Seven days ago, Ed Beesely’s wife comes down with a flu that she will, days later, pass on to her husband.

Five days ago, I nip into a Tesco, and pick up an odd looking box of paracetamol.

**

The weather forecast swore that it would rain on Sunday. It said that there would be localised flooding in the early hours of Sunday, when we were all sleeping, and it promised me that the game would be called off. As Harry, Theo and I rattled along in Ean’s car towards the ground, cricket bags in laps and in faces, seats clicked to unnatural angles to fit in too many people in too small a space, the clear blue skies confirmed that I had been lied to.

Game on. Toss lost. Bat first.

**

Sean McGurn misses the first ball that he faces. He wanders off to square leg, talking to himself. “Would be nice if you moved your feet Sean. Any danger of moving your feet towards the ball?” Two balls later, Sean McGurn does indeed move his feet towards the ball. The sound off the bat is possibly the only clue that anything has happened; there’s just still air, and still fielders, and a held pose, and somewhere about seventy metres away, just as the echo off the bat dies down, there is woody noise of the ball clattering into a bench. Their square leg fielder turns to me. He laughs nervously. He should.

Ed Beeseley, sat on the boundary, stares at the ground and takes deep breaths. His forehead has started to sweat. The fever is digging its claws in.

**

Ean Smith has clearly been watching videos of Joe Root and Kane Williamson. He has looked at the vacant third man and point regions, and has decided that if the opposition are stupid enough to bowl anything outside off stump, that it would be rude not to guide them through there. Ean may also have been watching the Kane Williamson and Joe Root videos on mute, and accidentally surmised that they are telepathic, and simply beam the thoughts of calling for a run into the heads of their batting partners. Luckily, Sean is loud enough for the two of them, and the opposition, being pinged relentlessly at one end, and dabbed at the other, are losing their minds.

Sean, against the run of play, and arguably against the run of physics, gets a ball that looks like it’s hitting sixth stump down leg side and ends up arcing through the air and hitting the top of off.

**

Suri walks out, sees that he may have to start launching towering sixes against children, and some of the light in his eyes disappears. “I can’t do this, man,” he mutters. A few balls later, muscle memory takes over, the wrists start unfurling, and then his frontal lobe wrests control of his body, and he checks out of a massive booming aerial drive. He is swallowed by mid-on.

“They’re kids, man,” he says, walking off. Later on, in the car park, he will say that he has no regrets.

**

Hussein Selmi is strapping on his pads when I ask him whether he bats much, what his batting style is, and whether he gets a lot of runs for Plough. His response is that he doesn’t really bat; he is unskilled, untrained, and to be honest, not really good at cricket.

When he leans forward, head completely still, bat perfectly straight, weight perfectly balanced, and nails a forward defence to cover so well that there isn’t even time to take a run, I realise that I have been lied to again.

It is when he and Umar are picking runs in front point, behind point, and through point, almost every single ball, almost as if this was beneath them, that I realise that I have been lied to again.

In the final ten overs, when he props forward, keeps his head locked, and swings a monster six over cow with a lazy, languid swing, I realise that I have been lied to again.

Hussein deserved a 50. On another day, this game would have been his story, and he would have raised his bat, and would have been the champion of the game. This is not another day.

Ed Beesely watches Hussein get out, desperately close to the landmark, and grits his teeth. He would bat himself at 12 if he could.

In the end, he will not need to. Plough post 201 in their 40 overs, thanks to some slap-happy hitting from Harry Bray at the end, and we wander off for lunch.

**

Over lunch, I tell our captain Ed that I have some paracetamol in my bag, and if he’s feeling rough, I would suggest taking two. He agrees, and swallows them, praying for some relief.

They will kick in about thirty minutes from this point, and Perseus will have his winged sandals.

**

Waqas has been asked if he would be OK bowling a little slower today, given the opposition, and given the lack of pressure on the game. He agrees, starting his first over from what looks like just a five yard run-up.

Rudeness in cricket can take many forms. For Waqas, it is evident that what he will not tolerate is a batsman who has the temerity to play and miss, or even worse, accidentally get behind one and play a defensive shot. He will not stand for a batsman standing there and getting beaten on the outside edge, and then on the inside edge.

After just six deliveries, Waqas closes his eyes, thinks back to Michael Jordan and his era of dominance, and mutters to himself the immortal words of His Airness. “Fuck them kids”.

Every subsequent ball has Sean taking an extra step back at slip, and me limping back with him, until by the end of his third over, we are probably only two steps in from the thirty hard circle. You wonder if this is what it was like to watch Jeff Thompson bowl.

It is one of the most brutal spells of bowling not to get a wicket. Today is not his story.

**

Vikki at the other end is unplayable. His first over is his second maiden ever for the Plough. Batsmen aren’t really in the same postcode as his deliveries. The ball is moving in the air, it is moving off the pitch; it’s impossible to make a decision whether to go forward or back or drive or cut or do anything. Do you look at the hair, do you look at the headband, do you look at the wrist position, or do you look around in disbelief, trying to calculate how many overs this guy has left? For three of their bats, all they could do was look at the ground before trudging off, turned inside out, left out to dry, beaten by a better man. Today is not Vikki’s story though.

**

Umar’s first ball moves about three feet sideways in the air. This is tape ball stuff, wiffle-ball deliveries under the dark sky and scattered rain. Umar’s second ball is the same. And the third. It’s Mitchell Starc in the IPL final, it’s Dale Steyn to Ian Bell. You almost have to wonder if someone’s sandpapered the ball, because this doesn’t make sense. First slip is in the game, second slip is in the game, and point is definitely in the game. Umar, for the first of his two wickets, doesn’t use any of these, choosing instead to pull off an almost comically blase caught and bowled. The second sees Theo, in spite of being shattered from 3am DIY, snaffle a catch so cleanly you don't even hear it go into his hands. Umar will end with two fully deserved wickets, over 20 runs with the bat, and will still somehow be a footnote in this game.

**

And finally, Ed Beesley, who last captained a game when he was 18, currently crawling his way out of the dank, sweaty depths of a flu, battling the fading light, and the inconsistent rain, brings himself on. It takes one ball to know that there’s something in the air; there are tendrils of magic floating in through the clouds, and you can almost feel it in your fingertips.

The first four overs are like the hollow silence in the air, the smell of cordite right before lightning strikes. As he wheels in, ball after ball, inching every single delivery tighter and tighter to the batsmen, going for nothing, and then going for nothing, and then going for nothing again, there is a sense of something on the cusp of breaking.

He has bowled 4 overs. He has bowled 2 maidens. He has gone for 7 runs. He starts his fifth over.

Dot. Suri looks over at me, and the way he grins, you know something is about to happen.

Next ball is a peach; it fizzes and dips and grips, and the bails come off. Wicket. The chase was wobbling before, but it feels like it’s broken now.

New batsman comes in and takes his guard. Beesley is now in a zone beyond human; he takes one look at the batsman, turns around to mid-on and he calls his play. This is Babe Ruth at the World Series, this is Warne bowling to Cullinan. He calls his LBW. It is. It’s plumb. Batsman gone. Heads gone. Game alight.

The team is in disarray; Umar is temporary captain for one ball, Suri is giving batting advice to the new bat, nobody can quite believe it. The field is now just a ring of fielders, all about three yards away from the batsman. It somehow feels illegal, it somehow feels like we have 15 fielders. It feels like prophecy.

It is. Off stump pegs back, and there is a roar that one of the other Plough teams playing on Sunday might have been able to hear. It is carnage, it is joy. It is a new member of the hattrick club. It is history. It is the very peak of what sport has to offer, that one ephemeral moment where the world sits in the palm of your hand.

The chase is gone, the opposition in tatters, and what follows feels expected. It is scorched earth, it is salting the fields so they never grow again, because Beesley, clearly not content with three, picks up the final two and takes five for the game. It is a demolition job.

7.2 overs. 9 runs. 5 wickets. The numbers don’t make sense. They look like a typo. They’re not.

In the Greek epics, men are made immortal when they overcome the insurmountable, when they achieve the impossible and earn the favour of the gods. On Sunday, somewhere in the wilderness near Enfield, eleven of the Plough got to witness a modern epic.

Match report from Prithu 'Pretty Boy' Banerjee