Nigel walks out to open with Ainslie, another member who will be hanging up the blue and yellow of the Plough by the end of the year, and the first two overs seem fine. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and maybe all is well in the world. And then Ainslie gets his middle stump blown out of the ground; the cartwheel is excessive for a delivery that, at best, might have touched 60mph.

I walk out, and at least one hope for the day has come to fruition; I get to bat with Nige. When he nurdles one to scamper through for a single, there is a huge roar on the boundary, maybe even a sliver of a thought crosses his mind to raise his bat. Just 99 more runs to go.

Sadly, today is not the day for another 99 runs. Their bowler gets one to come up off a length, tickle the shoulder of his bat and settle into the keeper’s gloves, and Nigel, the consummate sportsman, barely waits for the umpire’s decision before walking off.

Then for some captaincy. Larkhill’s captain, wily and calculating as he must have been, decides that it is time to take off their opening bowler; a bowler bowling at good pace, and with a little bit of swing, and a little bit of seam, and extracting just a little bit of bounce, and to replace him with Chris. A man, I am told later on, who medically lacks depth perception.

Maybe it is this, or maybe it is the relentless self-sledging in the Larkhill camp, but he is bowling some of the most devastating grenades you will ever see. These are deliveries that are a shade above walking pace, with massive loop and drop and tease. I am having an almost religious experience; maybe this is what it was like in Genesis for Eve in the Garden of Eden; some snake tossing up apple after apple to her, hissing seductively in her ear that she definitely has the levers to send this next one to Gethsemane. I, like Eve, too have a moment of weakness, trying to slam one over cow, and am desperately lucky that it falls in no-man’s land in between two salivating fielders. When I then calm down, wait for the ball, and crunch one through cover for four, it feels like it might be my day.

The moment I think this thought, the theme song to Always Sunny In Philadelphia plays, Alex Gordon- Walker swivels a ball down leg side and just sets off. I am in a weird sort of limbo as I make my way to the definitely doomed danger end towards the keeper. What an odd run to be taking, I think. This run, I ponder gently to myself, was never on. You have a mouth, I wonder, that has the ability to say the word “no”, and the word “run” and combine them into the commonly used phrase “no run”. I carry on thinking these thoughts when I am run out, and walk off the pitch.

Rehan enters, and there is an immediate uptick in tempo. He goes after anything that is in his hitting arc, and has racked up a set of boundaries in no time. Alex is also going after them, but the bowling is now so slow that he is finding it difficult to really connect with anything. He eventually goes after one shot too many, and is caught for 9.

Sandeep enters while on a tight schedule. While most batsmen are just thinking about runs, Sandeep is thinking about the fact that he needs to score runs here, then head off, drive 45 minutes to collect his kid, and then drive back in time for the bowling innings. It is maybe this weight of expectation on his shoulder that means he skies one, and is caught in the same place, by the same fielder as Alex.

And so Will Gray walks in, with the scoreline a very shaky looking 65-5.

It takes one ball to know how good he is. He has that thing that fielders whisper about when someone with a high elbow plays a defensive shot, he has that thing that captains look at and breathe a small sigh of relief, he has that thing that makes you wring your hands like that Zidane meme.
Shapes.

Will Gray is all shapes. He is shapes when he blocks one on middle stump. He is shapes when he drives one through cover. He is shapes when he gets right up on his toes to ride the bounce and take two runs down to third man. He makes batting look so easy; he never seems to hit the ball that hard, and the ball still keeps going and going and going in a way that it doesn’t for so many other people. It is elegant, and it is easy. There is a vague sense of unfairness to it all, the visual of how simply the runs come for him, and with such little effort.

He and Rehan start to grab the game by the scruff of its neck. Rehan continues to use the long handle; the moment the ball is fractionally short— and a lot of these are more than fractionally short— he is battering it through long off or cover. At times, he just lets his rubber-band wrists take over; there is a ball on fifth stump that he whip-flicks along the ground for four that makes me seriously consider retiring from the sport. When he is not pummelling fours, he is finding gaps to get Will on strike, who is then gliding it around like he’s having his own private net.

Rehan is then stumped on 39, and Bruno replaces him. There is absolutely zero change in the way that Will carries on with his work. There are, if anything, now more boundaries. He brings his 50 up, and there is the barest of bat raises; this is a man who is very aware that there are just a few overs left, and we may need every single run that we can get.

In the chase of a possible 200, there are a flurry of wickets; Bruno departs for 6, Nibs for 2, and Will for a fantastic, beautifully crafted 76. It is left to Grayzer and Harry Wright to wring out what we can in the last couple of overs. We finish on 176.

The bowling starts about as perfectly as you could ask for. Nigel opens up with Grayzer, and the Larkhall openers cannot get it off the square. Nigel starts with a maiden, and Grayzer goes for just 2 in his first over. The opening spell is a suffocating, relentless blanket of tight, miserable bowling on a pitch that is starting to slow down. The fielders are close in, and Chris, the replacement fielder we have for Sandeep, is slowly turning out to be the greatest man we have ever met. When he is replaced by Sandeep, a low, insistent chant of “Chris! Chris! CHRIS! CHRIS!” goes up.

The pressure builds and builds and builds and then bang, Grayz has the first one.

And then, the main event, the reason that we have all turned up today as a group. Grayzer gives the signal, and a shiver runs up my spine, the hairs stand on my arm, and the indomitable misery of this sport abates. Leo Nieboer to bowl.

The first over is the loosener, and many a weaker man would have lost their gumption, surrendered to the forces of this game. Not Nibs. His second over is loop and dip and flight and guile. They don’t know where he’s coming from, they don’t know what day of the week it is, they don’t know where the next run could be. One thing is for sure, it’s not from this over. Leo Nieboer, maiden over.

Their number three, Hayes, is however, a dangerous man. He lets himself have a few deliveries to set his sights, and then starts to go after Harry Wright. The search for his first Plough wicket goes on, but there will be more chances this season.

Grayzer then brings on Sandeep. I am at short cover when he bowls his first delivery, and I get to see the batsman’s face go through what every batsman’s face does every single time Sandeep bowls. There is the initial confusion about him coming through and around, morphing into disdain at the ball being thrown so far down legside, and then the dawning, crushing, horrendous wonderment as the ball rips across him, veering past the outside half of off stump. And then finally, that realisation that there are forty-one more deliveries of this. The third ball is the Sandeep change-up special, a vicious, rapid quicker ball that the batsman barely gets his bat down on in time.

The opener very clearly does not want it, and if there is one thing that we know at Plough, it is that you really have to want it. It is unsurprising then that Sandeep pins him LBW in his second over, and the opener starts walking to congratulate him before the umpire has even raised his finger.

And now, for the longest time, we are in a sort of deadzone stalemate. They are miles and miles behind the run-rate, but Hayes and Horton, their numbers 3 and 4, simply do not want to get out. They are playing the long game gamble, and hoping that they are still around at the end of what is now a game of chicken to see who loses their nerve first.

And very slowly, seemingly out of nowhere, the tide starts to slowly turn. It’s the hantavirus breakout of comebacks; the mildly elevated temperature of the occasional boundary (which you think is just the sun), the slight muscle aches of them lofting Sandeep once or twice instead of letting it beat them (which you think is just cruise ship beds being too firm), and the body fatigue of them running more singles than they were before, and suddenly, before you know it, all the symptoms start to add up, and the RRR doesn’t look as steep as it once did, and the cruise ship doesn’t seem as safe as it once was, and they have two set batters and six still to come, and the ports look very, very far away. And then, the full blown panic outbreak.

They target Grayzer and manage to get two overs of his away for 12 and 13, and suddenly, it is very much game on. We might lose this game. We are going to lose this game.

But today is Nigel Stephenson’s last game. He has been here through sun, rain, sleet, bad nets, good nets and several pints. And yes, you can never guarantee the perfect, final farewell. And yes, it is stupid to hope. But every now and then, if you ask nicely, and you pray a little harder, and cross your fingers a bit tighter, the game rewards you.

With the pressure mounting, and the skies greying, and the temperature plummeting, Nigel takes the ball for the last time in his Plough career.
First ball. Wicket. Michael Ainslie is, and has been, for the entirety of the game, a joke behind the stumps. He is the dream keeper, a man so good at his job, that you never notice him. He is so ridiculously quick with his hands, so deliriously efficient in the way that he gathers, the way his feet skip-step to the side, the way his hands are already on the swing path back into the stumps almost before he’s collected the ball that you don’t realise quite how many levels there are to this game until you watch someone else’s keeper in a game. You cannot give Ainslie half a second to stump you. To be honest, you cannot really give him a quarter of a second. Horton, who has batted so well to this point, gives him too much, and he is gone.

The next ball of the over goes up, up, up and then unfortunately down, down and down. A dropped chance, this late in the game? What could it do to a man?

For Nigel, it does fuck all. Third ball, wicket. Having realised that he can’t rely on his fielders, Nigel opts to simply bowl out the next guy. It is the bowling of a man who knows that destiny is on his side. He finishes his spell, and his career, with scarcely believable figures of 6 overs, 2 maidens, 9 runs, and 2 wickets.

For anyone else, they would be done. Nigel? Nah. Final over, game on the line, 7 runs to defend. Everything counts. Every run needs to be stopped, every pick up needs to be clean. Fielding on the 45, he swoops down on a ball, one fluid pick up and then fires it into Ainslie. There is a yes-no-yes-no-oh-shit in the middle, the bails are knocked off and there is a run out, and the game is iced.

Ploughman win the game by 2 runs, and there is jubilation on the field. We were in total control, and then we had lost, and now, somehow, we have won. Duray is in three different people’s coats, there are 400 unread messages on Plough On; it is carnage. When everything has calmed down a little bit, the players who played today form a guard of honor. Yes, this is a guard of honour for the man who took us over the line today, but more than that, it is a guard of honour for a man who has been taking us over the line, repeatedly over the last 13 years. Nigel Stephenson, it has been nothing short of a pleasure.

Match report from Prithu Banerjee