Netherlands did improve their batting but honestly, it is absolutely nothing in front of England. England reached the target of 245 in just 30 overs. All knew that this was not going to be a fair competition, to be honest. But it was good to see that Netherlands at least tried to give a competition to England. I have to say as an associate country they did really well. They could not win a single match but their performance was quite good.
Netherlands is a big zero, if they play without their premium bowlers such as Timm vd Gugten and Paul van Meekeren. For the last match, Paul van Meekeren was included in the playing XI and he made an immediate impact by getting out Phil Salt and Dawid Malan. Unfortunately he didn't got any support from the other bowlers (Logan van Beek and the spinners). That said, Gloucestershire is not very happy that van Meekern chose to represent the Netherlands when the county championship is going on. I have a feeling that if players such as van der Gugten and van der Merwe (Roloef) were available, then the Dutch could have been much more competitive.
I don't know if Netherlands could have won even at least one match in this series but I think the results could have been different if they had all the players available for them. And I think they could have restricted the England team to at least under 350 runs.
You cannot expect a team to suddenly start performing well. Netherland were playing against England and in the past they have defeated the English side but that was a different format and a different team. At the moment they need more such games to improve themselves. I skipped all the matches as I knew there would hardly be any excitement watching them play.
The only excitement that was in the series was actually if England was going to hit the 500 runs mark or not. It was really one-sided and not surprising at all. Netherlands is already a weak team and they also did not have a lot of important players available for them.
Netherlands is one among the best team performing good, positioned on the bottom. These teams require regular matches versus the leading teams. This is how these teams can improve their performance. Throughout this series it looks like England is on an aggressive move. Because, in the first ODI England players were chasing the target of 500 runs. In the third ODI, the target of 244 runs were reached in 30 overs. On the other side Netherlands have got consistent performance, because in every game it managed to score around 250 runs.
It was a small ground and the curator went for a very flat surface. On top of that, the England bowling line-up was mostly comprised of their second-string players, such as David Payne, David Willey and Brydon Carse. If their regular bowlers such as Mark Wood, Chris Woakes and Jamie Overton were included in the squad, then I really doubt whether the Dutch would have got this far. Overall this was a very disappointing series for the Netherlands. I couldn't find any positives at all. They chose a young squad this time, and things didn't went well for them.
Well, that is also true and in that case, we honestly cannot say that the Netherlands have played well. But considering that they don't play cricket regularly as the top-level teams I think they have done a decent job at least with the bat. And the same thing goes for their bowling. They are not a great team and on a flat pitch, it was expected from them.
