ETPL 2026 Venues: Inside Voorburg Cricket Club and Malahide, the Two Grounds Hosting Europe’s New League

The inaugural ETPL season doesn’t have one home ground — it has two, six hundred miles apart. The first half of the tournament plays out at Voorburg Cricket Club in the Netherlands, before the whole league packs up and moves to Malahide Cricket Ground on the outskirts of Dublin for the run-in and the knockouts. Here’s what each ground actually is, the cricket history behind them, and why the league chose to split its opening season across two countries instead of settling on one.

Voorburg Cricket Club, The Hague

Voorburg Cricket Club was founded on 1 June 1932, making it one of the older cricket institutions in the Netherlands. The club has played in the country’s national premier league (the Topklasse) almost continuously since 1990, and won the Dutch national championship for the first time in 2002. Today it’s one of the largest cricket clubs in the country, running six senior sides, three youth teams, and a women’s team.

The club plays its home matches at Sportpark Westvliet, a multi-sport complex it moved into in 2006 after previously being based at Sportpark Duivesteijn. The ground has genuine international pedigree — it’s hosted Netherlands T20Is and ODIs, including fixtures within the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup League 2 structure, and international matches going back to Netherlands vs Afghanistan warm-up fixtures in 2010. Voorburg has also produced Dutch internationals over the decades, including record cap-holder Tim de Leede.

For ETPL 2026, Voorburg Cricket Club hosts the tournament opener — Rotterdam Dockers vs Amsterdam Flames on 26 August — and continues to stage matches through 6 September, covering the opening 17 fixtures of the season.

Malahide Cricket Ground, Dublin

Malahide’s cricket roots go back even further — the club was founded in 1861 by the 5th Baron Talbot of Malahide, Richard Wogan Talbot, who first laid out a pitch on the grounds of Malahide Castle. The ground itself, known locally as “The Village,” sits inside the historic Malahide Castle demesne in North County Dublin.

It took over a century for major cricket to arrive at the ground — the first notable match was a first-class fixture between Ireland and Scotland in 1991. Everything changed in September 2013, when the ICC cleared Malahide to host international cricket. Its first international match came just weeks later, Ireland vs England, memorable for England captain Eoin Morgan scoring 124 not out on the ground where he’d grown up playing. That match also set a record attendance for the island of Ireland of over 10,000 spectators.

Since then, Malahide has become the closest thing Irish cricket has to a national stadium. With temporary grandstands and hospitality tents, capacity expands to around 11,500 — comfortably the biggest cricket venue in Ireland. It hosted Ireland’s first-ever men’s Test match, against Pakistan in May 2018, and has continued staging Ireland’s international fixtures across all three formats since, including a T20I as recently as September 2025. The ground is known as a batting-friendly, high-scoring surface, which should suit the aggressive T20 cricket ETPL franchises are building their squads around.

For ETPL 2026, Malahide hosts the back end of the league stage plus the entire knockout phase — the Qualifier on 19 September and the Final on 20 September.

Why Split the Season Between Two Countries?

The ETPL is a three-nation league — Ireland, Scotland, and the Netherlands jointly run it — so no single country’s cricket boards or grounds could reasonably claim to host the whole thing. Splitting the season between Voorburg and Malahide lets the tournament visit two of its three founding nations in year one, spreading the league’s early exposure and gate revenue across more than one market rather than concentrating it in a single city.

There’s a practical infrastructure angle too. Both grounds already have proven ICC-standard credentials — Voorburg has years of hosting Dutch internationals and World Cricket League fixtures, while Malahide is Ireland’s flagship venue with Test-match pedigree and the country’s largest capacity. Rather than building new grounds up or leaning on venues with no international hosting history, the ETPL is running its first season through infrastructure that’s already been stress-tested at international level.

Scotland doesn’t host matches in this inaugural season, even though Edinburgh Castle Rockers and Glasgow Cosmic both represent Scottish cities — a detail that could well change as the league expands in future editions.

For the exact match-by-match breakdown of which games fall at which ground, see the ETPL schedule, and follow live scores from both venues on the ETPL live score page.