Thursday evening’s general meeting of the KNCB was a rather strange affair, curiously lacking in the energy and buzz of excitement that might be expected on the brink of a season which will inaugurate a new competition structure and feature the busiest international programme in Dutch cricketing history.

But instead it was mostly a subdued, low-key affair, like a pair of lower-order batsmen playing for stumps against a brace of ordinary medium-pacers. There were a couple of appeals, but we missed the rattle of stumps or the ball sailing into the second tier of the stand.

New CEO Richard Cox had got the innings off to a promising start with a cameo performance in the first half-hour, reviewing his first four months in the job and looking forward to a future of significant change and continued success. If much would depend upon the performances of the national teams – ‘our product,’ he said, ‘our success, our existence’ – he also saw grassroots development as crucial to the long-term future of the sport.

A sponsorship deal was, he said, tantalisingly, ‘very, very close’, while at the same time emphasising that the game was changing rapidly internationally and that Dutch cricket was going to have to be prepared to change with it. More Twenty20 cricket would certainly be part of the mix, and Cox even held out the distant prospect of a ‘Netherlands Knights’ IPL franchise at some point in the future. The crowd gasped as the ball sailed over their heads.

There was a quiet, reflective interlude as chairman Marc Asselbergs announced the KNCB’s five ICC Centenary Medals, handing over three of them to those who could be present: Steven van Hoogstraten, Satar Alladin and Betty Timmer. The other two, to Klaas Vervelde and René van Ierschot, who were unable to attend, will be presented later. And there was also an award for retiring national captain Jeroen Smits, whom Asselbergs declared a ‘cricket hero’.

Smits’s hero status didn’t prevent him from being bowled a few bouncers later, when his initiative to attract foreign-born Dutch passport holders to The Netherlands and get them playing in the domestic competition came up for discussion. The Board had been seen to be unhappy about the implications of this for the rules on player payments, and their concern was shared by some of the clubs.

Smits, now the Bond’s High Performance adviser, defended as stoutly as he ever did in the middle, and drew a distinction between paying a player and reimbursing his expenses. When these include an airfare from the other side of the world it’s a distinction which was too fine for some, but the clubs have been playing this game themselves for years, and any charge of hypocrisy was likely to rebound in comments about pots and kettles.

So Tom Cooper and Derek de Boorder will play this season, and the Board and the clubs will undertake a review of the whole eligibility issue. Did that mean, it was asked, that other clubs could now recruit – and by implication, pay – willing overseas players in the meantime?

That caused sufficient consternation for the meeting to adjourn so that the Board could go into emergency session, and after the resumption Asselbergs pushed the ball quietly into the covers, saying that it was the Dutch passport which was crucial, and that the issue of payment was a matter for the clubs concerned. Licensed hypocrisy may continue to be the order of the day, at least in the short term.

By the time this exciting passage of play was reached, it livened up a meeting which had been in danger of lapsing into torpor. The annual reports went through on the nod, and there was little reaction to treasurer Peter van Wel’s presentation of the accounts and the Finance Committee’s commentary upon them.

A former international with 26 appearances behind him, Van Wel knows plenty about a solid defence, and his analysis of the Bond’s far from comfortable financial situation pretty much foreclosed on any heavy discussion. With 57% of its income deriving from the ICC and only 6% from the clubs, it’s clear who calls the shots, although it’s a cause for concern that not only does this restrict the KNCB’s movements, but meeting the ICC’s requirements, which secures that income of €735k., actually costs more like €1m. The difference of more than €250k. has to be found somewhere.

No wonder the Finance Committee stressed the need for significant sponsorship, and fast – it’s a terrifying fact that sponsor income amounted to only 4% of the Bond’s 2009 turnover of €1.5m. But a more worrying feature still is the national Olympic Committee’s increasingly stringent requirement that sports bodies have at least 5000 members, which could imperil grants running at €200k. If that’s not an incentive for the clubs to pull their fingers out and start recruiting, it’s hard to know what will be.

Yet Development Officer Marike Dickmann’s presentation about the transformation of youth cricket – a rapidly-expanding programme of indoor tournaments over the winter, more attention to recruiting and retaining young women cricketers, a small increase in the number of teams playing this summer – seemed to stir little enthusiasm, to the point that Dickmann bowled a couple of pretty sharp deliveries at her audience.

In 1988, she recalled, there had been a survey of youth policy in 23 clubs, twelve of which had no youth policy at all. Of those twelve, six no longer existed. Was that the way the club representatives wanted to go?

A stimulus, one might have thought, for a lively and incisive discussion of the Board’s new policy document, covering the period to 2015. But no. It got brief, desultory consideration, and then it, too, was nodded through. It may persuade the Olympic Committee that the KNCB is a worthy, forward-thinking body, but it needs to be translated into action if Dutch cricket is going anywhere.

The discussion of the playing conditions for the competition, the last big item of the evening, was almost a laboratory experiment in what’s wrong. A draft, dated 2 March, had been sent to the clubs and placed online in advance of the meeting, but representatives arriving at the meeting were handed another, this one dated 7 April.

The major change between the two versions was to bring the Eerste Klasse into the competition structure already established for the Top- and Hoofdklasse: a three-match second phase to bring the total number of regular league matches up to 17, and a best-of-three promotion-relegation series between the Eerste Klasse and the Hoofdklasse.

But the catch was that not only had no notice been given of these changes, but the clubs involved hadn’t been consulted. There had been consultation with the Topklasse (and to an extent, the Hoodfklasse) clubs, but the Eerste Klasse clubs had been left out of the loop. Hercules Utrecht, who had missed out on a Hoofdklasse spot at the end of last season by the narrowest of margins, were understandably unhappy, but they were unable to muster sufficient support to get the decision reversed.

This is obviously an area where structural change is required. Everything tends to happen too late in the close season, and while the big clubs have managed to insist on being consulted, the rest are in danger of being presented with faits accomplis.

The restructuring of domestic cricket eighteen months ago drew a line between the Overgangsklasse – now effectively the lowest level of ‘top cricket’ – and the lower leagues, but this has not been reflected in the organisation. Is it really necessary to wait until 15 March to determine which clubs are taking part in the top five divisions, and to delay the publication of fixture lists and so on until after that date? And why can’t a full-scale consultation process, for all those involved, take place in the autumn, generating agreed playing conditions well in advance of the spring general meeting?

The meeting was in no mood to confront such questions, and went on to its quiet conclusion. But ‘the ability to manage change’ is CEO Cox’s declared task for his team in the KNCB office, and there’s reason to expect that things will look a good bit different by this time next year.