Arriving at the Griffin at exactly 11:30, overpriced Redemption Roasters coffee in hand, like always, it occurs to Leo Nieboer that he may be looking at the only stretch of green grass left in this exhausted, beleaguered, drought-riddled city of ours.

“We could be in another country right now,” Damon Greeney muses, looking calmly at the verdant pasture before him, the ground eerily silent for now, totally calm, ignorant of the noise and madness to come.

Nieboer nods. He hopes he wins the toss today. His record — three wins in the last 12 games — is a cause of concern for many.

“I’ve been practising the coin toss at home, with Livia,” he tells Damon.

“How does that work? Is there anything riding on these tosses?”

“Yep. To start with, it’s quite light stuff — like who gets to decide what we have for dinner. But then it ramps up. Serious implications at stake. The other night I had to sleep on the balcony, for calling wrong.”

“Right.”

“And all the while I have a belt around my neck and a tangerine in my mouth,” Nieboer adds. “But that’s unrelated.”

Nieboer’s practice has not worked. He loses the toss again. Ploughmans are batting. By drinks, they are 50-5. It has not been the most pleasant hour. Doesn’t exactly help when your captain is bowled fourth ball of the game by a delivery that doesn’t really do anything. A bit like a battle starting and your general looking into the barrel of his gun, to check it’s clean, and then blowing his head clean off.

Despite some good fight from Leo Towers and Umar Iqbal, it’s a sad, paltry effort, and Ploughmans 2nd XI — with possibly their best batting lineup all year, in their most important game of the season so far — are all out for 103.

But they aren’t out of this contest. By this stage, the 1st XI, who have won their game in about 45 minutes, are now all here. Nicko Dowell has a pram containing one child and about 40 cans of ice cold beer. This XI, plus many other spectators from the club, from Oli Lonsdale and Chad Mace to Jess Spencer and Oli Tennant’s girlfriend, Camille, have, through their raucous drunken presence, turned this second innings into a kind of blockbuster showdown. To add to things, the Alleyns 1st team are also here. The Griffin, so quiet a couple of hours before, now feels like a cup final.

And with the clouds darkening and the crowd getting loud, very loud, the 2nd XI put on a display that rings every bell in the ground. After Alleyns creep to 30-0, threatening to quiet the crowd, Narvin Ganesh bowls a short one that pops up and is taken by Nieboer at mid on. Two balls later, he smashes No.3’s stumps. The next over, the Alleyns opener — a talkative man called Russell who’s also basically deaf — barbeques their No.4 without facing a ball, thanks to some panther like movement from Narvin.

30-3. Out of nowhere. My god, we can actually do this. The crowd is thronging and surging with energy, and it’s beaming right into these boys, these brave brave boys, refracting and swelling into something only vaguely human. We’re more like carnivorous reptiles at this point — komodo dragons encircling their prey.

Ben Milward-Sadler, on his 2s debut, comes back for another spell and it’s lightning fast, thrilling, the kind of stuff that makes your nipples hard, just hearing that ball fizz through the air. He removes their opener, and then Damon Greeney bowls some child for a duck.

We are so close. We are so very close here. One more wicket and it breaks them open properly. They still need 30 runs and Ploughmans need 4 wickets. It’s so tense you can feel, even amidst the task of captaining and running around and shouting, the tension on the sidelines, the way everyone’s plugged into this contest like a main circuit cable.

They add a few runs. Annoyingly, their No.8 is a lot better than their No.7. Nieboer takes a gamble and puts on Leo Towers for a bowl. During his over, the main clubhouse — now hosting a wedding reception — starts blaring out Careless Whisper, and it casts a sort of absurd pallor across the occasion, making it feel less like a cricket game, somehow. The gamble doesn’t work. Alleyn inch closer and despite some great fight, some real gutbusting endeavour from all, the essential rage from the contest diminishes and Alleyns win, robbing the 2s of a victory that would have taken them within inches of winning Division 11 North.

Coming off the pitch, the boys get a hearty round of applause. Never has a team been made to struggle so much chasing 103. It took them 33 overs, which says everything.

Outwardly, Nieboer is very proud of his boys. Inwardly, he is in a dismal mood. He has played poorly and, more pertinently, feels a wrenching pain at not being able to give this crowd the incredible result they so deserved.

He can’t even drown his sorrows at the DSG. He has to head off after only an hour — midway through a bowl off organised by Oli Lonsdale during which only Lonsdale seems unable to hit the stumps — to head home, change, then head to Putney for a party. On the Uber home, his driver asks him why cricket takes so long. It’s a good question.

“It’s a game composed of failure, anxiety, and boredom,” Nieboer finds himself saying. “To really optimise those key pillars, it’s best to go on all day — or even five days, if you’re playing at the highest level. Which I’m not, let me tell you.”

The Uber driver shakes his head.

“Five days. That is crazy.”

He’s a nice man. We both have similar thoughts on the concept of breakfast — just unnecessary — and Nieboer somehow goes into a tangent explaining the concept of an Otaku — someone in Japan who renounces real life and instead plunges into a life of anime, manga, tentacle stuff, a life behind a screen. He notes that people even hold private wedding ceremonies where they ‘marry’ virtual partners, attended, online, by other Otakus and presumably distraught family members.

“No, no!!” he exclaims, shaking his head. He doesn’t like this. Doesn’t like it at all. Weirdly, it makes Nieboer feel a lot better, this whole conversation.

The party that night is weird. Nieboer keeps wandering into painful conversations. One girl corners him for nearly 20 minutes talking about her “personal connection with Jesus Christ, our Saviour.” Another girl keeps trying to pull off cartwheels and landing flat on her arse. And then some guy insists on showing off pictures of these big Marlin he caught in Hawaii, and Nieboer leaves feeling not much better than when he walked in, his feeling for cricket the same as his feeling for deep-sea fishing, gymnastics, or anything else where the losers end up thrashing around in the water on a barbed hook.