“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

This is Phil Connors, in Groundhog Day, after days and days and days of waking up in the same, self-repeating nightmare, unable to really change anything, locked in with all his inadequacies.

“Purgatory fire will be more intolerable than all the torments that can be felt or conceived in this life.”

This is Venerable Bede, one of the first historians in England, and a great Anglo-Saxon scholar from around 700AD, making what were, for the time, light hearted comments about limbo.

Both of these great men, great characters, have beautifully summed up what cricket is for me; an endless hell of my own making, a punishment for my many sins, a vague hope of redemption (that will never come) making me do it over and over again. Like Groundhog Day, or the place where Catholics go when they’re not quite good enough for Heaven, the brilliance— or horror, depending on how much sado-masochism you like— of purgatory is that your senses are befuddled; you lose your sense of time, of place, of self.

Max Gumpert is in my purgatory, because all season, no matter the sun, the weather, the opposition, the ground, the tea, the wind, the alignment of Mars in relation to Jupiter, he is out there, scoring runs. I wake up, he is scoring runs. I get out, he is scoring runs. I umpire from one end, he is scoring runs. I scream into my pillow, he is scoring runs.

This Sunday, the opposition captain walks out to the middle with Max, wins the toss and decides to bowl first. He tells us that the team is a weaker side than normal; their best bowler forgot he was on holiday, their best bat has dropped out, they’re waiting for some people to turn up. You can already feel it then. Max Gumpert is going to score runs.

Their opening bowler from one end is bowling left arm hoop with the wind tailing him, and Ben Gumpert, the Big Daddy, is navigating it as well as he can. This is tricky because the bowler is wearing a red wristband about three inches below where he is gripping the ball, which understandably makes it somewhat tricky to see the ball out of the hand. Ben Gumpert is bowled off a very good delivery, and the opportunity to show his son how it’s really done is cut sadly short.

The bowler at the other end is bowling sub-50mph off a full run up. If this is a sign of what their bowling ceiling is, you can feel it in your bones: Max Gumpert is going to score runs.

Suri gets out, fending at one that has popped from a length, the red wristband snaring its first victim. He had asked for it to be taken off, which it had been, in the previous over, but had now found itself back on the arm for this over. Suri smiles as he walks off, and I smile at him; two souls trapped in misery, safe and warm in the knowledge that this is the rest of our lives.

Cosgrove, in the meantime, has been teaching me how to score. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen patience and calm like it. He is dealing with incessant questions from me, sharing the load of acknowledging the umpire’s calls with Ajay John, when I repeatedly fail to do so, and skillfully dodging Sade’s road-illegal JCB digger. Cozzy is not in purgatory, the man is destined for The Better Place.

He strides in, having done everything that he can in his power to help me reach flow state in scoring, and immediately gets about his work out there. At the other end, Max is manoeuvring the ball around. Red wristband has bowled 3 overs for 3 runs, the other side is going at about 8 runs an over. The wind is picking up, and there is a noticeable sense of foreboding in the air.

Cozzy, having worked so hard, and ridden the bounce, and played with soft hands, goes just a little early. He drives one into mid-off’s bread basket, and Leon Parks walks in. I turn to Ajay and we get our pads on quickly, just in case there’s a collapse, or they bring on a secret weapon.
Wasted effort, as it turns out.

Max gets to his 50 off 52 balls, and raises his bat. A light smattering of applause from everyone. Cincinnati push everyone back on the boundary. Leon Parks is doing his best Joe Root impression; every ball, there’s an opportunity to sneak a single, or find a gap for a two. Whisper it quietly, but he might be batting faster than Max at this point.

I watch Sade do ten cartwheels in a row, and Max is still batting. He’s on about 70 at this point.

Giordy walks over and suggests that he would be very happy to sell Bruno Fernandes in the summer window. When I question why United might want to sell their only creative outlet, and arguably the sole reason that they got to the Europa League final, he shakes his head sagely. Nah, trust me, bro. Max is on about 90.

Then he gets to his 100, a big cheer from those on the boundary. There is a conversation in the middle. Maybe it’s about Sean scoring 175 last weekend. Maybe it’s about Nicko scoring over 200 in a game. Maybe it’s about the volatility of US tech in a stock market that is currently being buffeted by trade tariffs that are being pulled from thin air. Whatever the case is, Max decides to keep batting.

I fall asleep as he starts sledgehammering their bowlers. He is on about 125.

I wake up, and he is bludgeoning them into other people’s back gardens. He is on 150.

I talk to Ajay about single handed backhands versus double handed backhands in tennis, and the proliferation of the double. Ajay says that the double hander is a young man’s game, a bigger weapon with more oomph and more versatility. Max is on 175.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my boundaries, ye peasants, and despair.

They are dead at this point. I have watched the light fade from their eyes, and any belief that they had in a merciful or benevolent God is in tatters. To them, they have been out here for a day, a week, a million years. The earth has been scorched, and the ground salted so that no crops may ever grow there again. The field has now stopped changing; a spinner from one end bowls with deep third man, deep fine leg, and deep backward point, just because that’s long on, long off and cow corner from the other end. Fielders are now just out there as unpaid DHL delivery men, shuttling around to deliver the misshapen ball from the boundary to the bowler and then back again.

Max Gumpert gets to his double hundred. He and Leon— a man whose innings has been that of poise and class and quality, and is in risk of being forgotten— now have the record partnership.

Alexander wept, for there were no more batting records to conquer.

Max walks off, more red ink to his name, more bowlers’ blood on his hands, more viscera in his teeth from this demolition job.

Ajay John rushes out, sans helmet, because he either can’t find it, or can’t be bothered to put it on, or the straps are too loose. It doesn’t matter.

He scores 24 off 8— which is, frankly, ridiculous— his innings replete with massive pulls and launches and some grim determination to enter the Engine Room sub group come rain or shine.

Ploughmans post 322/4.

Though the game is dead, it is still worth talking about the bowling effort.

Giordy bowls an absolutely magnificent spell; it is comfortably the best I have ever seen him bowl. Every ball moves in the air, every ball is on a horrible, nagging length. He doesn’t chase the wicket, he doesn’t get ahead of himself, he doesn’t get inside his own head. He gets them playing and missing, he gets them wafting at thin air. And then he gets wickets. Leg stump yorker that has the batsman in ruins. A completely mistimed loft that Daman Greeney settles under, having had to navigate awkward swirling winds, the noise of the Plough around him and the Venga Boys talking about how they want to go boom, boom, boom, boom wafting down from The Mighty Hoopla.

Nigel Stevenson applies one of the most lethal strangles that I have ever seen. His first 16 deliveries are dots. It is the equivalent of a senior university maths professor asking a small child whether they believe that the Reimann hypothesis can ever be solved, or why their marriage is breaking down after 15 years of lovelessness: they have no answers. He snares three wickets and rarely have three wickets been more deserved.

Harry Payne, Señor Death Net himself, gets into the action as well. There are times where you can see the glimpse of the bowler he’s going to become mid season, where everything lines up just right, and there’s this electric snap, and he absolutely fires the ball in. There are two bouncers he bowls that are genuinely onto the batsmen before they have a chance to react. Two wickets, the first of many, you suspect, for Harry.

Credit to Cincinnati and myself, they play out the full 40 overs. It is a resounding loss, but they leave with some dignity, some refusal to simply give up and die at the end there. In the end, it is a huge win for Plough, and a terrific (and deservingly so) day out for many of its members.

As we head home, I find myself wondering what my next game will be like. What new and inventive way will I find to get out? What else can I do to sabotage my own bowling? How many false anthrax threats would I have to call in for cricket in South London to be suspended? Amongst all these questions, I do know one thing. When I roll my Sisyphean boulder back to DSG, and trundle out onto that hill to give it one more doomed push to the summit, Max Gumpert will be out there, scoring runs.

Match report from Prithu Banerjee