It may well be that the most significant impact of the restructuring of the Dutch domestic competition which comes into force next season will be felt not in the newly-created Topklasse, but in the Hoofdklasse, which now becomes in effect the Second Division.

With three teams dropping down from the top flight, joining the second- to sixth-placed teams from the 2009 Eerste Klasse, the new-style Hoofdklasse seems set to produce an extremely tight battle for the right to play the bottom side from the Topklasse in a best-of-three promotion/ relegation play-off come September.

Voorburg, VVV Amsterdam and HBS Den Haag had been among the weaker sides in the Hoofdklasse for some time – apart from Voorburg’s remarkable foray as far as the championship final in 2007 – and they will not be able to make any rash assumptions as they take on Bloemendaal, Sparta 1888, Kampong Utrecht, Dosti Amsterdam and HCC 2.

Only 7 points separated these five teams in last season’s Eerste Klasse, and matches between them were often hard-fought affairs. None of them will be a pushover for the three sides which have dropped down from the top flight.

It is to be hoped that one consequence of the new set-up will be that Dutch players have a much greater role than has been true in the Eerste Klasse in the recent past, where the professionals and overseas exchange players have been even more disproportionately rampant than in the Hoofdklasse.

In 2009, for example, the overseas players hit 18 of the 25 centuries which were registered in the Eerste Klasse, and of the remaining seven, three came from the Dutch-domiciled New Zealanders Jarrod Englefield, Mat Reijnen and Andrew Bailey. Eight of the top twelve positions in the batting averages were occupied by the pros and exchange players.

Things were somewhat healthier among the bowlers, players like Pieter Reeve (HCC 2), Masood Khan (Rood en Wit) and Saurabh Zalpuri (Kampong) figuring among the leading wicket-takers. But here, too, it was the overseas players who were often the dominant figures.

It was, indeed, the desire to create a stronger, leaner top level of Dutch cricket which motivated the proposals of Top Cricket Nederland (TCN) in the first place, and the character of the new-style Hoofdklasse will be a key indication of the extent to which this is being achieved.

Above all, it needs to provide a competitive environment in which young players like opener Dennis Coster (HBS), middle-order batsmen Floris Kingma (Voorburg) and Matthijs Luten (Bloemendaal), and leg-spinner Bavik Nana (Kampong) can develop their skills and become better cricketers.

With the weaker sides from last year’s Eerste Klasse effectively dropping down a division, there will be few easy matches in the Hoofdklasse next season.

The restructuring of the Sunday competition will also have implications for the Twenty20 Cup, now firmly established as a regular feature of the Dutch domestic landscape.

Invitations have for the past three years been given to all the clubs playing in the top two divisions, which has meant eighteen teams divided into four regional groups of four or five. Presumably that will now be extended to take in the top three divisions, producing a 19-team competition when five Second XIs are discounted.

This will enable the KNCB to address one unsatisfactory feature of the preliminary rounds up to now: the existence of a ‘Rest of the Netherlands’ pool which has so far included no team from the top division, whereas the other three groups had three or four such sides. It might be claimed that this has now been resolved with the promotion of Rood en Wit to the Topklasse.

That was, however, not the only argument for change: traffic around Amsterdam being what it is on a Friday evening, it is less than ideal for teams from Haarlem and Utrecht to have to drive past the capital in peak-hour traffic in order to reach each other’s grounds. It would make much more logistical sense to split the four Amsterdam sides between two groups, half of them taking on Bloemendaal and Haarlem sides Rood en Wit and United, the others playing against Hilversum and the two Utrecht clubs, Kampong and Hercules. It would also make for a more interesting competition.

2010 is undoubtedly going to be a season of change and adaptation in Dutch domestic cricket, not least because of the implications of the national side’s participation in the ECB Pro40 competition. But there will be plenty of talking points in club cricket as well, and observers of the local game will be looking to see how quickly the new structure produces its first positive results.