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Netherlands players and staff have a team huddle on the pitch after the came. Photo: Matthew Lewis-ICC\/ICC via Getty Images<\/p>\nIt was no Kansas City nor was it Hamburg, but Bristol turned orange on Thursday evening for the first-ever fan march to a cricket match.<\/p>\n
The 50-odd Dutch supporters were unmissable, clad in their bright orange football and cricket jerseys turning heads of the locals as they snaked their way from the harbourside to the Bristol County Ground on Nevil Road \u2013 two miles away \u2013 on an extremely hot day.<\/p>\n
An orange inflatable bus bopped to the sounds of \u201cLinks Rechts\u201d as the fans swayed to the beat on the Castle Bridge. Ten minutes later, they broke into a Conga-line formation, dancing to Het is een Nacht. The Dutch love a party and they were in full swing ahead of the evening game against South Africa at the women\u2019s T20 World Cup.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got a big house and there\u2019s eight of us staying together. We talked about mimicking the Oranje fan march from somewhere to the stadium. It\u2019s a nod to the footballing tradition,\u201d explained Canada-born, Bristolian Kirk Luciw, who spent five seasons at Voorburg Cricket Club.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen we got the idea of painting an orange bus. We needed some more people so it got posted around on socials and more people joined us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c[Dutch captain] Babette\u2019s from our club so we have to come support her. We thought let\u2019s have a party for three days and flew in from Holland this morning,\u201d said Harold Vogelaar, a digital marketeer from the Hague who also plays for Voorburg, got the club to post about the first-ever fan march and the word spread.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was expecting only 10-20 people but that\u2019s obviously gone up now!\u201d laughed Kirk.<\/p>\n
Around him, Logan van Beek, the Dutch men\u2019s all-rounder, is up on a bench conducting the colourful crowd in his ODI kit. Fresh off a stint with Yorkshire, he has been drafted by the ICC\u2019s content team and has kept a crowd of 50 engaged.<\/p>\n
One of the loudest members of the fan march throughout was Carlijn van Koolwijk, the 19-year-old Dutch batter who missed out on a World Cup berth: \u201cI fell out of the squad but if I can\u2019t play, this is the second-best thing I can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The orange army was founded in late 2015 by Hester Rijke, all-rounder Robine\u2019s mother, and has travelled regularly with the men\u2019s and women\u2019s team to India, Nepal and Thailand over the years.<\/p>\n
Netherlands players and staff have a team huddle on the pitch after the came. Photo: Matthew Lewis-ICC\/ICC via Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cBack in the Netherlands, there are only about 250 women\u2019s players. Some of us family members travelled with the team,\u201d explained Hester. \u201cWe were such a minority so I started bringing flags to the cricket and slowly others joined me. All the parents started bringing stuff and we just went. Now it\u2019s a large army!<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very emotional. Last year we lost Babette\u2019s mother. It was a massive loss for their family but also for us because we travelled together for many years. I miss her. We hope that they [the women\u2019s team] do very well, we support them no matter what,\u201d she added before joining another batch of supporters on Gloucester Road.<\/p>\n
The numbers swelled at the ground on a difficult night for the Dutch, who gave a good account of themselves in parts but could not hold off a dominant South African side, led by Tazmin Brits\u2019 unbeaten 114, succumbing to an 88-run loss.<\/p>\n
Coolest supporters<\/p>\n
The support didn\u2019t go unnoticed in the South African camp as Brits singled out the Dutch as \u201cprobably the coolest supporters I\u2019ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been phenomenal. It\u2019s made the tournament for us,\u201d said the Dutch head coach Neil MacRae at the post-match press conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe drove up to the stadium today and the fans were marching with flags and banners, rubber dinghies, anything they could carry that was orange. And for the players to know that they\u2019ve got that support behind them has been a huge thing throughout the last two years of qualification.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re hoping that half the Netherlands will come on Saturday and support us, and that\u2019ll give us the final push in this tournament.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was no Kansas City nor was it Hamburg, but Bristol turned orange on Thursday evening for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-761296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}