After what has felt like three weeks of constant rain, the sun is shining today. The forecast is the sort of thing your grandmother wants for her trip to (Chris) Butlins: not scorching, not windy, not spitty, not bitey… just a good old tepid bath of 21 degrees centigrade all day.

However, Leo Nieboer is feeling… unusual. Wriggling around in bed, covered in sweat, fetally curled, he’s not experiencing his typical pre-match sickness and nausea; he’s feeling genuine sickness and nausea. Not entirely cerebral, this sickness, he thinks. His appetite is even more non-existent than usual and everything feels like it’s underwater, all far away and dim. This isn’t even a hangover; Nieboer was home at 21:30 the night before, but had been out eating eels — very good Japanese eels, part of a bento set, one should add — and suspects against any real logic that it’s those naughty little teriyaki-covered black wangers exploring his organs who are responsible for this somewhat concerning malaise.

Getting to the ground — a genuine rugby pitch absolutely laden with goose excrement — he sees Max Gumpert performing a series of elaborate and even provocative back stretches. It’s his first game back since April, when he got a slipped disc, and nobody has any idea, least of all him, how it’ll react today. Nieboer has planned for the very possible reality that Max will double over after 10 minutes and be wheelchair-bound for the rest of his days: namely, get back in the foetal position.

It’s hard to know what to do at the toss. Nieboer’s gut is saying bowl. Benny Cobbett, also with a back injury and just here to score the game, is saying bat. Max reckons bowl. Giordy Diangienda proudly tells me that he started the day with a shag. Nieboer takes a slight gamble and decides to bowl. Alleyns’ skipper tells me, after the toss, that the pitch actually worsens as the day goes on.

In any case, it’s a rip-roaring start. Giordy delivers what must be his finest ever spell for Ploughmans CC, using the skiddy low pitch to scintillating effect, bowling their No.1 and No.3 with a delicious mixture of movement and dip. They can’t score off him. At the other end, Qammar Jamshaid nicks off their other opener, caught wonderfully by Yanni Baveas, and would have taken more if they could get near the ball. Alleyns are 14-3.

We’ve got their balls in a vice, and it continues with Max and Van Naidoo — the former building up dots the way gamblers run up debt, the latter taking two wickets with the same sort of skiddy accurate bowling that Giordy had such success with, both balls keeping hauntingly low. Alleyns are 55-5 at drinks.

After a cute little shared cigarette, Max and Nieboer decide to give Giordy the ball right after drinks. It pays off: his third ball shatters the stumps and now we’ve broken the back of these boys. Our collective thoughts drift to bowling these blokes out for 80 and drinking beers at 16:00. But league cricket isn’t like that. Life isn’t like that, really. As Nieboer warned, every team will have a little spell, and their No.7 and No.8 do indeed have theirs, putting on a useful partnership.

The breakthrough does come eventually, Max taking a delicious caught and bowled. Ajay John, making his 2s league bowling debut, mops up the tail with two wickets, his last one stumped by Yanni. He raises his hands in the air, looks at Nieboer, and shouts: “I’VE GOT TWO WICKETS!”

It’s very sweet. And it’s been a good show. 125 all out. The boys are in excellent spirits. Nieboer, however, is sinking further into the abyss of private sickness, all thirsty and queasy, his eyes bulging and receding with his pulse. He takes no tea, sucking on a vape and pacing instead, but the spread does look pretty comprehensive, replete with Jackie style sandwiches and even chicken wings, which in Nieboer’s current state look about as romantic as turds.

Back out in the middle, it’s a living nightmare. Alex Jullienne pushes his first ball into the hands of short cover. “That’s cricket, mate,” he says, walking off. Van Naidoo is then bowled third ball. Plough are 3-2 after the first over and Nieboer, standing at the non-striker’s end, feels on the verge of having an aneurism, which his doctors have expressly told him to not have.

Thankfully, Max changes the vibe almost immediately, crunching two of his first few balls for four. Alleyns almost instantly push the field back, so he can take singles at will. Nieboer is not so lucky. This pitch is low and slow and rather tricky and he can’t do a lot more than nudge and nurdle, so they squeeze the living daylights out of him, denying him any gaps. Diving for one single, a strap on his pad breaks, so he has to go off and swap with one of Van’s, which is way way bigger.

“My brave, brave boys,” he moans on the sideline, channeling Margaret Thatcher. He’s not having the best time out here.

At the same time, it doesn’t really matter, because Max is moonballing Alleyns into a narcoleptic coma, muscling boundaries and deftly running singles, so Nieboer doesn’t need to worry about scoring too quickly or looking even remotely good. He just needs to exist at the other end long enough for Max to twist the knife until the victim stops breathing. If we were to compare handling the Alleyns’ bowling to, say, handling a violent child with rabies, Nieboer’s role would be to simply hold the rabid child still while Max repeatedly beats it over the head with a club.

And it’s working, this double act. The sheer divergence of styles is melting their brains and they’ve all gone quiet, apart from one older man, described by an Alleyns player to Nieboer as “a bit of a prick”, and who told his teammates, earlier in the day, that you need to be able to keep straight ones out to be in the top four… and proceeded to miss a straight one. He’s a bit like their Tom Lonnen, if Tom Lonnen was older and more sinewy and had all of his good qualities removed, just keeping the undiluted venom, and had his cricketing abilities reduced by 70%.

Even so, he does make the breakthrough, Nieboer smashing a full toss at mid wicket, out for 13 (42). Him and Max have added 72 runs.

When Ajay falls for 4, there’s a slight threat of a wobble, but a mixture of gorgeous calm from Oli Lonsdale and Alleyns running out of good bowling, plus Max just simply being there, is enough to get Plough over the line two balls before the drinks break, Max finishing it off with a six and ending on 88* (60). 20 points on the road and a bloody snog.

Even better than that, the DSG is a mere five-minute drive away, so we zip over there, have some good old hanky panky in the shower, Nieboer slapping every bum he can see, and purchase a tremendous amount of jugs to enjoy in the still-warm sun. Giordy, in understandably fine spirits, is telling us about his pre-match routine. Apparently KFC at 03:00 + intercourse at 10:00 = wickets. None of us argue with him.

We learn that Elena Narozanski, one of our favourite Plough, has just been appointed as a Non-Executive Director on the Surrey CCC board.

“Does that mean that Ploughmans are now part of the deep state?” Lonsdale asks.

“I think so,” Nieboer says. “You know those dark murky halls of power they talk about? We get to walk through them now, I think.”

“Excellent.”

Nieboer does some more Margaret Thatcher impressions, because he knows Lonsdale loves them. “This lady is NOT for blind turning” is his favourite. Max is talking about the difficulties of lovemaking with a slipped disc, reduced to the role of pillow princess. Benny walks over.

“We on about about sex with a bad back?” he asks, then nods knowingly, sits down. “Gotta deal in boundaries.”

“Who didn’t bat today?” Yanni asks at one point. And Benny very unfairly points at Cake. We then launch into loads of impressions of Bob Katter, the Australian politician, which doesn’t exactly lift his spirits, repeating the following paragraph, which will never not be funny.

"I mean, you know, people are entitled to their sexual proclivities. You know, I mean, let there be a thousand blossoms bloom, as far as I'm concerned. [GETS WAY ANGRY ALL OF A SUDDEN]. But I ain't spending any time on it because in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in North Queensland."

People start to melt away, until it’s just Nieboer, Lonsdale, Benny, and Max. We try to watch Switzerland vs Qatar, but it’s just the most horrible watch, entropy made manifest, until suddenly Qatar equalises in the last minute with a bullet header. We ponder how Qatar is kind of like the Switzerland of the Middle East — totally neutral, money focused, amoral, happy to house all kinds of monstrous people, so long as the right palms are greased and gooches stroked.

Nieboer had bought a four-pint jug of Guinness, to share with Ajay, but he’s gone, so Nieboer is just working through this damn thing on his own, no longer feeling sick but now in a state of torpid vegetation.

Time to get gone. We all head our separate ways. Nieboer lurches home and watches Brazil vs Morocco, which is a good game, slurping noodles shirtless and banging on to people about how this Morocco team is actually more Brazilian than Brazil, that Brazil are basically f*cking 3s. Soon fatigue takes over; he passes out on the sofa, presumably looking awful, like a hairy bag of potatoes, a faint smile on his face after another day where the 2s were more than the sum of their parts.