The issues around foreigners playing for Dutch teams have reared their ugly heads again, as they do from time to time. Teams (notably Dosti) have been allegedly bringing in unregistered ‘ringers’ to play key games for them.

I’ve been a member of three Dutch cricket clubs in my time, and all three have ‘cheated’ in one way or another. Cheated in the sense that they have bent the rules on eligibility to breaking point or beyond. This would include one of the clubs that is – incredibly – reportedly helping to organize a boycott of Dosti in 2011.

Indeed, I was one of those ‘cheaters’. As captain of a lower level team, if I knew we were a couple of players short for the next day, I would trawl the bars around Leidseplein on a Saturday night on the lookout for tourists who superficially appeared sober.

So it was that many a bemused English or Aussie tourist would find themselves running around a Dutch field in borrowed kit on a cool Sunday morning, playing for a club whose name they didn’t know and they would never hear of again. I don’t know of any club that hasn’t done the same at some time.

Years later, another club gave me the onerous task of collecting players’ annual contributions. Imagine my surprise when three of the names on my list told me they hadn’t been members of the club for several years, another was dead, and still another was believed to be living ‘somewhere in Canada’. Turns out this club had a handful of phantom memberships whose identities could be used when it was convenient to do so . . .

So there is nothing new here, and everybody does it, or something like it, the only crime it would appear, is in getting caught.

So what to do about Dosti? What to do? The hang-wringing! The outrage!

One idea was the Wildersesque concept of issuing KNCB photo ID for all Dutch cricketers, an idea borrowed from the KNVB. Let’s stop for a moment and look at how that would pan out in reality, shall we?

Imagine you are a Pakistani playing for a big city club in Amsterdam or Rotterdam; you have a game out in the sticks against Polderboys ’37 cricket club. You arrive at the clubhouse half hour before the game and present your licence to play. Jan-Peter, the middle-aged bloke behind the bar (whose only connection to real cricket is that his great-uncle Floris scored 53 against Rood en Wit in June of 1952) starts to examine it. He picks at it, he prods it, he holds it up to the light.

‘Hey Cees, vind je dat dit nou echt is? Volgens mij hebben we misschien hier te maken met een illegale vreemdeling.’
[‘Hey, Cees, do you reckon this is genuine? I think we might be dealing here with an illegal immigrant.’]

How is that going to make you feel? The white man gets to police the game; the black guy is ‘on trial’. Is the ensuing game going to capture the true spirit of cricket? Or will it be played in an atmosphere of barely subdued hostility and resentment?

I've been thinking about this a lot the last couple of days, and I've decided I'm with Dosti on this issue. Since the KNCB allowed extra foreign players to join the competition if they are Oranje-qualified, we no longer have a level playing field. Almost by definition these guys are going to be white skinned and will join 'traditional' (read white) clubs, this puts the 'new' clubs (read black) at a real disadvantage round play-off time.

So given the massive levels of rule-bending that goes on throughout Dutch cricket, and given the unfair situation with Dutch qualified players, I believe all clubs should be allowed to sign up anyone they like to play any game. See the English Twenty/20 final of 2010 for details; Essex flew Dwayne Bravo in especially for the one match. Bravo conceded 46 from his four overs, at a cost of £10k plus expenses (!).

Let’s kill two birds with one stone. Cut out the hypocrisy and the alleged ‘cheating’, allow any team to play anyone they can sign up on the day.