How Netherlands Women returned to the World Cup after 26 years

On January 28 this year, Helmien Rambaldo, a 45-year-old university professor, was in front of her computer screen nervously pressing the refresh button on repeat. Far from the cloudy skies of Kirtipur in Nepal, she had kept a tab on the DLS numbers at play in the game between USA and Netherlands, which had come to a halt due to rain, with the latter needing 39 runs off the last eight overs. With eight wickets in hand, the victory should have been a cruise. But it was also a must.

Apart from the fact that Rambaldo had coached several players in the squad since their early teen years, there were more reasons for her to be nervous: for several years, she had experienced the feeling of the national team just falling short of the finish line, and in that, Netherlands women's cricket falling off from being one of the better teams in the world, often coming second-best against teams that were nowhere in the international scene. Rambaldo has lived through that journey - while also being witness to the past and the present, now serving as the assistant coach of the national team at the 2026 T20 World Cup.

As a 20-year-old, Rambaldo was a part of the last Netherlands side to participate in a World Cup - the 2000 edition - having qualified as one of the top eight teams in the world. It was their fourth successive entry to the world event, having also featured in the three previous editions - 1988, 1993 and the 1997 . And then, as Rambaldo entered her journey in top-flight cricket, Netherlands kept dropping off from the rung.

That origin story of the question is from the qualifier tournament for the 2014 World Cup, when Netherlands fell two runs short of Ireland's total. Rambaldo had batted through all of those 20 overs in the 137-run chase. She tries to connect the dots, and there is one answer that sketches itself out to her: a full delivery from Ireland's Isobel Joyce in the 17th over, to which she offered no shot whatsoever. "When the fuse goes off in the socket - I felt like that in my mind."

Rambaldo made up for her moment of brainfade by cutting and pulling Joyce for a couple of boundaries in her next over. But by the end, it wasn't in her hands. "(With four runs needed) I was at the non-striking end off the last ball, and it was devastating. That is one game in my head that I still replay. I ask myself: 'Where were those three runs'. We were literally playing for a World Cup ticket. We could have gone for the 2014 T20 World Cup."

Netherlands may have missed out on a World Cup berth by a whisker in 2013, but it wasn't the first time. The chips were coming off repeatedly. In 2003, they finished third in the first ever World Cup qualifiers - with only the first two teams making it to the main event held in 2005. Eight years later, Rambaldo was at the helm of the team when everything came apart in 2011. They finished sixth in the qualifiers for the 2013 50-over World Cup.

"I had been to a World Cup before, I had played other tournaments. In terms of quality or fitness, it was the best Netherlands women's team I was ever a part of. We were the best prepared we had ever been. And we lost our ODI status.

"That was a big realisation. It just meant that the rest of the world had gotten so much better, and invested so much more in women's cricket. We also got better, but the rest just overtook us. I remember, Bangladesh came out of nowhere. They were so strong. They had invested, not just money, but so much time in their players - and they overtook us.

"In my career, that was the most difficult moment. I was still leading the squad. We were top of what we could be. And then suddenly, we lost everything. The only thing we got at home was we were punished for losing our ODI status. We lost funding, etc. It just didn't match with our feeling - because we felt that we were a better team than we were in the years when we had more opportunities. For me, it was very strange."

While several teams that Helmien points out benefited from access to larger funds and facilities following the merger of the men's and the women's boards, for Netherlands, that move proved counter-productive. Matches organised by the women's bodies against higher-ranked teams were reduced, while those who were Full Members of ICC got more opportunities against each other. The pace of growth between teams of the ICC member boards and the associates were drastic, especially in the decade following the merger in the mid-2000s.

While Netherlands' return to the World Cups - despite such disparity of financial muscle and quality game time and less than 300 women involved in the sport - is a fair reason for celebration, it is also interesting how a team with such a rich legacy in women's cricket fall so behind in the competition.

Ingrid van der Elst has crossed into her 70s. She gave up her career in hockey, a sport in which she represented the national team as a goalkeeper, and many decades later, retired from her life as a sports writer. But she continues to play cricket - as part of the Still Going Strong club, a club meant for 'older people' where she is the only woman, but also for the women's league for the Kampong Cricket Club in Utrecht. "Playing alongside younger players makes her feel younger," she laughs.

Ingrid has been part of Netherlands' cricket community for the past 59 years, since the 1960s, when women's cricket in the country was witnessing an unusual dip. She is now a part of the small community of cricket lovers who have kept the sport alive in the country.

For all these decades, the sport's popularity has sustained within a limited circle, largely in cities like Hague and Amsterdam. It has involved someone in the family moving abroad - like UK, Australia or New Zealand for studies, and bringing the sport back to the country, and playing with their family members. But outside of that circle, whether it was Ingrid in the 1960s or Babette de Leede in 2026, they are stuck to explaining why 'cricket' is neither a board game nor a sport involving horses.

It was not always so; cricket has had a reasonably rich legacy in the Netherlands. The massive swell in the cricket clubs in the country began in the late 19th century. In fact, many of the clubs, especially in Hague and Rotterdam that now serve purely as football clubs, were formed as cricket and football clubs, with the football season going on till April, and cricket being played in the summer months till August. In the book Skirting the Boundary, Isabelle Duncan claims 'a number of exclusive clubs existed with restricted membership, and they often adopted their own quirky rules which did not resemble those of the MCC - for example, one club felt it unfair to score runs behind the wicket!'

Women started playing cricket in the 1930s, and even hosted a touring Australian side in 1937. Several tours with the English team followed in the post-War decades, and Netherlands became one of the earliest members of the International Women's Cricket Council. After a brief lull, it rose to popularity again from the mid-1970s. Ingrid even featured in the 1982 World Cup, as part of a team called International XI, featuring the best of the players from around the world.

They imported their heroes. Some did by watching cricket matches on BBC. Some did through stories. A fair few coaches through the 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands, were from the West Indian and South African cricketers. They would fill them in with stories of their national heroes.

By 1990, there were about 40-odd women's teams in the country, with four divisions in the league. There were many people playing the sport even when facilities were limited. For Rambaldo's generation, they would often train in school halls, once every Saturday, after rolling out their mats on gym floors, with shared cricket kits.

Elise Reynolds, who featured in two World Cups - 1997 and 2000 - has her own experience to add. "The biggest shock when I started playing against the big teams was that in Holland I was a feared bowler. In the World Cup I wasn't. I had a bit of speed and swing, but experienced players had no trouble with that.

"I'm very much a part of the non-trained generation of cricketers. I had no idea what I was doing. I would just come in and try to bowl fast, try to knock over the stumps. The other teams really strategically tried to intimidate the batters with the field positions. I was a very good bowler because I was very powerful. But I was never strategic. We didn't have that kind of knowledge."

Both Reynolds and Rambaldo have maintained scrap books of their cricketing tours, which remind them of their playing days. "My kids love it - they go and tell their English friends that their mother played cricket for Netherlands. We didn't achieve a great deal of things, but whatever we did, was special," Reynolds says sharing a photo from a game against India in the 1997 World Cup, where a massive crowd broke past the boundary and entered the ground in celebration of the team's win.

For Reynolds, watching fast bowlers on television enamoured her - not as much for what the players did with the ball, but the beauty of their motion. She is currently painting one of the figures who inspired her - Cathryn Fitzpatrick. "She had a beautiful bowling action. She was like a Cheetah. So fast and so elegant. The speed, the power, she made it look effortless," Reynolds gushes.

It's through their actions that she remembers cricketers. If the action is not appealing enough, chances are that their cricketing feats won't matter - neither does she recall Debbie Hockley nor does she know Jasprit Bumrah. "Waqar Younis was my hero," she says.

But away from her paintings and job as a translator, she has little time to catch up on the matches. She retired from the sport in 2002, and looking back at her older photos, it feels like it's from a different lifetime. Her memories from that World Cup are limited - but one stands out: getting a nick off Belinda Clark's bat in the first over of a match, even though the catch was dropped. "I'm sure I got a nick off her first ball," Reynolds insists with a laugh. "That's the lasting memory because I was disappointed. But I got a nick off Belinda Clark. Just that it's not in the books."

More than a decade after her retirement from the sport, her services were once requested by the national cricket board, and she was keen on it, until she learnt the state women's cricket had dropped to. "I found out there were only 8 teams in the whole country. It was so shocking. That was crazy. When I started there were so many girls playing - even though my club (VRA Amsterdam) said no girls could play, before they opened it up for us in 1983."

In saying so, she also has a possible reason for why the interest in cricket came down drastically in the Netherlands through the 2000s. "I know why I stopped. And maybe that's true for most people. I had children. Cricket takes a lot of time.

"Moreover, people have less time now. They want to play padel for 30 minutes and be done. You ask - do you want to play your entire Saturday on the field - and they will say 'no'. Times are different and cricket has responded."

With lesser time, even sports started taking the shape of a professional pursuit more than just a recreational hobby. "That's why maybe my children are not playing. It was a lot of pressure, it wasn't very fun. When I was playing, it was all about throwing balls at each other all day, and we couldn't get enough of it."

Rambaldo points towards another key factor that explains why the interest in cricket dwindled from the mid-2000s. "Back then, the BBC would air the cricket matches and everyone could access it. After that, when Sky Sports took over, we couldn't access cricket anymore. That's also a big change. Now you have to actively search for cricket if you have to watch it."

"The way I understood it was that the World Cup, which had 11 teams in 1997 was shrunk to eight teams for 2005. We couldn't even compete if we weren't among the top teams. It's 12 teams now and we are in again. As simple as that."

Rambaldo adds to that. "In 2008, we played a tournament involving teams like Pakistan and South Africa in Potchefstroom. We were playing these middle teams back then, and those tournaments were so beneficial. Now you're playing qualifiers, and you go to the next tournament and you're always at the bottom. Playing tournaments against these teams used to be so beneficial."

Given that perspective, it's easy to understand think Netherlands' cricket has not lost out on its global standing enormously even if the gulf between the haves and the have-nots in world cricket has widened. The challenge though is that the numbers at home are decreasing. But the community is still keeping it alive. "Even though it's a small world of cricket in Netherlands, it's a passionate world," Reynolds claims.

"The league is so small, everyone knows each other. So they aren't star-struck," Rambaldo says. " But now that they are at the world cup, maybe they will be seen as stars in a different way."

Rambaldo has joined the squad in England as assistant coach, and she is nervous again. But also proud. Despite everything that hasn't gone their way, they've persevered. "It's very strange. In a way, I'm excited to go to the World Cup. But I don't even know what it's going to be like, what to expect. You have some ideas, but you don't know what it's like.

"This group has been together for quite a while now. I've seen many of these players since they were 13 or 14 (while working as the coach of the age-group teams). It always felt like we were always so close but never managed to cross the finish line. It's been really nice to see them qualify for this world cup. This is a big reward to everyone. This World Cup is going to be tough. But to give themselves this opportunity to play at this level, they deserve it."

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