Heading to the ground via the Northern Line, Nieboer feels ghosts of the past resting on his shoulders. Haydon’s Recreation Ground, like Dien Bien Phu to the French or Tom Ryder to Ajit Prasad at Maida Vale, only holds bad memories for him. His first game there, the oppo — Blue Wings — hit 250 and Ploughmans were all out for 100. More recently, as a 1s player, Nieboer had been up against the same team and seen his dear boys need 30 runs from 10 overs with five wickets in hand, and still somehow lose.

Yes… after enough time, going round and round again at these anonymous grounds stretched randomly across Zone 4, wasting countless f*cking Saturdays in the same sort of way, you build a kind of trauma-based intuition. You just seem to know, walking into some of them, that the next seven hours or so are going to be heavy. The details don’t matter. All you know, for sure, is that your brain starts humming with brutal vibes as you approach the green. Something wild and evil is about to happen; and it’s going to involve you.

After electing to bowl first and Giordy Diangienda and Liam Gray (as always) removing their openers, leaving them 10-2, Damon Greeney hits their dangerous No.4 flush in front, halfway down middle, two times in an over, and the umpire tells him to f*ck right off, signals both were going down leg, and everyone howls with consternation.

“How many have I bowled down legside all day?” Damon grumbles, walking off.

Eventually we do get the guy out, although once again it’s mired in teeth-grinding controversy. Liam Gray is back on. He asks Nieboer where he should bowl it. Nieboer says full and straight. Liam does. It’s going about 27mph. It’s a bit short. The ball bounces, goes down, bounces again inside the popping crease, and bowls him. The square leg umpire, a child, initially signals no ball, but then Nieboer reminds him of the law, 21.7 in the MCC handbook, which states:

21.7 The umpire shall call and signal No ball if a ball which he/she considers to have been delivered, without having previously touched bat or person of the striker,

- bounces more than once or rolls along the ground before it reaches the popping crease

Once the child is reminded of such legal strictures, he changes his decision to out. Their captain, batting at the other end, will not accept it.

In any case, the Rule of Law eventually prevails.

Annoyingly, the next guy who comes in is actually pretty good. He scores a rapid 50 — with a fair amount of luck, as Chris Ovens points out to him — and Team Mitcham are well on course to score 220 here.

But Plough hit back. Nicko bowls hard lines, Damo finally gets a deserved wicket, Giordy dismantles the tail (like always), and Ritik Jaat — called up to this game late, like 18 hours ago — produces two unbelievably good and pretty much identical direct hits, reducing Mitcham to 191 all out, which is a fairly good effort on a pitch so dry and fast it’s basically like playing in the Atacama Desert.

And much like in the Atacama, there is no tea today, so we sit down in our stuffy changing room and munch now-up-to-temperature meal deals while Nieboer nibbles on an oat bar outside, pacing back and forth, thinking, as always, about What Comes Next.

The Ploughmans batting innings starts breezily. The guy who hit 50 for Mitcham is also, it turns out, a rapid bowler, his first ball onto Nieboer’s pads and Nieboer just getting his bat down, the ball flying for four through vacant square leg. Him and Van Naidoo are very comfortable out here, coasting to 55-0 after 10 overs, Van piercing the gaps beautifully.

At this stage, the 1st XI, following a slight pasting in their own game, are now here. Their dad-like presence, plus Mitcham’s other opener changing to spin, takes Nieboer out of his bubble, and he’s out — for the third bloody time in the league this season — for 18, wasting what was an excellent platform.

Chris Ovens departs shortly after, setting in motion what would become an agonising pattern for the next couple of hours: namely, Ploughmans getting to a position of comfort, of control, then shitting their own bed, throwing the contest wide open again.

Nicko and Ritik Jaat, who comes in at 98-4, add 48 easy runs, almost entirely deflating the contest. But then, shockingly, Nicko goes for 43. The pendulum swings the other way. In comes Yanni Baveas. For a bit, it looks like Ritik is going to take us home, smiting some beauties with power.

But soon Ritik is indeed out, the score 160-6. Ploughmans still need 32 runs.

Standing there at umpire, Nieboer is in a pit of anguish. You bastard, he’s thinking to himself. You f*cking, f*cking bastard. You should still be out here. This shouldn’t be so hard. He can feel the tension on the sidelines. Nobody is moving and nobody is laughing. It’s horrible. It’s no way to spend a Saturday, this. He’s transported back to that 1s game, back in 2024 — the hew of the fading light and game situation the same, the 20 points evaporating right in front of Nieboer, powerless now to do anything about it.

And yet there’s another swing. Liam Gray, our dear club captain, our commandante, comes in and, alongside the imperious steely and gorgeously Yanni, takes Plough from 32 required to 8 required. And then he’s bowled. We can almost smell it, taste it, this victory, but at the same time it feels about as far away as Tom Lonnen right now, across the Atlantic, probably staring blankly at some chimps in some woke nature reserve with his family while this horror show plays out in the bowels of South Wimbledon.

So it’s down to Yanni and Damon. And, by god, the boys show some unbelievable cajones. Damo wears one on the lid. Giordy, sat there on the sidelines, is vibrating with abject terror. He is sitting perfectly still, saying nothing, like a ghost, his glazed eyes seeing things no living creature should see.

But out in the middle, Yanni slowly but surely guides us closer. There is a fierce determination written across his face so loudly it’s almost feral, primitive — the look of a beast who’s just been tossed into a sawdust pit to fight for its life, knowing on a cellular level that failure is simply not an option, the Australian dog spirit humming off him like sweet radiation.

And run by run, piece by piece, the scores become level. Ploughmans can’t lose. Ploughmans can’t lose. The win is sealed — fittingly, in this most village of all village contests — with a wide, given delightfully by Chris Ovens. We don’t care. Ploughmans have 20 points and remain top of the league. Nieboer kisses Yanni on the lips, then promises to take things further at The Garden Shed, an excellent pub just over the road.

And let me tell you: those beers, drunk after a nailbiting league win on the road against a team of difficult blokes that doesn’t just keep you top of the league but also extends your lead, taste VERY good indeed.

The boys are in a sort of post-coital state of glazed serenity. Duray Pretorious sings the South African national anthem, then leaves. Yanni is struggling to move, so he heads home. The rest of us have a very intimate discussion about quiche. Nieboer thinks they’re better cold. Benny insists on hot, then suggests pie is better, which feels irrelevant. Liam reckons they’re fine either way. He then tells us about how he went to Flat Iron with his friend Muz last night, ordered a steak platter, after which the pair decided to just double up — make it two, as Suri Poleboina might say.

It’s that point of the evening where Nieboer is hiccuping and struggling to think cogent thoughts. He lurches back to the Northern line, which is thronging with happy, drunk, seething bags of humanity, all of them coming back from some festival in Morden. One lady to Nieboer’s left, called Erin, spills some mojito on his bag, and we start talking, mainly about her boyfriend’s new obsession with bouldering, which Nieboer reckons is inherently Gollum-like and absolute bin, hobby wise. Pot kettle black stuff. She wants to know what’s in the Sainsbury’s bag, so Nieboer shows her: this horrible tableau of discarded apples, half eaten oat bars, cigarette packets, and a box, for some reason. She doesn’t know what it means. Her friend, next to her, is paralytically drunk, head bobbing everywhere. At one point she retches like some cat coughing up a furball. We ponder asking TFL staff for a wheelbarrow or perhaps some kind of adrenaline shot.

Thankfully, it doesn’t come to that. Erin bundles her friend off the train and Nieboer keeps zooming east, back to Shadwell, getting his fan to blast his nether regions once again as he nibbles a very nice lemon-ricotta-courgette pizza on the sofa and feels mainly just relief, pure relief that it’s all over, like the survivor of some terrible shipwreck.