It’s not a pleasant day. Temperatures aren’t set to exceed 15C and there’s a 60-80% chance of rain across the afternoon — London supposedly covered in a thin but seemingly permanent smattering of rain, enough to keep you concerned but not enough to kill a game — not enough for Leo Nieboer to roll back over and have more dreams about dentists chairs and monstrous births.

No… today we will be playing some cricket, for good or ill. And Leo Nieboer has not nearly had enough sleep. The building opposite his flat is a sort of retirement community, and on the side that faces him there’s an alarm that goes off whenever it wants, a sound worse than a car alarm — higher pitched and more frantic — piercing into one’s brain at any time of day. It seemed to go off every hour from 02:00 to 07:00. Either nobody knows how to stop it, or those old bastards just can’t hear it. Or maybe they just don’t care. Perhaps it’s a hallucination — the amygdala so distended it now has its own soundtrack. In any case, Nieboer is not in good spirits.

Thankfully, his vice-captain Chris Butlin has very kindly offered him a lift to Addiscombe, making Nieboer’s journey to the bowels of Croydon a little easier. But Nieboer’s also anxious about it. Every time he takes a car to the game, rather than his usual train-bus-lime bike combination, he gets a duck. Not even, like, 2, or 7. Zero runs. This has happened four times before. And as a superstitious young man who refuses to take responsibility for bad shots or lame technique, Nieboer genuinely does believe there’s a correlation between his mode of transport and how he performs in a game.

In any case, it’s a pleasant car ride. Butlin is telling Nieboer about his Eurovision party later on, a Butlin tradition. He’s pessimistic about the acts on show because many have boycotted the event, so it’s a bit like Eurovision 2s, this time around, which seems quite fitting for Butlin.

At the ground, on a place called Coombe’s Farm, the bleak tableau stretching out before Nieboer could not be more different to the sunny, well-stocked Griffin Sports Club he enjoyed last week. The sky is grey and ugly; the pitch is uncovered, looking as if it were made of straw, and the clubhouse is like something from a horror film. It’s dark, wet, empty, littered with wrappers and empty hand sanitiser bottles, all scattered around as if the previous occupants had to leave in a huge hurry, perhaps pursued by some monstrous thing that even now lurks in the darker corners and waits for another mediocre cricketer to cross its path and be ripped to shreds.

There isn’t even any toilet paper.

“Don’t worry,” Tom Lonnen says. “I’ve got some. I always keep a roll of toilet paper on me. You never know when you might need it, at my age.”
The other Tom, Tom Merilaht, seems grateful, and perhaps also a little bemused at the painfully village setting he’s found himself in. The man has a ESPN Cricinfo profile. He used to play for Glamorgan 2nd XI. So I guess this is basically the same, really — just some more 2s stuff.

Out in the middle, Nieboer and Leo Towers, having been sent into bat, immediately find themselves menaced by a pitch that one might call hostile. Others might call it an utter shit tip. Nieboer goes forward to defend one that shoots past his nose. And feeling out of sorts, and also weirdly aware of the Car Curse, Nieboer chases a wide one and is caught behind. For a duck. Yes. Yes. Of course. Should have taken the f*cking Windrush line and then a tram. Or maybe just left it.

Merilaht joins Towers and the pair, despite the pitch, look pure class. Merilaht is a joy to watch — never plays a shot in anger, just guides the ball into gaps, as if he were playing a video game. The next day, he will go on to score a casual 177*, so Addiscombe have no idea how lucky they are that he only made 31 here.

Butlin goes cheaply. Suri and Towers dig in until drinks.

“This is horrible,” Towers is saying. “I never strike below 100.” Will Gray, his mate, tells Nieboer the next day that this simply is not true.

With Towers and Lonnen departing, Plough are in some bother. It looks, at one stage, that we may end up on around 120, if we’re lucky. But this is a good team, a gutsy team, one with real depth, so when Benny Cobbett comes in and starts smoking it everywhere, Nieboer is delighted but not surprised. Benny has correctly figured out that the only way to nullify this nasty pitch is to basically hit hard, just smash through the line, kind of like that MCG test last December, described by one surly Australian commentator as a “crapshoot” (it wasn’t Nicko Dowell, who I imagine said something worse).

With Benny making 36 and Suri scoring 27, plus some decent lower order hitting from John Walton — who made 12 and consistently cursed himself throughout the innings, smashing his bat on his pad at least three times — Plough have a very defendable total of 172.

After a decent tea comprising of chicken tenders and cucumber in wraps, Plough head out into the field. It’s not a pretty start: Addiscombe race to 67-0 off about seven overs, and a certain measure of doom begins to wash over the boys.

But then, like some sort of factory explosion or involuntary wet dream at work, everything changes in an instant. Qammar Jamshaid and John Walton come on at first change and essentially rip Addiscombe apart by the limbs. The former is too quick; the latter is too accurate. It becomes a slaughter, the home side flailing about helplessly. The stumps are hit so often that they could quite justifiably sue the duo in a court of law.

They’ve gone from 67-0 to 96 all out. 10 wickets for 29 runs. It’s all over before drinks. 20 points and a bloody snog. And now the rain — which was mizzling at points — really does come, just as we go off.

“Not bad bloody timing,” Lonnen beams. He has once again been an invaluable presence out there, giving Nieboer insights he’d have never thought about himself, especially with his sleep deprived brain as shrivelled as it is.

We head to Addiscombe’s main clubhouse. The lady behind the bar says Nieboer can have a shower if he buys a drink. He asks if he can take his Guinness to the shower. She says he can, if he buys two. Nieboer counters by asking if she just has a jug, or perhaps a bucket.

The boys are in good spirits. It’s been a tough day at times — cold, village, frustrating, wet, only about six blokes having a positive outing out of the 22 — but they’ve dug in and claimed another 20 points.

Nieboer wants to stay and drink for longer, or perhaps just collapse, but he needs to head back east for a friend’s birthday party. At the pub, he notices Eurovision on the TV, and gets so horrified by the United Kingdom’s entry that he actually stands up and backs away from the TV set. But the view is no better from the other side of the room: this shameful electrified corpse, raving and flapping his arms, looking like an iguana in a feeding frenzy. It’s too much for his brain to handle. It’s also, Nieboer realises, not far from what he must look like when he sets fields.

The night lurches on. The event we’re going to, called All My Friends, has so many rules it makes Nieboer nervous. No phones. No kissing on the dancefloor. No drinks on the dancefloor. No backpacks on the dancefloor. This place has more laws than the MCC handbook. The lady at the door who gives us these laws finishes by saying, in no uncertain terms, that one must not touch anyone who doesn’t want to be touched, looking right at Nieboer when she says it, who is, in fairness, grabbing his friend Dylan’s arse as she delivers this well-rehearsed monologue.

But so much of that bad gibberish. The 2s have another 20 points, sit pretty at the top of the league, and have another tantalising game next Saturday at the Griffin, where presumably I’ll be allowed to squeeze as many male bottoms as I damn well like.