The fourth Dutch Twenty20 Cup tournament gets under way on Friday evening with matches in three of the four regional groups. With only four teams in the Den Haag pool, action there will not start until next week.

One interesting feature of this season’s competition is the splitting of the Amsterdam clubs between two groups, VRA and VVV playing in a group with those from the Haarlem area, while ACC and Dosti take on teams from Utrecht and Hilversum.

In Group B, Eerste Klasse club United Haarlem will make their debut in the competition on Friday, travelling to the Donkerelaan to take on Bloemendaal. United’s league form so far has not been encouraging, while for Bloemendaal new coach Andrew Robertson has begun well in the new-style Hoofdklasse.

VVV Amsterdam also face a tough game first up, meeting a buoyant Rood en Wit at the Spanjaardslaan. Again, form suggests that the Topklasse side will have too many guns for their Hoofdklasse opponents, who have won just one of their five matches, but anything can happen in a T20 game.

Last season’s surprise finalists, Dosti Amsterdam, travel to Utrecht for a Group D match against Hercules. This may be one of the more intriguing contests of the evening: Dosti have a very different line-up from last year, while Hercules – who narrowly failed to secure a place in the Hoofdklasse and have been inconsistent so far this season – will be keen to prove that they can compete at the higher level.

The other match in this group pits bottom Hoofdklasse side Kampong Utrecht against ACC at Maarschalkerweerd. Kampong have a potential matchwinner in player-coach Shaun de Kock, but one might expect ACC’s varied attack to prove too strong for their hosts.

By contrast with these new match-ups, there’s something very familiar about the fixtures in Group A.

A quirk of the fixture list means that Hermes-DVS meet the holders, their Schiedam rivals Excelsior ’20, at Sportpark Harga in what is virtually a curtain-raiser for their Topklasse encounter the following day. It’s a slightly bizarre fact that Excelsior have never beaten Hermes in this competition: after a rained-off meeting in 2007, the Harga club have won twice in a row.

There are plenty of players on both sides who are capable of match-winning performances: Ed Cowan, Daan van Bunge and Usman Malik for Excelsior, Shanan Stewart, Derek de Boorder and Nick Statham for Hermes. The decisive factor may be which of the two attacks shows more discipline in what is bound to be a thrilling encounter.

Even more surprisingly VOC Rotterdam, who travel to Capelle aan den Ijssel to take on Sparta 1888, have lost all three group matches they have played against their hosts. Part of that history involves former Sparta coach Luke Vivian, who smashed a record-breaking 151 in 2008, but VOC has yet to demonstrate that it has come to terms with this form of the game. But who knows, this might be the year of their breakthrough?