The relentless pace of this Dutch cricket season shows no sign of letting up this week, although the attention will for a few days be more on the future and the past than on the constantly-demanding present.

Friday and Saturday sees the second European Continental Twenty20 Championships at Thurlede in Schiedam, after the KNCB’s successful inauguration of this event last year.

The defeated finalists from last season, Germany, are not taking part this year, and their place will be taken by Luxembourg. They join Belgium, France and the Netherlands A team in the quadrangular tournament, the first official matches in which will start at 13:00 on Friday, with the final starting at 14:00 on Saturday.

The tournament will be part of France’s preparations for next month’s European Division 2 tournament in Guernsey, while for the Dutch A side it will be part of the build-up to the Division 1 championship in Jersey, in which this year Ireland, The Netherlands and Scotland will for the first time be fielding their second strings.

For Belgium, who play in European Division 3, and Luxembourg (Division 4) there is no ICC tournament this season, so this Twenty20 competition will be one of the highlights of their year.

The three visiting sides will also play warm-up matches on Thursday, with France taking on Netherlands A in a 50-over match at Maarschalkerweerd, Utrecht, while Belgium and Luxembourg will take on VOC Rotterdam and Excelsior ’20 Schiedam respectively, both matches starting at 17:00.

And before the Twenty20 tournament is over, the farewell match for former national captain Jeroen Smits will be getting under way at De Diepput. This game will be between a Netherlands XI and Smits’s Invitation side, and it will feature many Dutch stars of the past and present.

Few players have given as much to the Dutch game as Smits, and he is currently displaying as much energy off the field in his new role as the KNCB’s High Performance adviser as he ever showed on it. So this will be a suitably celebratory event, and it is a pity that it will overlap with the end of the Schiedam tournament.

Somewhat bizarrely, Smits himself will not be captaining his invitation side, but will instead be playing for the opposition. But that does mean that we will see him one more time in day-glo Orange.

The teams are:
Jeroen Smits Invitation XI:
Tim de Leede (captain ), Reinout Scholte, Henk-Jan Mol, Luuk van Troost, Stephan Myburgh, Steven van Dijk, Robert van Oosterom, Darrin Murray, Joost Leemhuis, Klaas-Jan van Noortwijk and Jacob-Jan Esmeijer.

Oranje:
Peter Borren (captain ), Daan van Bunge, Eric Szwarczynski, Adeel Raja, Tom de Grooth, Tom Cooper, Maurits Jonkman, Jeroen Smits, Pieter Seelaar, Mudassar Bukhari, Edgar Schiferli (whose role will, unfortunately, be confined to batting) and Ruud Nijman.