though, that job starts off feeling incredibly easy. There’s some wayward bowling, and both openers are punishing it. The pair race to their 50 partnership in just seven overs, giving Plough the ideal platform. Prasad looks imperious out here, taking down anyone who dares to put it in his slot. He has always maintained that he bats a lot better against South Asians — his dad in his head, apparently, saying, “Put that GARBAGE away” — and it’s the case here. He’s nearly out to their lanky gora opener, but then dismantles their best bowler — a wily old bald Indian man with the lowest release point in Division 11 North and perhaps the southern England area more generally.

So it’s a tremendous shame when Nieboer — starting to tighten up, run wise — pushes for a single that probably isn’t there and Prasad is run out for 34 (32). They’ve put on 83 for the first wicket, adding to the 96 and 94 they scored together in their last two occasions opening together. Like Nixon and Haldeman, or Lenin and Trotsky, or Giordy and his right hand, some partnerships just work, for whatever reason.

Van comes out at No.3 and looks superb, striking his first ball through the covers, but then very surprisingly chops on for 7. Bharat Ramesh comes out, Nieboer conscious of his last league outing, back in 2024, when he made 0, hoping he does a little better here, because a collapse now would be suboptimal, with 130 odd runs still to get.

The gorgeous Aussie doesn’t disappoint. He’s going after this damn ball like he’s got a personal grudge against it. It’s almost like he’s decided the best way to push through his nerves is to hit really hard, smacking and spanking himself into a state of comfort and perhaps even arousal, away from potential inertia and atrophy.

But then, weirdly, with the game very much in hand at 118-2 off 17 overs, the pair start to struggle a little. It occurs to Nieboer, standing at the non-striker’s end, seemingly in the forties forever, that it’s always firstly and foremostly the self out there, in the middle, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. We’re fighting against our own brains, really. The bowler is not the foe; he’s more the partner in the dance, the excuse for meeting the self. Cricket’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive, fundamentally; you compete with your own limits to transcend the self. You seek to vanquish the limited sluggardly overthinking self whose limits also make the game possible in the first place. In other words, Nieboer has to remind himself to not think, to just watch, and tells Bharat the same. He reminds himself that, at this stage, it’s you who gets you out.

And so it proves for Nieboer, clothing one to extra cover for 77 (73) in the 27th over. He’s bitterly disappointed, but also knows the back of this chase is very much broken, with Plough on 193-3, needing just 36 runs in 13 overs.

And despite a bit of squeaky bum time that has Nieboer pacing and cursing and staggering along the touchline, Plough do indeed get over the line, Ajay John producing some gorgeously fearless hitting (38* off 25 balls), with Ean hanging in at the other end, to put Beddington away in the 34th over and give Ploughmans a rather delicious 20 points on the road.

Crucially, Ajay’s rampant one-gear style also means we finish the game in time to acquire a couple of jugs and head into the clubhouse to watch the penalties between Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain. At no point in the day has Giordy been more animated. And when Gabriel launches a penalty so high and wild it may actually land in Moscow like some errant drone strike, the clubhouse explodes. There are no Arsenal fans here; they haven’t chosen Beddington CC as the venue to watch their team’s biggest game in 20 years, which does make sense. So it’s a wonderful collective hatewatch. Nieboer shakes Giordy’s hand, convinced the boy has had something to do with it, through his hatred of Arsenal alone. Beddington’s skipper, Matt, buys us another jug and we take it back outside, the evening shadows lengthening and the air still warm.

And it’s a delightful old time, out here, in that fuzzy post-win drunken glow. Narvin is telling us about how he’d never drunk alcohol in his life, then met the Plough — specifically Sean McGurn — and decided he wanted to drink. He initially thought of starting with a rum and coke, but Sean cautioned against it, and bought him a beer.

“I have one beer, then another beer, then another,” he’s saying. “Then one more. Then I need to go home, on the Northern line, to Morden, but I end up in Edgware.”

The boys laugh. Nieboer cautions him that he’ll jeopardise his delightful rig, his Tamil rig, which you can see on his WhatsApp profile, if he spends the season with us. Ajay, also of Tamil background, points out that the conventional older Tamil rig is quite unique — really thin arms, really strong calves, and a huge hanging gut and just no arse at all, as if their arse was, like, sucked into their bodies and reappeared out front as gut.

More laughter. More beers. Nieboer pulls out his Damon Greeney impression, which is just George Harrison, pretty much. He also gives the group a quick blast of Margaret Thatcher, which doesn’t go down as well. Van’s telling us about his man cave — not a euphemism — and it sounds quite impressive. He’s got a pool table, table football, a couple of sofas, a half-sized fridge, but sadly no TV, so he loses some points there. Nieboer hopes one day he can have his own cave, adorned with portraits of Sir Alastair Cook and Chairman Mao. Maybe some Guinness on tap. And Ajay John as personal chef, cranking out scallops and lamb chettinad curry, as County Cricket plays in the background.

Our minds are all turning towards food, actually. Nieboer asks Narvin what he’d ideally eat right now. “Anything! Literally anything!” he booms back. Giordy, who I have never seen eat food outside of cricket teas in the four or five years I’ve known him, who I’m starting to think just doesn’t eat food apart from when he comes to cricket, is mute on the issue. Nieboer goes home and makes some jazzed up Shin Ramyun noodles, with peanut butter, egg, birds eye chillis, but then makes his characteristic mistake of adding too much of Lao Gan Ma crispy chilli oil, so his noodles just end up tasting of that.

It still tastes pretty good. What tastes even better, though, without any shred of doubt, is that sweet nourishing flavour of 20 league points, after a day where all 11 players gave absolutely everything.