There can be no doubt that in a purely cricketing sense, the decision to introduce play-offs in this year’s Hoofdklasse has been a huge success.

Not only has the battle for semi-final places kept the competition live for most clubs way past the point where the rest of the season would have been pretty much a formality, but the semi-final weekend produced two very good, hard-fought matches and one which will be remembered and talked about for years and years to come.

One of the stated reasons for moving to play-offs, however, was to raise the profile of the sport in The Netherlands, and a review of the Monday morning newspapers suggests that in this respect the initiative has so far been less than overwhelmingly successful.

That’s putting it gently: the truth is that in public relations terms this weekend’s semi-finals registered less than the average coughing fit shows up on the Richter scale.

Even allowing for the Dutch media’s obsession with football, currently in its early season manic phase, and the numerical insignificance of the national cricketing community, the coverage of the first-ever play-offs has been deeply disappointing.

The honourable exception is the Rotterdam-based Algemeen Dagblad, which generally gives more attention to cricket than do most other papers. It previewed the weekend’s matches on Thursday with two articles, one dealing with the play-offs in general and the continuing controversy over the KNCB’s choice of venue for the final, the other centring on the fact that Tim de Leede was about to appear for Voorburg in the semi-final on his very first day in his new job as VOC’s general manager.

We now know, of course, that he found the perfect compromise in this possible dilemma, making 49 and then going out leg-before to complete the tie which led to Sunday’s replay.

Pressure of space on a Monday morning means that the report on the matches, however, only amounts to about eight column inches. On the plus side, the paper gives a lucid account of Xavier Doherty’s last-over hat-trick on Saturday; on the other hand, it describes VRA’s South African coach Ryan Maron as a New Zealander, and fails to note that Peter Borren, who is New Zealand-born, is also a Dutch international.

As for the rest of the papers, there is little cause for satisfaction. Het Parool, based in Amsterdam, devotes ten or so column inches to the games, almost entirely focused on VRA’s win over Quick Haag. Two sentences are enough to announce that their opponents next week will be Voorburg, but there’s no hint of the excitement which surrounded their ‘spectacular’ contest with VOC.

The Monday evening edition of NRC Handelsblad also has a terse but comprehensive six-sentence account of the weekend’s matches, although that is little more than might be expected in a normal week. There’s no sense that what took place this weekend was in any way special.

Even so, that’s more than the rest could manage. There’s no mention of cricket at all in ‘Metropool Sport’, the twelve-page tabloid Amsterdam sports supplement of De Telegraaf, the most genuinely tabloid of all the Dutch dailies (despite the fact that the main paper, notwithstanding its mix of sensationalism and triviality, remains steadfastly broadsheet). Eight of those pages are devoted to football, of course, including a half-page report on a second-division amateur match between Zandvoort and Argon and more than a page of results all the way down to Division 4E, but not a word about VRA’s win over Quick.

There is just one paragraph in De Telegraaf’s main sports section, tucked away on the final page in a box tellingly headed ‘Sport Kort’. It mentions Voorburg’s win over VOC, but without any mention of the amazing events of Saturday. They’re only amazing if you have any interest in, or understanding of, cricket, of course. But those football results, all the way down to Division 4E, are there again.

De Volkskrant, the weightiest of the heavy-duty morning papers, just gives the barest of scores – even by Dutch standards, reporting Saturday’s tie as ‘VOC-VCC both 168 all out’ is like saying that War and Peace has 723 pages. There is no editorial copy at all.

And Trouw managed even less than this, omitting even the scores from its summary, which nevertheless found room for the softball semi-finals and first-round matches in rugby and handball. Oh, and the lotto numbers, which Trouw apparently classifies as sport. No accounting for tastes . . .

The KNCB has done its best, with press releases and updates on its own website, to gain a bit of media attention. It’s hard to know what more, short of bribery or threats of violence, it can do to interest Dutch journalists in a sport in which The Netherlands has an established international reputation.

But it will have to do something. Maybe next weekend, with the first-ever Hoofdklasse final, will be better. But I’m not sure it’ll be worth paying €6.95 to find out.