With the world of Dutch cricket taking its traditional break this weekend, it seems an opportune time to take a look back at the season behind us, and say as little as possible about the drudgery ahead.
With fully four rounds of matches still to come, late July might seem a little premature for a Topklasse review - but then of course the season is to all intents and purposes over. Excelsior's successful title defence is all but secure, and likewise Hermes' top-flight survival is rapidly approaching arithmetic impossibility.
VOC are the only other wooden spoon prospects at this point. The pre-season favourites - suffering from the unavailability of Pieter Seelaar and Ahsan Malik - have only managed four wins so far, but still enjoy a four-point cushion and a slight net run rate advantage over the Schiedammers. It would take a remarkable turnaround to lift the Sky Blues from the bottom of the table, where they have lingered since the opening round.
The title race has likewise been a two-horse affair since slightly over half-way through the season, with VRA the only serious threat to Excelsior since HBS' early challenge sputtered out around round 10.
In truth VRA's three home losses in the early season meant their run at the title was always a long shot, Excelsior having been at least four points clear since round five, and any hopes of catching the defending champions were snuffed out two weeks ago by Jonathan Vandiar's fourth century of the season. Vandiar's ton saw HCC become the fourth side to take points home from the Bos, and after the game VRA captain Peter Borren acknowleged the obvious.
"I'm really proud of the boys. Considering the boring format of this year's competition we've done well to keep things interesting for this long - with five rounds to go - when for most other clubs the season's effectively been over for some time."
If you run the numbers on the past season it's clear that Borren is right on the money. In strict arithmetic terms only four clubs are now definitely safe and out of contention, but for several sides anything but a mid-table finish has been all but certain for a good while.
The table below gives some idea of the situation after each round, showing how long each team was in contention for relegation or the title within a 95% confidence interval.*
At a glance you can see that the table quickly split into title-contenders and relegation candidates, and for half the clubs in the league the season was as good as done fully two months before the final round - in fact newcomers Punjab Rotterdam have effectively been playing for pride since round eight.
Any sensible bookie would have stopped offering odds on Hermes getting relegated or Excelsior taking the title half-way through the summer, and with the probability of their retaining the championship now in the high 90s the only question remaining is where Excelsior will be when the silverware arrives.
That is not to say that Excelsior don't deserve the title of course, they have after all dropped only one match since mid-way through last season, and Hermes were never likely to recover from an 11 match losing streak. But the fact remains that the main reason that it's possible to write a season review in July is that the ten-team double round-robin format introduced this year is near-guaranteed to drain all of the tension out of the competition well before the close.
From here on out dead rubbers will become the norm rather than the exception, which is of course the direct and predictable consequence of not only expanding the league to ten teams, but also eliminating the playoff phase and the finals - both of which worked to keep more teams in contention for both relegation and the title deeper into the season, and indeed made Excelsior's late comeback from third to take the championship possible last year.
It's worth remembering that when the case was first made to scrap the eight-team Topklasse one of the criticisms of the existing format was that it produced too many dead games. Whilst it's not realistically possible to entirely eliminate dead rubbers from any league format, the current model is not only considerably worse on this front than what it replaces, it is practically the worst format imaginable.
In total there were only three dead rubbers last season (two of which were called off after washouts), a figure which was fairly typical of the format. Compare this season, where we can expect anywhere between 10 and 15 entirely meaningless games, and if we include matches where at least one side has nothing to gain or lose that number more than doubles.
There were of course other, less nonsensical reasons given for the reversion to ten teams, but none of them really hold much water in light of the reality.
When the KNCB set out their case for the new-old format, they argued that the expanded league would ease the pressure on clubs to spend money on paid players to stave off relegation, and would allow them to play more youth players - giving young dutch-produced cricketers much needed exposure to high-pressure, high-standard cricket.
The fact is of course that the standard of cricket in the Topklasse is inevitably diluted by the expansion, and a substantial portion of the season is anything but high pressure. On the contrary, with nothing on the line, the remainder of the season will for most be de facto recreational and inevitably the quality of cricket will decline still further.
On top of this a quick look at this season's statzone shows that the two newly-promoted sides, HBS and Punjab, have secured their places next season pricipally due to the efforts of their paid overseas players and there are in fact considerably fewer Dutch-produced players under the age of 25 amongst the top 30 run-scorers or wicket-takers this year compared to last season.
The suggestion that the gap in standards between a watered-down Topklasse and the national side can be bridged by the ailing North Sea Pro-Series is likewise unconvincing given that the regional "league" currently comprises just three 50-over matches and a single three-dayer, barely warranting the name competition.
No reason, incidentally, has ever been offered for entirely scrapping the final. Other than nostalgia or sheer reactionary conservatism it's difficult to see any justification for doing away with what has in recent years been a successful and well-attended climax to the season.
In summary then, the new format - by most any criteria - is simply not fit for purpose. It has not mitigated the dominance of player-coaches nor alleviated the pressure to spend money on them. It has not appreciably improved the lot of youth players and shows little promise as an incubator for new home-grown talent. All told, it has precious little to recommend it except for the copious quantity of "thanks for coming" awards on offer, and the rapidity with which they are doled out. And above all, it's boring.
It is of course harder to row back on the decision now than it was to take it, especially as returning to the eight-team format would result in two teams being relegated essentially retroactively. Nonetheless the league in its current form is simply inadequate. It is broken, and needs fixing.
*The model used to generate these probabilities assumes each future match is essentially a coin toss. A more sophisticated model might attept to factor in the relative strengths of teams; e.g. giving the better-performing sides a better than 50% chance of beating lower ranked teams. Any such model would necessarily generate even more brown squares, so the figures shown can be taken as a sort of lower-bound for the abject tedium inflicted on us by this format.