One effect of the reorganisation is the arrival in the top flight for the first time of Rotterdam club Punjab, who were runners-up in the Hoofdklasse last season after a tense battle with Amsterdam rivals VVV.
They will welcome back the two Pakistani coaches who served them well last year, Shoaib Minhaas (Khan Research Laboratories) and Khurram Shahzad (Karachi).
Minhaas was their leading run-scorer with 600 runs at an average of 40.00 as well as claiming 25 wickets at 18.84, while Shahzad made 359 runs and took 19 wickets.
Although the club has never been in the Topklasse before, several of their squad have experience of the top flight with other clubs: Haider Khan played 96 matches for Excelsior ’20 before moving to Punjab, and other former Excelsior players include Zafar Chaudhary (64 matches) and Sulaiman Tariq (76 games for Excelsior and Sparta 1888).
They will join Minhaas and Shahzad in what looks like being a pretty effective attack, which will also include Irfan Ul-Haq though notn Waqas Khan, who has moved to Eerste Klasse club Ghausia Feijenoord.
There may be more questions about the batting, which relied heavily on the two player-coaches last year. But there is also the experienced Sri Lankan-born Ashan Bamunusinghe, whose previous clubs include Hercules Utrecht and VRA Amsterdam.
For last season’s Hoofdklasse champions HBS Den Haag the first challenge will be to avoid the fate they suffered in 2013 and 2015, when they made an immediate return to the second flight.
The side has been through a rebuilding phase after the loss of seasoned veterans like Sjoerd Weurman and Rasool Abed from the attack, but it has mostly been the batting which has let them down in the past, and they will be looking for more consistent performances this term.
26-year-old Western Australian Corey Rutgers returns after an injury-hampered first season at Craeyenhout, and will be joined by compatriot Jaron Morgan, a 21-year-old left-handed batsman and wicketkeeper; he is perhaps unlikely to be given the gloves here, unless Tobias Visée decides to concentrate on his batting.
Visée had an outstanding campaign in 2016, topping the averages with 964 runs at 56.71 and a highest score of 179 against Bloemendaal, efforts which saw him included in the Dutch squad over the winter.
Among a promising crop of younger players the one to watch is probably 18-year-old Navjit Singh Randhawa, who topped the Hoofdklasse bowling averages last year with 22 wickets at 9.18 and was declared the KNCB’s Youth Player of the Year.
He will play a key role in an attack which is led by former international Berend Westdijk, leading wicket-taker last year with 34 at 11.74 and which also includes seamers Wessel Coster and Farshad Khan, and Adil Ahmad.
The Craeyenhout club will be hoping that opener Dennis Coster is able to hit a consistent run of form this season, and will be looking for further progress from youngsters Julian de Mey, Nils Wisse and Pim Wuite.