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Holland win is new blow for England

Holland (195-5) bt Durham (194) by 5 wkts

This was another day of embarrassment for English cricket, as the enthusiastic but largely amateur players of Holland inflicted a grievous blow on Durham at the pretty ground in Amstelveen. After England's miserable failure in the World Cup, the weakest county in the championship could not resist a team that did not qualify for the competition. It is not a happy time to be a follower of the English game.

Led by Roland Lefebvre, who once bowled for Somerset and Glamorgan, Holland were bolstered by two foreigners. Kenny Jackson, from Cape Town, is their overseas player and Roger Bradley, who is from New Zealand, is now technically Dutch by qualification. But it was a home-grown Orangeman, Feiko Kloppenburg, who made the most visible contribution yesterday.

Kloppenburg, 24, took four for 25 on a slow pitch entirely suited to his medium pace and then made 61 in a front-foot manner reminiscent of Northamptonshire's Rob Bailey. When he was run out in the 41st over Holland needed only three an over, a task completed with some relish by Luc van Troost, the elder brother of the Somerset fast bowler, who took three successive boundaries off Stephen Harmison and ended the game with another.

Durham once caused surprises of their own in this competition, beating Yorkshire in 1973 and Derbyshire, 12 years later. Now they are cast as the butt of others' japes, and the realisation hurts. They have won only one game of limited-overs cricket this summer, and that was a World Cup friendly against Scotland, and the margin was all of two runs.

David Boon, who stands down as captain at the end of the season, has never known a day like this. He played 107 Tests for Australia and was the man of the match in their first World Cup final victory, a fact worth recalling in the afterglow of their second. In his three years at the club he has tried to reinforce a young side with some steel. On this evidence, he has failed.

Holland, who will now play Kent on this ground on July 7, should never be taken for granted. They may have lost their previous four matches against county opponents in this competition but they have beaten representative sides from Australia, South Africa, West Indies and, of course, England, who lost here in 1989 and at Haarlem six years ago.

Apart from Lefebvre and Van Troost they have produced a third county bowler, Paul-Jan Bakker of Hampshire. On the matting pitches prevalent in a low-lying land they will always produce more bowlers than free-flowing batsmen. Amstelveen is one of only two clubs in the country which has a grass pitch.

After Durham were put in, Boon, who needed 19 balls to get off the mark, played one of the two significant innings. The other belonged to Martin Speight, who made 60 from as many balls, a little masterpiece of timing on this pitch. The tail submitted to Kloppenburg and the failure to make 20 more runs proved crucial.

The Dutch did not, in fact, start brightly. They lost two wickets inside four overs and it took the following partnership of 74, between Kloppenburg and Jackson, to settle a few nerves. When Jackson was caught at slip, and Tim de Leede clipped one to mid-on, it required another stand, of 75, to carry them into safe water.

Both Kloppenburg and Van Troost hit Nick Phillips, the off-spinner, back over his head for six and the run-out that accounted for Kloppenburg had, for some time, been the most likely mode of dismissal. Van Troost, a powerful left-hander, went on to complete a handsome half century of his own and there were three overs left when he used Harmison's additional pace to nick the winning runs.

Hans Mulder, the manager of the Dutch team, said afterwards: ``Durham are obviously not one of the stronger county teams, so we thought we would have a chance. It's a good day for Dutch cricket because it gives us exposure we don't normally have, and keeps our name before people in England''.