The debate within the HCC club which was triggered by Fred Beekman’s article expressing his concerns about the present state and future of Dutch cricket, which we have been republishing over the past couple of weeks, addresses important issues, and it is to be hoped that its echoes will continue to resound through the Dutch cricketing community.

It cannot, on the other hand, be said that reading the contributions through made a terribly comforting or encouraging experience. One of the strongest impressions to emerge is of a deep chasm between the aspirations of the KNCB and its national team and the perceptions of the ordinary club member.

After getting on for a couple of decades around the boundary and in the pavilions of Dutch cricket grounds, this does not come as a great surprise. The criticisms and complaints of the HCC debaters can be heard being put at least as forcefully on most Sundays, even if they surface only desultorily in the forum where they might be expected to have most effect, at general meetings of the Bond.

This alienation comes, in part, from a sort of nostalgia, for the good old days when foreigners were rare in Dutch cricket and the highlight of a typical summer was a gentlemanly match against a bunch of English club cricketers playing under the auspices of the Free Foresters.

I don’t mean to denigrate the feelings of those who see much wrong in the current situation, or to deny that in many respects they have a point. But it is a hard fact that, as several contributors pointed out, Dutch cricket in general and the KNCB in particular, faces a dilemma: we are now so dependent on ICC funding that there are almost no spare resources to spend on the grassroots development which is essential if the game is to survive.

There is little doubt that this dependence gives rise to a degree of resentment against the ICC and against those KNCB administrators who are seen as the ICC’s creatures. Yet the ICC is responsible for few, if any, of the Bond’s – or Dutch cricket’s – many ills, and its funding of the sport, both from Dubai through the High Performance Program and from London through its regional office, has permitted many developments which would otherwise have been impossible.

It is through the ICC’s initiatives that the Bond now has a full-time CEO and a full-time national coach, that it is possible for Dutch cricketers to test their skills in ODIs and four-day first-class matches, and for Dutch cricket enthusiasts to see so much cricket of international quality. Attendances at home matches, on the other hand, suggests that there are comparatively few in the Dutch cricket community whose horizons extend far beyond their own club.

A recurring theme in the HCC debate was the KNCB’s alleged neglect of domestic cricket in favour of the interests of the national sides. It is true that the demands of the international programme, which must, after all, suit the convenience of others as well as of the Netherlands, have increasingly had an impact on the domestic competition, and that this seems to have reached a peak in 2010.

But the mess that was last season’s upper division competitions originated, as I understand it, in the assertion by some leading clubs that a 14-match Topklasse was not enough, and so the second phase – which I thought at the time an ingenious compromise – was invented to get the schedule before the play-offs up to 17 matches.

It might have worked out if the carrying-through of points had not been turned into a lottery, but the truth is that it was a completely unnecessary measure, and it just complicated the difficult task of combining the domestic competition with the national side’s commitments.

A more lateral approach could solve two issues in one, producing a straightforward championship system and enabling the internationals to be available for all – or almost all – Topklasse and Hoofdklasse matches.

With one game per weekend from the start of May to mid-September, including two traditional public holidays and a one-week break in July, there are 21 playing dates available in a Dutch season. For a 14-match home-and-away round robin and a three-round play-off, 17 are needed for the top domestic competitions.

That leaves four playing dates free, on which the national side might well have a fixture.

Oh, some will immediately complain, but that leaves the ordinary club cricketer with too little cricket in his season! But how about using those dates for a separate competition, designed to make the most of the opportunity?

I would use them to play a 40-over knockout competition, in which the clubs without their internationals would have the opportunity to give some of their younger players experience of competitive first-team cricket without the national championship being affected. Four rounds enable you to go from 16 teams to two finalists, but I would go a step further, and start with 24.

I would then have, early in the season, a preliminary round involving the 16 top-ranked clubs from the Hoofdklasse, Eerste Klasse and Overgangsklasse, with the eight winners joining the Topklasse teams in the first round proper. So the smaller clubs would get an opportunity to cause an upset, club players would get some extra games, fringe and talented youth players would get an additional opportunity to test their mettle in the first team, and the Topklasse and Hoofdklasse would be unaffected by national team commitments.

The steady decline in numbers which is the root of Dutch cricket’s problems began two decades ago, well before the ICC’s supposedly malign influence was evident, and one legitimate criticism of the Bond, and of the clubs which comprise it, is that they were so slow to recognise this threat and take steps to meet it. One of the most inexplicable decisions of this period, in my view, was permitting the Bond’s Promotion/Propaganda Committee, which had been operating since 1932, to collapse and die in the late 1990s, when playing numbers had declined by nearly 15% in a decade.

On the other hand, there are some indications that the Bond is beginning to turn the ship around. The introduction of a Zomi competition alongside the Zami and a Twenty20 Cup for teams from the lower divisions; the appointment of a Cricket Development Manager primarily concerned with youth development; proposals for a Club Charter scheme to recognise clubs’ efforts to promote the game; these are all positive signs.

Switching youth cricket to Sundays and the main league to Saturdays may or may not be an element in the solution: that is a debate which has yet to take place. Many of the factors which have contributed to the decline are beyond cricket’s control, and this is at least a decision which is in the clubs’ own hands. But there is much to be said on both sides of the question.

One of the most encouraging strands in the HCC discussion is the recognition that in the end it is the clubs themselves who are the key to the sport’s recovery. They need support from the Bond, of course – administrative, organisational and financial – and they need all three to be more effective than they have frequently been in the recent past.

But they also have to recognise two things. One is that the ‘us-and-them’ mentality which sees the enemies of Dutch cricket as residing in Nieuwegein, London and Dubai is itself one of the deadliest perils facing the sport. And the other is that there is no way back to those legendary, leisurely, sun-bathed summers of the distant past. That world no longer exists – if, indeed, it ever did – and an abandonment of the goal of international competitiveness would see Dutch cricket plunge so fast that the sport would effectively cease to exist in the country which is its oldest and most successful Continental bastion.