As usual, Leo Nieboer hasn’t had enough sleep. The night before, following a lovely barbeque provided by occasional Ploughman Bruno Rogers — replete with chicken wine and kua kling sausages — he had decided to head home and perhaps watch the first half of Argentina’s total mismatch knockout game with Cape Verde, then do his best to make himself unconscious.

But here’s the bastard thing about this World Cup: the games are just too good. Which wouldn’t be an issue if the best of the action wasn’t happening at, like, 01:42 on a school night. But as it is Nieboer finds himself careening around the room like some hairy naked cannonball after Cape Verde — amazingly, inexplicably — equalise in extra time with one of the finest goals in World Cup history. It’s killing him, slowly, this World Cup. The night before had been similar with Portugal vs Croatia, Nieboer walking around his flat with hands on his head, heart thumping, cursing Portugal and everything Portuguese, even pastel del nata, at 02:30, his Friday Teams standup less than eight hours away.

How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? Nieboer wonders to himself as he staggers into Southwark Park, which, when entered from the Bermondsey side, is very pretty, laden with bulbous rustling trees and peaceful activity. He sees people doing yoga, holding hands, playing tennis in that distinctly unaggressive almost polite way middle aged people seem to play tennis.

He rounds the corner — now more towards the Surrey Quays side — and the vibe does a total 180. It’s crowded and ugly and loud. The pitch we’re playing on is teeming with screaming cricket-playing children, people on bikes, bored parents, dog walkers, and a random assortment of groups playing games Nieboer doesn’t understand. It feels somehow unstructured, all of it. Even the toilets have a chaotic feel about them.

“Due to persistent vandalism, these toilets will close at 4pm,” the sign proclaims. Nieboer shakes his head. Maybe he didn’t need to do that poo on the floor.

Eventually the field clears and we can play this awful sport. Once again, Nieboer has lost the toss and Ploughmans are batting. Giordy Diangienda, who has been driving trains since 05:00, heads off and finds a quiet place to sleep. We’re tracking his location, and it looks like he’s actually booked himself into a hotel, which feels unnecessary. Tom Elmslie is accusing Tom Lonnen of breaking his bat. Nieboer isn’t really paying attention; him and Van Naidoo have a job to do.

The job turns out to be a lot easier than anticipated. Their opening bowler, Tom Lee, the leading wicket taker in the division so far with 20 poles, has come down with a vicious case of the yips, the howling fantods, the screaming meemies. He can’t hit the astro pitch. At one point, the Southwark Park slip recommends that he, you know, tries landing the ball on the pitch, and Tom simply explodes, which is fair enough. In any case, his 14 ball over (which goes for 26), plus some superb hitting from Van and Nieboer manipulating a field that leaves him gaps in all his favourite places, helps Ploughmans reach 115-1 at the first drinks break.

From that point on, Southwark Park never really recover. They do have one very strong leg spinner who makes this awful sound whenever he bowls — like Waluigi or a goat having an orgasm — but the bowling, for the most part, is still wayward. And Ploughmans are ruthless with the bat. Nieboer makes 57. Lonnen makes a very watchful, gusty 30. Nicko Dowell scores a blasting 39. And Michael Ainslie and Tom Elmslie, for the last 10 overs, absolutely ram the knife in, looking so elegant, scoring 30* and 41* respectively. Plough have finished on 280.

Following a pretty nice tea, featuring extremely dry scones and beef sandwiches and an impressive array of fruit that Nieboer doesn’t eat — double apple vape is much nicer — we head out into the field knowing there’s still a big job to do. We are playing on astro, after all. The boundaries are small. And Southwark Park are, at this stage, top of the league. They are not out of this.

20 overs in, they are out of this. Giordy, like he does every week, removes their dangerous opener. Qammar Jamshaid — who is now bald and looks 300% more menacing and fast as a result — bowls their No.3 first ball with a delivery so molten hot it nearly breaks the stumps.

The real star of the show, however, is Shamar Grant (AKA Marz). In his first league game for the club, he bowls eight overs on the trot, taking 2-35. The man just never misses. He always has a smile on his face. He’s one of those people with a strange light around them; you just sense they’re a good egg and would, if needed, deliver your baby, if you started delivering your baby midway through a league game.

With Nicko Dowell at the other end, Plough have a noose around the neck of this contest. Tom Lonnen narrowly misses two catches at second slip — flying just over him — and Nicko puts Nieboer in the cordon, at first slip.

“Guarantee you’ll get a catch now,” Lonnen moans. Next ball, an edge flies perfectly into Nieboer’s hands. The boys go mental; Lonnen just stands there, furious, like a man watching children trying to set fire to his car.

Now the game has entered the entropy phase. It’s already so late — like, 19:00 — due to Southwark Park bowling 40 wides earlier, and there’s still 10 overs left, three wickets to get. Southwark Park are like a boxer who has been punched to oblivion, received his terrible message, but remains standing, now just sort of staggering around the ring. The brain is dead but the body continues to function on some basic motor survival level.

It’s like one of Dante’s Circles of Hell, these last few overs. It reminds Nieboer of Colonel Kurtz’s nightmare from Apocalypse Now

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare: crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving."

Indeed. This is what eternal damnation will look like for Nieboer: captaining a game that doesn’t end, his mouth sticky with saliva, neurons no longer firing, having to corral boys who are at this point zombies, thinking only of the pub but never actually getting there.

To add to Nieboer’s crawl across the razor, children keep streaming onto the field, running after balls, blissfully unaware of the hard ball nearby that may well kill them, if they’re not careful. At one point, three children from three different sources spill onto the pitch at once, and Nieboer finds himself shouting: “Jaysus! We’ve got TRIPLE CHILD!”

Mercifully, the game does eventually end, courtesy of Narvin Ganesh smashing poles and Giordy taking his third wicket of the day. It’s now 20:00; Nieboer’s brain has gone soft and mushy, but we are top of the league at the halfway point of the season. It’s time for many drinks.

And we do indeed have many drinks — at the Old Justice, Michael Ainslie’s favourite pub, with its view of the Thames and £5 Guinness. They taste awfully good, after all that. We’ve all gone a little crazy. Marz is talking about mature Russians. Van, for some reason, is holding a massive box of pastries, handing them out to people, shepherded by this old Caribbean lady. Nieboer can’t stop doing his Ian Paisley impression.

“You’ve a FINE keister indeed, Mr. Ainslie,” he growls in Paisley’s thick Northern Ireland accent. “Your keister has caused a MORAL DISTURBANCE, Mr. Ainslie.”

Eventually, we all start to melt away. Nieboer, Van and Elmo are the last ones standing. We try to watch the France Paraguay game, but it’s so morbid and turgid it hurts our eyes. Time to get the hell out of here. Nieboer has a leftover kua kling sausage in the fridge and plans to do terrible things to it, maybe eat it in the shower, like some monkey in an Amazonian rainstorm.

But so much for that bad gibberish. It’s been a long and beautiful day — a day when the 2nd XI made perhaps their biggest statement of the season so far.