The Netherlands is not where you expect to find first-class cricket. The national obsession is football, and the second tier belongs to cycling, speed skating, korfball, anything that involves either a ball at your feet or a bike under you. Yet here at Het Schootsveld, the home of the Salland Cricket Club on the outskirts of Deventer, the long Dutch summer has been measured in overs since at least 1975, when Danish side Dansk XL Club came over to face The Forty Club in the ground's first recorded match. Cricket arrived in the Netherlands with British residents in the nineteenth century and has been quietly persisting ever since, never quite breaking through but never quite going away either.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, Het Schootsveld kept punching above its weight. The Dutch national team brought four matches of the 1990 ICC Trophy here. In 1999 it hosted its first List A match - the Netherlands against Cambridgeshire in the NatWest Trophy - and in 2004 its first proper first-class fixture, when Ireland came to town for the ICC Intercontinental Cup. Scotland followed in 2009-10, Kenya in 2011-13. None of these are headline contests in world cricket. They are exactly the kind of fixtures that keep an associate-nation game alive: visiting sides, modest crowds, a pavilion bar that closes when the last over is bowled.

Then came the 2018 Netherlands Tri-Nation Series. Scotland and Ireland, two of cricket's great underdog stories, met at Het Schootsveld for a T20 international. Paul Stirling hit 81 for Ireland. The scores finished level. Under the ICC's updated playing conditions, brought in the previous September, a Super Over was now mandatory in tied T20I matches. But the captains and umpires had been told before the toss that there would not be one - a holdover from older protocols nobody had thought to revise for this particular game. Both teams shook hands on the tie and went home. Two days later the ICC issued a formal apology. It became the tenth T20I in history to end tied, and the only one since the new rules to escape a Super Over.

Cricket grounds are usually remembered for centuries or collapses, for one batter's hour in the sun. Het Schootsveld is remembered for an administrative error nobody wanted. That feels harsh, because the ground continues to do what small cricket venues everywhere do: hosting local league fixtures for Salland CC, taking the occasional national-side booking, letting the Dutch summer pass slowly across an unfussy outfield. Koninklijke UD has used the ground too. On a quiet weekday afternoon, with the IJssel only a few kilometres west and the Bergkerk's twin towers visible across the rooftops of Deventer, it is as good a place as any to spend a few hours watching a slow game in a country that mostly prefers fast ones.