If the primary objective of the restructuring of the Dutch domestic competition was to create tougher, more demanding cricket at the higher levels, this year’s new-look Hoofdklasse may well put a smile on the faces of the KNCB Board.

With three sides having dropped down from last season’s top flight and now fighting it out with five of the leading teams from what was the Eerste Klasse, it seems probable that many of the matches will be very strongly contested indeed.

Voorburg, playing for the first time on their new turf square, have suffered a number of departures and injuries: captain John Sist drops down to the seconds, Ehtesham Chaudry Mohammed has moved to Dosti and Sean Trouw to Kampong Utrecht, Johan Claassens and Shaz Anwar have also gone, and Gijs Bins will be out for the whole season with a knee injury.

The new player-coach is Canterbury allround Brandon Hiini, and the club will also have an exchange player in the form of Jeremy Ford, a promising batsman from Newcastle, New South Wales. The Voorburgers will be looking, too, for Floris Kingma to play a more substantial role in the batting, and he may be joined in the first team by one or both of his brothers, Philip and Vivian.

Much will depend on the contribution of the more experienced members of the squad, notably Wilfried Diepeveen, Mohammad Rafi and Adriaan Kronenberg, with Steffen Mulder also likely to play a prominent part with the ball. Tim de Leede will play some home games, but will probably not be a constant presence in the side.

HBS Den Haag will have New Zealand allrounder Anton Devcich as their player-coach, but apart from the absence of an exchange player the rest of their squad will be essentially unchanged from last year. Devcich’s left-arm spin will add variety to their attack, and his batting will make a crucial contribution to what is often the most problematic part of the HBS game.

Dennis Coster, who broke into the first team in the course of last season, will be a batsman to look out for, and HBS will be hoping that young keeper Tobias Visée is more consistent in his batting, with Taco Risselada providing great experience in the middle order.

It is the seam attack which is HBS’s great strength, however, with national squad member Berend Westdijk, alongside the dependable Sjoerd Weurman, Rasool Abed and the youngsters Ferdi Vink and Ollie de Geus.

Both these sides will be hoping to make a quick return to the top flight, but the third relegated side, VVV Amsterdam, is much more of an unknown quantity. Brothers Rizwan and Zishan Akram and Kamran Shafiq have moved to ACC with Mehmood Sadiq transferring to Dosti, and that leaves a very considerable hole in the first team.

Several of last’s year’s side remain, however, including batsmen Naveed and Shakrukh Akhtar and seamer Abdul Qadir Imdad. For the most part, though, the club will be looking to players from its second side to step up into the gap.

Zakir Khan takes over the captaincy, but it is still uncertain at this stage whether VVV will have a player-coach this year. Without one, it is hard to see them as serious contenders for a place in the top four.

Bloemendaal were the best of the rest behind Rood en Wit Haarlem in last year’s Eerste Klasse, and will be hoping to be among the challengers for promotion this year. Their new coach will be another New Zealander, Canterbury Country skipper Andrew Robertson, and they will have another player from Canterbury, Henry Nicholls, on exchange.

Other than that, the side will be largely unchanged, although Tjerk Schoonheim is another of those who will be playing for Dosti this season. The batting will combine the experience of former international Klaas-Jan van Noortwijk with the talents of youth internationals Matthijs Luten and Quirijn Gunning.

The side will again be led by Aldray Powell, who will share the brunt of the attack with Tyler Tettelaar, Samsudeen Khoja and the two New Zealanders.

Sparta 1888 are another side which has relatively few changes from last year: the new coach is Sean Eathorne, yet another New Zealander, and the exchange player is his compatriot Sean Conlan.

The departure of allrounder Andrew Bailey to Topklasse club Rood en Wit will be a blow, but it is compensated by the arrival of the equally-experienced Naeem Khalid from Dosti. The side will be captained by former Pakistani international Mohammad Wasim, now an established Dutch resident, and with brothers Luqman and Sulaiman Tariq, Karan and Hitesh Pawa, Usman and Amir Ishfaq, under-19 international Gagandeep Singh, and Ben Calvert, they have a well-established side which seems likely to be one of the contenders for promotion.

Kampong Utrecht, too, can draw on a largely unchanged squad, with last year’s successful coach, South African Shaun de Kock returning to Maarschalkerweerd. They will miss their exchange player from last season, Emiel Kriek, but they have gained Sean Trouw from Voorburg and the former youth international Nikki Vieler joins brother Karel from VOC Rotterdam.

The club is looking to its emerging players, such as youth internationals Bavvik Nana and Robert van der Harten, to make further progress this season, while seamer Saurabh Zalpuri is another to look out for. The Utrecht club will doubtless be hoping for greater consistency in the batting, with De Kock receiving more support, and should that happen they could be in contention for a top four place come the end of July.

The biggest reconstruction of all is at Dosti Amsterdam, where the departure of Shahbaz Bashir to Rood en Wit, Naeem to Sparta, and of Nadeem Akhtar and a whole group of second team players to VVV Amsterdam will be compensated for by the arrival of Mehmood Sadiq (from VVV), Victor Grandia (from VRA), Ehtesham Chaudry Mohammed (from Voorburg), and Tjerk Schoonheim (from Bloemendaal).

Dosti’s new player-coach is Eion Katchay, a Guyana-born seamer and a Canadian international. In addition to the new arrivals, he will join a squad which includes the talented Gary Gravesande, brothers Vikram and Vimal Tewarie, and the enormously experienced Shafiek Panchu.

The big question will be how quickly this new squad can coalesce into an effective unit; if that happens early on Dosti, too, could be a tough side to handle.

Finally, there is HCC 2, the only second team in the competition, who will undoubtedly benefit from the presence of Stephan Myburgh as their coach. The Haagenaars will have a good mix of experience and youth, although their selections may, of course, be affected by what happens in the Topklasse side.

The core of the squad will comprise skipper Fred Bos, opening batsman Bart Kuipéri, and seamer Pieter Reeve, with promising young players like Mels Hartman and keeper Werner Erkelens also playing significant roles.

It is hoped that former first-team stalwarts Feiko Kloppenburg and Joost Leemhuis will also play occasionally, especially if international fixtures lead to players being called up from the Seconds into the Topklasse team.

A key measure of whether the KNCB’s concentration strategy is working will be the extent to which the overseas players dominate the competition, as they largely did in last year’s Eerste Klasse. If the Dutch element can raise their game to meet the new challenge, we should be in for a fascinating campaign.