Whippets have eight players. Not eight players here, eight players in total for the game. Lonnen and Parks are considering how we can make this a fair game. Dave Yates is on the phone to his friend who he’s been secretly netting with. Josh Kerr is getting a pint.

Eventually the decision has been made to switch this to a timed game. Ploughmans CC will bat first, Yates’ friend will run/walk/cycle/kayak down from Battersea, Whippets will be offered two fielders for a time, and the Whippets will be allowed to bat after a sporting declaration from us. Obviously there is no chance that these are famous last words.

Scantlebury and Cosgrove walk out to bat, a combination that I have grown comfortable seeing; it is like a warm blanket to know that they are out there. It becomes apparent, very early, that Whippets may have literally no bowlers of any pace in their team. This become more evident when Scantlebury gets down to sweep a ball— almost audibly telling himself not to play this shot even as the knee bends— swings through the shot— almost audibly angry at himself— and watches the ball arrive five seconds later and gently kiss the stumps.

Lonnen walks out to meet Cosi, and in a turn of events that is incredibly shocking, the angriest man at the Plough is immediately angry. He cannot quite believe how slow the bowling is— the bowling changes have actually put on bowlers who are somehow slower than the ones who started— and is making his emotions known (quietly). He is however, not wrong.

There is a point partway through the innings where he faces a ball that seems to bend time. The ball leaves the bowler’s hand, and Lonnen thinks about the people at the club who have personally wronged him, the people who post on Plough On instead of one of the subgroups, and the ball has travelled a quarter of the way down the pitch, and Lonnen has already drafted, word for word, a diatribe about how there are subgroups for a reason and that there should be no Ashes chat in the main group and the ball is still only halfway down the pitch, and Lonnen has now had to write a full 4000 word apology complete with bibliography in the group, and the ball seems to have started going backwards, and we have all begun entering the heat death of the universe, and the ball is now very close to pitching, and all life has vanished and we are in a cold, empty, nothingness, and the ball has now pitched, and Lonnen has played a shot, and he is early, and he has pulled his shoulder because of how hard he has tried to hit it, and then about fifteen minutes after that, the ball plods into his midriff.

Dot ball.

“Any f*cking danger of someone bowling with a bit of f*cking pace on the ball?” For legal purposes, this is not a direct quote, but a summation of feeling.

However, the test of a batter is their ability to work through the things they don’t like, and in that sense, we are watching two technicians here. Both Cosgrove and Lonnen are patient and wary, and they stick to the old truism of waiting for the bad ball. When one comes along, they duly punish it; Cosgrove guiding cuts and nudges behind square on both sides, while Lonnen crunches a few overpitched ones straight down the ground. They pick gaps, they run singles, they communicate, and in every sense, this is a template of how you should bat. There is a big cheer when Cosgrove gets to his 50, and then ten minutes later, a big cheer as Lonnen does too.

Unfortunately, Lonnen is facing a bowler with a zero-step run up, and the ball after his fifty, chops onto the stumps.

This then brings a stream of batsmen to the crease, each with a single imperative, which is to stick around with Cosgrove. Cosgrove climbs from 50 to 60, and Leon scores 21, Cosgrove grows from 60 to 70, and I score 12 off 10, securing my place at the Engine Room dinner, one tiny bright spot in the otherwise endless hell that is my existence in this sport, Cosgrove from 70 to 75 and is eventually out. He walks off to a standing ovation in honour of his highest ever score for the Plough. A testament to hard work and grit, and to just wanting it.

There is no need for a sporting declaration, as we are all out, Dave Yates being the final man to get out trying to lap sweep a bowler with a shot I have never seen him play before in his life.

“Are we the bad guys?” asks Mitchel to Webb in a famous sketch. There is a similar sense of that in the second innings; a questioning whether today is one of those days where we are not the protagonists of the story, where maybe we are the set and the dressing and the stage for someone else.

That someone is their opening batter Afzal. There is something about him from the moment he steps onto the pitch; a complete unwillingness to let this game go. He plays a nightmare opening spell from Raza, who is nothing short of spectacular throughout the entire bowling innings. Raza will end the game with figures of 10 overs, 29 runs and 2 wickets spread out over two separate spells of tight, nagging, relentless bowling. When he is not bowling, he is covering ground everywhere, fizzing balls in with an absolute cannon of an arm.

Afzal is patient and careful against Yates, who looks and feels close to his best. He is bowling off the full run-up, and the yips seem like a faint blur in the rear view mirror. There is proper dip on the ball, and it is doing just enough off a sluggish, difficult pitch to cause problems, least of all to his mate who has so graciously come and helped make this a game. There are bragging rights up for grabs, and Yates does not yield an inch.
Afzal is patient and canny against Winter, who bowls his heart out in an extended nine over spell. Every time he finishes an over, he looks spent, finished, drained, and then six balls later, he is back. He could so easily have dropped his pace, so easily could have asked to be taken off, so easily could have lost his line or his length, but he simply does not. Winter picks up a full deserved wicket, and on another day, could easily have picked up more.

Afzal bats, and bats and bats, picking his boundaries, picking his singles, audibly cheering on every single good shot his batting partner plays. It is a sign of how tight the game is that his own team don’t even let him know when he scores a 100, just so that he can stay locked in on the chase. He takes them over the line with just an over left in the game. Nobody else on his team scores more than 30. Only one person scores more than 20.

There is no shame in losing to an innings like that. Sometimes you just come up against someone who is having their day, and all you can do is doff the hat. Sometimes you have to take stock of what has happened, and realise things could be worse, like being scammed for close to half a grand by a man with a criminal record of impersonating professional hedge trimmers. I will leave the victim’s name out for anonymity in case they want to offer up the full (very funny) story of their own volition, perhaps on the group, or over a pint.

Match report from Prithu "Pretty Boy" Banerjee