Nineteen clubs will contest this season’s Insinger de Beaufort Twenty20 Cup, with the finals day scheduled for Saturday, 7 August.

The preliminary phase, which begins on 28 May, will again be played in four groups, but there is an innovation this year with the splitting of the Amsterdam teams between two of them. This should produce a more competitive group phase, and also makes sense on logistical grounds: in the past, the sides from Haarlem and Utrecht have faced a tricky Friday evening journey around the Amsterdam ring in order to reach each other’s grounds.

This time, VRA and VVV will take on the three clubs from the Haarlem area (Rood en Wit, Bloemendaal and debutants United) in Group B, while ACC and Dosti are in Group D with the two Utrecht sides (Kampong and Hercules) and Hilversum.

There’s no change in the remaining pools, with five teams from Rotterdam and Schiedam in Group A and the four Den Haag sides in Group C. This new structure means that there are three Topklasse sides in Group A, two in Groups B and C, and just one, ACC, in Group D.

Double champions Excelsior ’20, who qualified for the quarter-finals for the first time last year and went on the claim the trophy, will begin their defence with a visit to their neighbours Hermes-DVS, who are one of only two sides to have progressed beyond the first phase in each of the competition’s three years of existence.

The other is Rood en Wit, who have until now enjoyed the benefit of an all-Eerste Klasse qualifying phase. But they will again be favourites to go through, perhaps along with VRA Amsterdam, with whom they played a contentious quarter-final at Spanjaardslaan last season. These sides will meet there again in the last group match on 2 July.

But past experience has shown that in Twenty20 matches anything can happen, and the Hoofdklasse and Eerste Klasse sides will be keen to ensure that this season’s finals day is once again not the preserve of teams from the top flight. Last year Dosti Amsterdam went all the way to the final before losing to Excelsior.

One face that will be missing from this season’s competition is that of former Sparta coach Luke Vivian, who made a remarkable 534 runs in three campaigns, averaging 48.55 and recording the highest individual score with 151 from 72 deliveries against VOC Rotterdam in 2008. His successor at Sparta will be fellow New Zealander Sean Eathorne.

Vivian is one of only five men to have hit a century in the T20 Cup, the others being Zimbabwean Brendan Taylor (Hercules), South African Antonio Mullins (Hermes-DVS), Pakistani Mohammad Hafeez (Voorburg), and New Zealander Gareth Hopkins (Quick Haag). The highest score by a Dutch player is Bas Zuiderent’s 98 against Hermes-DVS last season.

The competition is again sponsored by private bank and wealth management company Insinger de Beaufort, which is part of the BNP group and last year merged with the KNCB’s long-time sponsors Nachenius Tjeenk.