It has been an unseasonably warm April. We’ve had an unprecedented ten straight days of sun. For every prayer that I send out on bended knee, a cruel and uncaring God is insistent that this game goes ahead. There is such a fervour for this game that we even have a player hop on a last minute flight from Sri Lanka to race down to Dulwich. Not since Will Smith was in his prime was there such an obsession with Belair.

Max wins the toss, and chooses to bowl first. He believes in early season batting collapses. He has gone out to the strip, and says that there has been enough heat over the week that he has had to brush dust off the surface. We are apparently playing our game on a Day 3 Galle track, and there is a glimmer in Max’s eyes that suggests that he might be having fun on this pitch in about thirty minutes.

The bowling effort starts with Giordy picking up exactly where he left off on Club Day. He is relentless, unerring, disciplined. There is a sense of Kagiso Rabada about him in the way that he steams in; a suggestion that he has been doing this every Saturday for eternity. They cannot get near him.

At the other end, Harry Payne butters up the batsmen with a few tactical beamers before letting rip with a vicious bouncer that their opener has no choice but to fend at, and Sandeep at first slip seems to just rise, and rise, and rise, arm held vertically up, and web what will be one of the catches of the early season.

Giordy is desperately unlucky that I am stationed at backward point, because a fully deserving wicket ball travels just to my left, where I shell a sitter. Umar’s face comes unbidden into my head, like some kind of sleep paralysis demon/coach, immediately telling me to “recover now, and feel bad about the drop later”, and I have no option but to instantly obey Pakistan’s answer to Tony Robbins. I pick up the ball, hurl it with disgust at the stumps and affect a run out, which really does make it seem like I am only here to steal Giordy’s hard earned wickets.

It is around this time that Max does something that no cricketer at our level should do, which is to put in a modicum of effort. He bends down to stop a ball and something just… goes. It is instantly clear that this is not an ibuprofen or a deep heat job, that this is something more serious. He tries to get back on the field, because it would take a literal career ending injury to drag Max away from beating the snot out of an unaware Sunday team, but even his strength of will cannot do it today.

Losing Max is not losing one player, it is losing three. You lose 8 overs of miserable, unhittable quick spin, you lose statistically the greatest fielder in the club’s history, and you lose a batter who has the remarkable, repeatable ability to drag a team kicking and screaming over a finish line they would normally never have been able to get to. Losing Max is like the yearly presidential pardon of the Thanksgiving turkey for the opposition here; they have been let off, but you wonder if they knew just how close they came to being killed.

But today is the sort of day that really defines what a Plough team is all about. This entire performance, from the moment that Max limps off, is a testament to this side’s resilience, and determination to be greater than the sum of its incomplete parts. Sandeep and Narvin bowl eight overs each uninterrupted; whippy rubber-band pace at one end and the idiosyncratic round-the-wicket-leg-spin venom at the other. With the batters that the opposition have, these two do a remarkable job of leashing them. These two single-handedly keep them in check, and stop them getting over the 5 rpo mark. On another day, Narvin takes a brace for his efforts, but what he does today is more than enough. On another day, Sandeep probably takes 8, but today, winning the cat and mouse battle with their left hander is enough.

Leon is, as usual, sensational behind the stumps.

Ean Smith chips in, bowling one through the gate with a lovely, teasing, dipping, flighted delivery. Giordy finishes off, somehow even better than when he started. He takes a well deserved wicket that will actually go on his tally, and he finishes with figures that are an absolute joke. Eight overs, one maiden, sixteen runs, and one wicket. On another day, on almost any other day, on any other pitch, with any other set of teammates, that performance is a MOTM performance.

There are a lot of batsmen at this club who bat like they’ve been gifted more time than the rest of us. A sense of seeing and moving before the rest of us do, a sense of knowing what is coming before it does, that makes the game look unfairly easier for them. But there are differences too, in the way that they go about their business. Sean McGurn, for example, is a batsman made almost entirely out of spite and vengeance; he remembers every bowler’s face and their perceived slights against him, and he can quote them to you, at will, any time. His batting is retribution for their sins, the massive sixes he hits, a retaliation in anger against the wrongs of the opposition.

Leo Towers, in contrast, has the air of a kindly butcher at an abattoir, gently and politely nudging animals along onto the killing floor. He bats with an almost faint air of apology; it brings him no pleasure to nudge this ball so easily here for two, or to calmly place this ball just here for one, or to lightly flay this ball over wide long-on for four, but these things must all be done. He does not remember the bowler's faces or the ball they have bowled— there is a sense that by the time the game ends, he will barely remember that he has batted at all — but it is simply a duty of care that he must diligently and surgically dismantle them. There is never a sense of mystery about the way that a delivery will go. We start at the very low bat tap, the bat almost parallel with the floor for a split second, a loose, imperceptible waggle of the toe as the bowler comes in, and then a reassured punch through long on for one. The result of the ball had been preordained before the bowler had even started his runup.

Today is his day, and if you watched him, you would have just known, from ball one, that it was always going to be his day. He scores a 102* off 98. If he hadn’t been forced to retire at 100, he would have scored 150. If the game had been 50 overs long, he would have scored 200. If the game had been a two day game, he would have scored 400. It is just that simple.

There is the supporting cast of course, and they must get a mention. Grant Wolledge opened with great panache— both in terms of batting fluidity and headwear— and had he not nailed the extra cover fielder what felt like sixteen times in a row, might well have eyed up a half century.
Narvin, desperate to get back to his job, hacked and slashed and sliced his way to 42. There were times he looked like he had forgotten to move when the bowler bowled the ball, but then his ridiculous slingshot wrists would take over at the last second and launch huge, corkscrewing drives over long on. It should be abundantly clear to anyone watching this game that the guy can hit a long ball; it is scary to think what he might do on a ground smaller than this.

I do some of my best work all game. Early in Narvin’s innings, I tighten his helmet with such technical quality that it stops bouncing around on his head, and he can suddenly see the ball. They say that you bat in pairs, and so I can confidently claim at least three-quarters of his runs. There are some fours that Leo hits, that I signal with such casual ease, that it seems bewildering that I wasn’t born wearing a white labcoat, and right hand wrapped around a clicker. There is a moment later on in the game, where the opposition appeal, and I chuckle and turn down the appeal with such aplomb, even they are reduced to shaking their heads at each other and commenting, with a wry grin, “Yeah, that was probably down leg, haha.”

Even at the end, Leon, having spent most of the match trying to get Sade to move her cycling digger from in front of the scoreboard, had time to walk in and play a wonderful inside out cover-drive, a shot so delectable that it had to be logged on his wagon wheel.

In the end, even with the slight hiccup here and there, it is a surprisingly easy win for the Plough. The sun is still out, and half of us have barely got out of our white when we are told that there is already an eight-pint jug of Sapporo waiting for us. If you caught even a hint of the game today, you would know that this is just the first of very, very many to come this season from a new phenom for the club.

Match report from Prithu Banerjee