Topklasse club HCC has completed an exchange agreement with the Western Province Cricket Association in South Africa, designed to send two players in each direction each year.

The deal replaces an arrangement with the Toowoomba district association in Queensland, which has run for several seasons and enabled a succession of young Dutch players to gain experience in Australian grade cricket, albeit in a country area.

The new scheme grew out of a tour to Cape Town by a HCC Under-16 side two years ago, which involved matches against leading school sides and an academy event at Somerset West. The idea of an exchange agreement was taken up by a member of the club’s High Performance Committee, Volkert Rijkens, in talks with the Western Province CA last November.

‘I was surprised and delighted at the enthusiasm with which they received the idea,’ Rijkens said this week, ‘and André Oldendaal, the chief executive of the WPCA, clearly saw it as a great opportunity.

‘It was the South Africans who suggested that their players might be drawn specifically from previously disadvantaged backgrounds in the province. They were very happy at the way in which JP Duminy, for example, had benefited from a season in the UK at the start of his career, and they would like the same effect to be achieved through this scheme.’

The first two players from Cape Town to spend a season in Den Haag will be Jancan Adams of Tygerburg and Imran Nackerdien from Durbanville.

‘The arrangement is that each country pays the costs for sending its own players,’ Rijkens explained. ‘They will be billetted with local families, and will get the benefit of living for a few months in another culture, with a different language and so on.

‘The South Africans plan to offer their two places around their clubs in rotation.’

An additional advantage from the Dutch point of view is that the boys from HCC will be given an opportunity to earn a place in the WPCA Academy.

‘That won’t happen automatically,’ said Rijkens. ‘The players will need to prove themselves – otherwise they would be keeping out local players, and that wouldn’t be fair. If they make it, they’ll be there on merit.’

As the club with the largest junior section in The Netherlands, HCC is keen to develop new models of youth development, and this scheme has the potential to form an example for other Dutch clubs.