Twenty years ago, Kon. UD Deventer became the second team from outside the ‘Randstad’ to win the Dutch national championship – the only previous one had been PW Enschede, in 1939.

There may be some disagreement about exactly what the Randstad comprises, but by any definition it includes the crescent of urban centres which starts with the Rotterdam conurbation in the south, takes in Delft and Den Haag, and then sweeps around through Haarlem, Amsterdam and Utrecht. With a population of around 7 million it has nearly 45% of the Dutch total.

In that 1990 season, twenty of the 59 clubs which took part in the domestic competition came from outside that area, but for most of the past two decades one of the features of cricket’s steady numerical decline in the Netherlands has been, to borrow a phrase from Matthew Arnold, ‘the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the game from the north, east and south of the country.

Except that ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing whimper’ might have been a more appropriate phrase: by 2008, only nine of the 44 clubs in the KNCB competition were located outside the Randstad.

Gradually, however, things seem to be changing. Not only have the past few years seen the formation of new clubs in Deventer (where the disappearance of Kon. UD from the senior cricket scene has been compensated by the emergence of Salland), Zutphen, Heerenveen and Zwolle, but this season has produced evidence that the Bond’s moves to reverse the decline are bearing fruit qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

One of the most encouraging signs was CC Friesland’s winning of the 4B title in their first season in the competition. Having brought cricket back to the province for the first time in more than a century, the club has developed steadily over the past couple of years, and their gradualist approach has been rewarded with promotion in their first full year.

With Rein Peens and Awais Chaudry topping the batting averages, skipper Zoravar Mamik the leading wicket-taker and Parvez Habib also averaging less than 10.00 with the ball, the Frisians have a good basis for further progress as they step up a division next year.

But Friesland’s success was not the only positive sign. Groningen, the Netherlands’ most northerly club, won the 3D competition, edging out another ‘peripheral’ side in MOP Vught.

Neither is a new club, having joined the Bond in 1961 and 1957 respectively, and MOP played in the Eerste Klasse as recently as 1997. This season’s successes, though, represent something of a renaissance, and Dutch cricket needs them to build on the achievements of the current sides.

MOP relied to a significant degree on former international Maurits Houben, who hit three centuries in five innings, and his brother Roeland, while Adrian Bradshaw took most wickets in the division and also averaged 52.2 with the bat, and Subir Shestra was another prominent wicket-taker.

Groningen’s was more of a solid team performance, with Sulman Shafeeq and Sanger Yousufzai, the leading performers with the ball, playing a vital part in their promotion to the Tweede Klasse.

Salland have moved steadily up through the divisions since their competition debut in 2006, and this season they almost made it into the Overgangsklasse, having been pipped for the 2B title on net run rate by Qui Vive Hoofddorp.

Remarkably, Salland’s 2010 squad included seven who also played in that 1990 Kon. UD title-winning side: Geert van Seventer, former international Kees Ruskamp, Arno van Ham, Michiel Lubbers,Theo Sikkema, Rutger Jan Loenen and Ruben Weijl, as well as other former UD stalwarts in Johan Gordinou de Gouberville and Bart Kuijlman.

But only Van Seventer was a regular, and there was a strong representation of youth in the Salland side as well, including 16-year-old youth international spinner Victor Lubbers, and two other members of the Lubbers family in Curtis and Desmond.

Salland’s continuing collaboration in the area of junior cricket with Kon. UD, with whom they share the Schootsveld complex, is crucial for the future, and with a group of more than 20 young players they have grounds for hoping that it won’t be too long before they bring Deventer back into the upper echelons of Dutch cricket.

With Gelre Zutphen having had a much more successful second season in 4B – seven of the eight teams in that section came from outside the Randstad – and Arnhem holding their own in 2B, there is more room for optimism about cricket again becoming a genuinely national sport than there has been for years.

But there is no basis for complacency: more of these clubs need to follow Salland’s example in pursuing an active youth policy, and there are still many Dutch cities – Tilburg, Breda, Apeldoorn, Amersfoort, Maastricht and Dordrecht – with populations of 100,000 and no cricket club, although they all had one in the past.

There remains much work to be done, and these green shoots of recovery will need careful nurturing, but it is a cause for celebration that they are there at all.