Cricket arrived in the Netherlands in the early nineteenth century, carried by British soldiers passing through during the Napoleonic Wars. The game took root, and by the 1860s it was a major Dutch sport. The first national team played in 1881, fielding 22 players against an Uxbridge Cricket Club XI and still losing by an innings. The Dutch Cricket Union formed in 1890 with 18 founding clubs, four of which still play today. Then came an accident of history. During World War One, in which the Netherlands remained neutral, large numbers of British officers were interned in the country - confined under treaty obligations but not imprisoned. Many joined Dutch clubs. A team made up entirely of these interned British officers won the Dutch national championship in 1918. The Dutch had to wait out the war to get their league back.

An English touring team visited the Netherlands in 1891 with an unusual ringer. Arthur Conan Doyle, then on the cusp of fame for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was on the squad. He was a useful bowler and a passable batsman who later played first-class cricket for the MCC, recording one wicket: that of W.G. Grace, the most famous cricketer in the world. There is no record of how he fared against the Dutch. There is only the fact of his presence: the man who would invent the consulting detective and kill him off and revive him, bowling on a polder pitch outside Amsterdam in the long evening light of a Dutch summer. The 1890s belonged to English tours. Out of those years emerged Carst Posthuma, the first Dutch player to play first-class cricket, who turned out five times for London County Cricket Club in 1903.

Today the Netherlands has roughly 6,000 cricketers, a tiny number compared to India's or Pakistan's millions, but the team has made a habit of selective destruction. They beat England again at the 2014 World Twenty20 in Chittagong, completing the round-robin with a victory that knocked the home team's pride further into the dust. At the 2023 Cricket World Cup in India, the Dutch beat South Africa - one of cricket's traditional powers - in what commentators called one of the biggest upsets in World Cup history. It was the second time they had done so. They had beaten the Proteas already at the 2022 T20 World Cup. The Netherlands won the ICC Trophy in Canada in 2001 and finished runner-up three times, in 1986, 1990 and 2023. They have qualified for five Cricket World Cups. They keep falling out of full ODI status and clawing it back.

The team plays its home matches at grounds that look unmistakably Dutch: the VRA Cricket Ground in Amstelveen, the Sportpark Het Schootsveld in Deventer, the Hazelaarweg in Rotterdam. Many of these pitches sit on reclaimed land, the boundary rope drawn across former polder, the outfield held in place by the same drainage engineering that keeps half the country dry. Coach Ryan Cook and captain Scott Edwards lead a squad whose marquee names include all-rounder Bas de Leede, son of former international Tim de Leede, and opener Max O'Dowd, who scored an unbeaten 158 against Scotland in June 2025 to set the team's individual ODI record. Several Dutch cricketers have built careers in English county cricket - Ryan ten Doeschate at Essex, Bas Zuiderent at Sussex, Paul-Jan Bakker at Hampshire from 1986 to 1992. Dirk Nannes, born in Australia of Dutch heritage, played T20 cricket for both countries and made his name in the IPL before retirement. The team that started as 22 Dutchmen losing to an Uxbridge XI now occasionally embarrasses the great cricket nations on their own turf.