There’s an old saying that a door never closes without another one opening.

Sometimes it seems as if in Dutch cricket that works in reverse.

Hard on the heels of the encouraging news that clubs in Voorburg and Schiedam are on course to develop turf squares in time for the 2009 season comes a serious threat to The Netherlands’ oldest such facility, at the ground of Koninklijk UD in Deventer.

Founded in 1875 and the oldest surviving sports club in the country, Kon. UD was a Hoofdklasse club when it acquired two grass squares at its new Schootsveld ground in 1996, but it was finally relegated from the top flight in 2000.

The unique feature of two such facilities in one complex has made it an attractive venue for European tournaments, however, and despite Deventer’s somewhat isolated location outside cricket’s powerbase in the west of the country, it has been regularly used for international matches.

This year, for example, it was the venue for both the Women’s European Championship and the Under-15 Division 1 tournament. And the No. 1 ground has a special place in Dutch cricket history: in 2004 it became the country’s first first-class venue when Ireland played The Netherlands there in the Intercontinental Cup.

But at a local level all has not been well. Arguments over the funding of the ground led to a split in the club in 2000, and the first team sank rapidly through the divisions. By 2004 they were able to field just one senior team, which struggled in the lower reaches of Division 3D. This year, while a lot of effort was still being put into junior cricket, Kon. UD was unable to field a senior side at all.

In 2005 a new club, Salland CC, was started by a group of former members of UD, and in an arrangement brokered by the KNCB’s Accommodation Committee they have been playing on the No. 2 ground at Het Schootsveld. Members of the two clubs worked side by side on the grounds for the European tournaments, but the long-standing feud has continued to poison the atmosphere.

Now there is a proposal to suspend or dissolve the UD’s cricket section, while the local authority, looking to ‘rationalise’ sports accommodation in the city, has plans to convert both grounds to artificial football pitches. That would mean the loss of one of the most outstanding cricket facilities in the country.

Understandably, the KNCB has been alarmed at this prospect, and is working behind the scenes to prevent it coming into effect. So is Salland CC.

Salland’s chairman, Ruben Weijl, who was one of the architects of the facility back in the mid-1990s, is unhappy that the plans were already far advanced before his club got to hear of them.

‘But now we have made clear to the city council that we want to be involved in their review of sports provision,’ he says, ‘and we will be fighting, along with the KNCB, to preserve the existing facilities at Het Schootsveld.

‘We still love cricket, and want to support the game. The survival of cricket in Deventer is much too important to allow the problems of the past to get in the way.’

Salland has ambitious plans for the development of youth cricket in the Deventer region, and Weijl is annoyed that the issue of the possible destruction of the Schootsveld squares is a distraction from that project.

He is looking to the KNCB to make strong representations to the Deventer council to ensure that the existing grounds are preserved.

‘Deventer, NOC/NSF [the agency which supervises and funds Dutch sport] and the KNCB have all invested heavily in these facilities,’ Weijl says, ‘and it would be crazy to throw them away.’

Not only has Het Schootsveld been used for European tournaments every season since 1999, but the threat to cricket in Deventer runs counter to the Bond’s emerging plans to reverse the contraction of cricket to the so-called ‘Randstad’ – the group of linked urban centres which includes Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam and Utrecht.

One possible way forward would be for Salland to merge with Kon. UD, effectively becoming its cricket section, but it may be that the tangled history of the past decade is too painful to make that practicable.

But the situation is a powerful reminder, if one were needed, of what a fragile plant Dutch cricket is, and how vulnerable it can be to the winds of change in the politico-sporting environment.