Paella with fresh shrimp on the beach in Valencia. Khao soi in Chiang Mai, washed down with ice cold Leo beer, perspiration dripping down the bottle. Walking along the streets of Buenos Aires, looking up at the mural of the greatest 10 to ever play football, surrounded by a sea of 10s. The slopes of Innsbruck. Doubles in Trinidad. Robotic toilets with warm water jets and inbuilt music systems in Tokyo.

There is a whole world out there, filled with food and culture, replete with wonder and experiences and memories that stay with you to give you a warm glow as you enter your sunset years, and I am here in South London, about 400m from Brockwell Park — where a man once asked if I had ‘any crack of any kind’ on me — ready to play cricket. Every day, I wake up, reminded that I am in a hell of my own making.

Max loses the toss on a humid, cloudless, searingly hot day, and is told that we are fielding. There is a point early in the game, after Jay has taken out their opener and their number 3 bat, where there is the faintest glimmer of hope. He has bowled with really nice pace and bounce, and is getting noticeable carry through to Alex Gordon-Walker, and he still has all his overs left. We all smile in anticipation of a good old Plough day.

Then their number 4 walks out, and your stomach drops. It’s the Faf Du Plessis sleeves that are short enough to alpha the five fielders he passes to the crease, it’s the tempo and the bounce in his step as he crosses the field, it’s the violence of the shadow batting as he warms up, it’s the left handedness as he marks guard.

We’re cooked.

And on this hot, hot day, the right handed opener, who is all high elbows and compact downstrokes, and the number 4 leftie, who is belligerence and strokes across the line, we are put to the sword. Do we help ourselves in the field? Does a bear practice Catholicism? The answer to both is that you would have to really struggle to answer in the positive with any conviction. Their opener gets to his 50 with two glorious straight lofted drives, and thankfully, he retires. Soon after, their left hander also retires.

Unfortunately, we do not capitalise on this as well as I have seen this team do on other occasions. Their following batsmen never truly get away, necessarily, but they also aren’t put under a terrific amount of pressure, and they tap the runs along steadily enough that the scoreboard never quite stops ticking over.

Niraj Tailor aka Ross Taylor deserves some credit here. It is difficult to completely remodel your bowling if you have spent any amount of time in your life bowling one way. It is harder to do so while you are continuing to play competitive games, to have the changes scrutinised and dissected in the heat of battle while you may not even be completely ready. Niraj decided earlier this season that he wanted to bowl medium pace.

People go from bowling pace, to bowling spin (see Ollie Robinson for further notes), but the reverse is tricky. Speeding up is harder than slowing down. Today, he showed just how far he has come with a solid, well worked, impressive bowling spell. The pace is up, there is bounce and carry, and he even threw in slower balls to show that he wasn’t a one trick pony. If this is where he is as a work in progress, let me be the first to say that I am excited to see what the finished product looks like.

We realise later on in the innings that we have clearly misunderstood Roehampton. When they told Max earlier that their batters would be retiring at 50, we thought that it might be the case that they retire on 50, and then only come back in if the team is bowled out. How old fashioned of us! What they meant is that they are going to be using rolling subs, and will be retiring batsmen as and when they see fit, particularly if there are, say, 7 overs left and they feel like they could do with spanking us around again, by subbing their number 4 back in.

It is therefore also sensible to outline just how well Jay bowled. Getting 4 wickets is good against even the most mediocre of opposition, but to do it against gun batsmen who have their eye in, and with a field that isn’t always backing you, on a day that is this sapping and doing it while having to cover massive swathes of ground at deep square leg or sweeper while you’re not bowling, is something really special.

Roehampton post anything between 250 and 270 depending on whether you look at the final score on their scorecard, or add up the bowling numbers, or add up the batting numbers with extras. It would have been higher, you suspect, if not for a man who was given his debut cap: Harry “Max, sorry, it’s Harry isn’t it” Wright. For his sins, he has been shuttled to every single position imaginable in the field— there are times where AGW must have worried that he’d have to give him the gloves just for him to complete the full set— but he has done this without a single complaint. He has chased every ball near him, he has showcased every kind of leg barrier there is in cricket and he has made every effort possible to go down in club legend as the better Wright. The cap may physically be too tight, but it is metaphorically a great fit for him.

Roehampton’s score has made our strategy very easy. We need 7 an over, which means a minimum of one boundary an over, and then extra runs wherever possible. We have to go big from ball one, and then just keep that going as long as we can. Ajay and Ean walk out to the middle, game plan set.

Ajay John claims he hasn’t played cricket in 18 years or something like that. You watch him bat, and you wonder what he was like 18 years ago if he’s this good now. Was he captaining Sourav Ganguly in the India u19s? Maybe he was telling Sachin to go long on to long on, and then turning around just to champ Dravid? Maybe a young Sehwag saw him bat in the nets and decided to model his game off him? Here today, rusty, “out of form”, he is brutal. The weight transfer into the ball is magical, he hits some of the longest boundaries with what seems to be bat speed that’s only a little faster than a forward defense. He hits a four, and Max and Rahul at the boundary tell him to stop playing around and hit the next one further. He duly obliges with a monster six.

At the other end, Ean is chopping and slicing anything remotely wide, and running singles whenever he can to keep the rate ticking over. Every over, we are doing a run rate check, and every over, we are over 6 runs an over. If it goes like this, the game is still on.

Ean is dismissed, LBW, and as he trudges off, Rahul walks in. Rahul is dismissed quickly, a testament to how bad this game can be, but he wears it remarkably well, coming back, slipping straight into his Bahaman shirt, and grabbing himself an ice cold pint. When he goes out to umpire later, he will turn down several appeals with his bucket hat on, taking a sip of another pint, which in my books is far cooler than anything ICC Umpire Richard Kettleborough has ever done.

When Ajay gets out for a blistering 32, Jay joins Max out in the middle, and together they steady the game. Jay is all high elbows and technical grace, and staying balanced, while Max is walking at bowlers, walking across his stumps, flaying the ball. This is our version of their opener and number 4 bat. Benny and I keep checking the scorecard, and we are still on course. We are still going at over 6 an over, and somehow this game is still alive.

And then after the drinks break, things fall apart.

Jay gets out, and Benny strides in, having worn his helmet for the last 15 overs to get used to the vision of having grilles in front of his eyes. He hits a four. The vision training has worked. He gets out lifting it down mid-on’s throat. Too much elegance, not enough power.

At this stage, I have now been wearing pads for the Plough for over 50 overs without batting. There were the 35 overs that I sat and watched Max make 200, and now there have been the 20 something overs that I have sat and watched Max make whatever Max is on now. I walk out to the middle. I see the first ball, short, pullable, and I think no, don’t be silly, you’ve sat around in pads for the duration of an ODI innings plus a bowling super over plus a batting super over. Just play straight bat. The ball hits the deck, pops up tennis ball style, clips the shoulder of my bat, and hits off stump.

I am, I realise, a run incel. I don’t know what it’s like to score a run, I’m a bit scared of them, and I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who makes them. I am filled with rage, and I am considering more and more that the only respite I might get is deep in the bowels of Reddit somewhere, talking about how nice batsmen finish last. I don’t have a Reddit account though, so these match reports are the only thing I can offer.

AGW, who has been effusive and indefatigably vocal in the field is somehow exactly the same as he gets out. As he walks off after his short innings, he is talking about how he should have defended it, or maybe hit it harder, ah but the game situation is the game situation and it was always going to be tough, but yeah maybe he should have defended it, and I don’t hear the rest because I am thinking about those 50 year old women who sit in casinos in Las Vegas for ten hours a day and just play the slots because they think it will finally pay out, and I am thinking how stupid they are, and I am laughing in my head, because I am superior to them because I know about sunk cost fallacy and they don’t.

Harry Wright, having run 40,000 steps in the field, reasonably decides that he doesn’t necessarily want to do much more running, and so tries to launch a ball to the moon. It sadly only gets one-billionth of the way there, and is snaffled by a man inside the ring. His iconic yellow helmet dejectedly makes its way back to the boundary.

Aisling, who has just wanted ‘to spend a day out with the boys’, is thanked for her efforts in the field and her neat and impeccable scoring by being barbequed by Max. She is remarkably fine with this as she comes off, as if this is just something that she does for fun, and the results don’t matter, and I wonder if maybe I’m the problem, and then Benny talks to me about how much he hates the seam on the Sunday balls and that’s why he can’t grip them just right, and I realise, no, we’re right and everyone else is wrong.

At some point, Max scores a hundred. It doesn’t register any more. It is now background noise for me to see him bring up three figures. He is a Sunday cheat code, a glitch, he is playing as Oddjob on GoldenEye. Max bringing up a century is like having the fifteenth steak dinner of the week, when it is still Tuesday lunchtime. The heat doesn’t get him, the wind doesn’t get him, the opposition doesn’t get him. One day someone will get him out in a Sunday game, but I may well be in an old person’s home by that point, writing match reports for the Mobility Scooter XI vs Hip Replacements.

In the end, Max is not quite enough. With partners running out, and the run rate running away, he runs Niraj out, and we are outrun to the finish line. We are closer than we thought we would be with 15 overs left in our bowling innings, and so a huge amount of credit should go to everyone for making that the case. It may not be Thailand, but a cold jug with the sun setting over DSG, with your mates, even after a loss, isn’t a terrible way to go.

Match report from Prithu Banerjee