Now four months into his job as Interim CEO of the Dutch governing body, the KNCB, Lucas Hendrikse has clear ideas about where he wants to take an organisation which is slowly recovering from a tempestuous few years.
Brought in to replace CEO Monica Visser, who took long-term sick leave late last year, Hendrikse has one great advantage over his immediate predecessors: he comes from a cricketing background.
He played for Quick Haag in the 1980s, claiming 59 wickets in his 42 top-flight matches at an average of 23.73 and helping them take the national men’s championship in 1986.
He has also had a long and successful business career, working as a senior executive with pharmaceutical and food company DSM before becoming a non-executive director and management consultant for a range of concerns.
Given that he would be the KNCB’s fifth chief executive in seven years, did he have doubts about taking on the job when he was approached by chairman and clubmate at Quick, Guido Landheer?
‘I didn’t really think twice,’ he chuckles, ‘because it was cricket.
‘I love the game, and I had already been involved informally last summer in discussing the problems the KNCB was facing. So I had ideas about what needed to be done, and knew that above all we needed peace in the organisation.’
Hendrikse’s first priority on taking over was to create more effective financial control over a body which was enjoying considerable success on the field but which was struggling to balance its budget.
‘There were no effective financial processes,’ he says; ‘the financial reporting was not used sufficiently, and there were problems of overspend.
‘So one of the first things I did was to set up a monthly management team meeting to review our spending and ensure that we stayed within our budget.’
He also had the task of preparing a budget for 2025 which would be accepted by the general meeting in April, and this he was able to achieve, with a planned deficit for the year of €179k.
‘It’s not a perfect budget,’ he admits, ‘but there are commitments you have to meet, like paying the players and subsidising the clubs with turf wickets, which we need for our summer programmes.’
The KNCB had to introduce swinging cuts last year after the collapse of key sponsorship deals, resulting in a near-halving of its allocation for development, significant reductions in its staff and marketing budget, and reductions in payments to players.
‘We depend very heavily on grant income from the ICC,’ Hendrikse points out, ‘and the way the grants work means that we have to keep investing in high performance or our income will take a big hit.
‘We have to go on qualifying for World Cups, ideally for the women as well as the men, in order to ensure that we still have the resources we need.
‘It’s a vicious circle: there isn’t really enough money for us to achieve our ambitions, but if we don’t keep performing on the field as well as growing the game domestically we won’t have enough money to do either.’
Hendrikse acknowledges that in the short term the KNCB will need to find additional sources of income, primarily through sponsorship, although that has been a recurring headache for the Board and its CEOs for decades.
‘It’s a great pity,’ he says, ‘that we were unable to monetise our qualification for World Cups in 2023-24, and it’s an area where we have to do better in future.
‘Major sponsorships around our national teams means looking to Asia, where there is the greatest passion for cricket, but we can also make more use of our networks within the Netherlands to build partnerships around the domestic game.
‘We are truly at a crossroads: either we find ways of generating more income or we will have to cut back on our ambitions, and that would be very bad for Dutch cricket.’
Despite the financial challenges the KNCB, like the governing bodies of many other Associates, faces, Hendrikse remains positive about the future of the game.
After a period of decline since his playing days in the 1980s, cricket has again begun to grow, albeit painfully slowly, and the two-thirds reduction in the numbers of native Dutch players has been compensated for to a considerable extent by a meteoric increase in the numbers of (chiefly male) cricketers of Asian origin.
‘I welcome the ‘Asianisation’ of Dutch cricket,’ Hendrikse says, ‘because it has massively increased our talent pool, and we see the result not only in the presence in the men’s national team of players like Vikram Singh, Aryan Dutt and Shariz Ahmad, but also in the large proportion of boys with Asian backgrounds in our Lions programme.
‘At the same time, we need to keep investing in broader growth of cricket to keep the sport as diverse as possible.
‘I would like to see a similar pattern in the women’s game, although we recognise that there are cultural reasons why this is more difficult to achieve. But growing women’s cricket generally has to be one of our top priorities.’
Hendrikse believes that in the end growing the game has to be the responsibility of the clubs, with the KNCB’s central organisation in the role of facilitator and motivator.
‘We need to be more inventive in creating a toolbox of supports for initiatives by the clubs,’ he says, ‘finding new ways to bring people into the game and helping them develop.
‘We know it’s difficult and we don’t have a magic wand, but we should be looking to introduce more soft-ball cricket and new formats to make the game accessible to newcomers.
‘It’s a waste of effort if the KNCB runs an introductory clinic and there is no follow-up from clubs to sign up and develop those who are interested.’
At a global level, Hendrikse is broadly positive about the recently-published World Cricketers’ Association report on the future of the game, although he is sceptical that it will be taken up and implemented by the ICC.
‘It’s obvious that there ought to be a fairer spread of ICC revenue among the members,’ he observes, ‘but there’s no sign that the BCCI will be prepared to accept a smaller share.
‘We saw during the Super League that it’s virtually impossible to break even on matches against Full Members, with the exception of England when we can attract the Barmy Army, and in the absence of competition structures like that finding games against the Full Members is virtually impossible anyway.
‘But creating a balance between national team commitments and the franchise leagues is essential, and if the star players are able to earn more that will eventually trickle down to the leading Associates players as well.’
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