It was a summer’s day in The Hague, August 1964, when cricket briefly shifted on its axis.

The Australians, bronzed and victorious from the Ashes, wandered into Houtrust for an exhibition game. While the Aussies came with their Ashes crowns and their airs of invincibility. They left humbled, their swagger punctured not by titans of the game but by men whose names belonged more to the parish than the pavilion.

Australia were dismissed for 197 by amateur Dutch bowlers. Ben Trijzelaar (3-41), Wandert Pierhagen (3-75) and Ernst Vriens (2-53) all contributed, while Jack Potter was hit on the head by Trijzelaar, taking no further part in the game. The Australians made 197. And then the Dutch, ordinary men with extraordinary hearts, chased it down.

As Debjit Lahri recounts in his Cricket Chronicles of Greater Europe, Piet Marseille’s strokes, young Pim van der Vegt’s courage, and Rudi Onstein’s sixes turned Houtrust into a theatre of the improbable. A feat that was witnessed by a crowd of 15,000, who did not simply cheer; they roared as if to announce that cricket, too, could belong here, in the land of canals and bicycles.

It was part absurdity, part folklore, but also an early sign that cricket’s boundaries could stretch beyond the empire’s map. That win in Hague might have been dismissed as a fluke. However, flukes don’t keep happening. Instead that win became a seed possibility that blossomed into a legacy of defiance.

In Peshawar 1996, the Dutch pressed England close under the shadows of the Hindu Kush. In London 2009, they danced beneath the floodlights of Lord’s, beating England on the opening night of the World T20, as if to remind cricket’s ancestral home that the game’s soul is not bound by geography. In Sylhet 2014, they blazed through 190 in 14 overs to complete arguably the greatest chase, before felling England once more.