Amsterdam has a professional cricket team for the first time, and the people behind it are not who you would expect.
The Amsterdam Flames are one of six franchises in the new European T20 Premier League, which begins on 26 August.
The team is co-owned by Steve Waugh, the former Australia captain and two-time world champion, and Jamie Dwyer, five times world hockey player of the year.
Between them they have more or less every trophy their sports offer.
What brought them to Amsterdam is a bet that European cricket is about to grow very quickly.
Why Amsterdam
Dwyer did not have to think about it.
He played for Bloemendaal, lived in Amsterdam, married a Dutch woman and had his children here.
When he was asked whether he wanted to buy a European cricket team in Belfast, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam or Rotterdam, he says he answered immediately.
It was Amsterdam.
The third name in the ownership group is Suresh Raina, one of the most successful batters in the history of the Indian Premier League.
His wife worked as a banker in Amsterdam, and he owns the restaurant Raina in Bos en Lommer.
Raina has 27 million followers on Instagram.
That is around nine million more than Max Verstappen.
The squad
The seventeen-man squad mixes genuine international stars with the core of the Dutch national team.
Mitchell Marsh, Steve Smith and Tim David lead the overseas contingent, alongside New Zealand’s Michael Bracewell, Ireland’s Curtis Campher and the English seamers David Payne and Richard Gleeson.
The Dutch group is the part that matters locally.
Scott Edwards, the Netherlands captain, is joined by Bas de Leede, Max O’Dowd, Aryan Dutt and Kyle Klein.
That is not decoration.
Every ETPL team has to field five homegrown players in its eleven, so the Dutch contingent will be on the pitch, not on the bench.
The rest of the squad is Yuvraj Samra, Ali Hassan, Dipendra Singh Airee, Tim Pringle and Jordan Neill.
Ryan Cook is head coach, with JP Duminy and John Davison assisting.
Where the matches are actually played
This is the part worth knowing before you plan an evening out.
Despite the name, the Flames do not play in Amsterdam.
The first fifteen league matches are at Voorburg Cricket Club in The Hague, roughly fifty minutes away by train.
The tournament then moves to Malahide in Dublin for the remaining fixtures, the qualifier and the final.
The opening match is Rotterdam Dockers against Amsterdam Flames on 26 August.
The season runs for twenty-six days.
How the league works
Six teams represent Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
Each plays every other team twice.
The side finishing top of the table goes straight to the final.
Second and third meet in a qualifier for the other place.
What it is really for
T20 is the short, fast version of cricket, and it is where the money and the audiences have gone since the Indian Premier League launched in 2007.
Waugh’s argument is that Europe, England aside, is the last part of the map without a serious T20 competition.
His second argument is about the Dutch specifically.
He describes Dutch players as big, strong, athletic and fast, and says the country is built for the format.
The stated ambition is talent development rather than a one-off spectacle.
Dwyer has said he wants a young Dutch player to reach the Indian Premier League within five years.
Whether that happens is another matter.
But a squad in which five Dutch internationals spend four weeks in a dressing room with Steve Smith and Mitchell Marsh is a reasonable place to start.
If you want to go
The opener is on 26 August at Voorburg Cricket Club, and trains to The Hague run several times an hour from Amsterdam Centraal.
The full fixture list is on the club’s own fixtures page.
Cricket is also now an Olympic sport again, which is part of why this is being taken seriously.
For a city that has never had a professional team in the game, it is a strange and rather good place to start.