Since Saturday I have been thinking about what to write in this column. Do I apologise to our fans? Do I defend our players and staff for the criticism we have come in for in the last few days? Do I try and explain what happened?

The answer is I have no idea what the best thing is to do so its a case of seeing what comes out. At half time in the Dutch game we were confident, the captain spoke clearly about how we knew that they were going to come hard and how we must stick together.

"Even if they are 100-0 off 10 we stick to our guns out there", he said. Looking back I'd have snapped your arm off for that. The one thing I don't get is an extraordinary amount of people who simply can't understand why we didn't know how many overs they had to chase our total in. It was completely irrelevant to us.

We knew that they were going to come hard, that is the key. Therefore whether it was 10,14 or 16 overs, they were going to play the exact same way. The 14 over figure was one that was only important to the Dutch, as far as we were concerned we were looking at winning the game, not preventing them from going through.

I can't stress enough that knowing there was a figure, and therefore knowing that they would be swinging hard, was more important than knowing what that figure was. There has also been the suggestion that we were complacent, simply not true.

We know we didn't have a God given right to be travelling to Chittagong to play in the Super 10's, did we expect to go? Absolutely. We expected to go because we believe in our ability, if people consider that to be complacency then we have been complacent for every one of my 170 caps.

This Irish team goes out on to the pitch expecting to win every time we play. It may not happen but that's not down to complacency. Of that I can assure you. We prepare better than any other team I know.

Something that I can accept is criticism of our performance. For two and a half games we played cricket that in my opinion was good enough to see us through to the super 10s. It's a hard pill to swallow that half a game cost us our spot.

In hindsight, when we saw Borren was opening the batting our plan could have perhaps changed from that of bowling our two off spinners to going back to the more conventional route of opening with seamers.

Borren is more comfortable playing spin and maybe if we had opened with one of our quicks it may have been different, who knows? In the first innings the ball had held up slightly for the Dutch spinners and each of the batters said at the time that slower balls and spin would be trickier to play. As it turned out the wicket had got slightly better, possibly down to the slight dew which made all the bowlers slide on.

Without doubt we weren't good enough, we bowled too full in that innings but its incredibly hard when a team comes out and plays with no fear of failure. They had absolutely no choice but to come out swinging.

The term "no fear of failure" is one we often hear branded about but rarely, like in this instance, is there no option but to play this way, it was simplified as much as it possibly could have been. That made them so dangerous.

I don't think I have ever seen cleaner striking of a cricket ball over such a period of time than that day. Even the balls they were mis-hitting were going to the boundary. I genuinely believe that if they had the full 20 overs to chase down our total that we would still be in Chittagong right now.

It's just a completely different mindset, as I just alluded to. Another disappointing aspect was our fielding, some balls were mis-hit and our fielders could have done better, that I can accept.

What we craved more than anything in my opinion was someone with the ability to bowl 85mph plus, just to put them on the back foot slightly. Unfortunately the bloke that use to do that for us, played his last game over a year ago. It's important that we try bring someone through to do that again.

The one thing that people must also remember is that the other team are allowed to play well. They certainly did and you have to give them huge credit for that. Friday was the first time I had ever lost to the Netherlands...I therefore don't think that a knee jerk reaction is called for.

By and large, this is the same group of players that won the treble of trophies in associate cricket last year, bar a very influential Trent Johnston and a hard nosed cricketer in John Mooney.

Their replacements though, have stood up and been counted at various times since January. Andy McBrine probably wouldn't have played if TJ was still going and he's been our best bowler since the turn of the year.

Stuart Thompson has come in for John and has shown just how talented he is, finishing the game against Nepal in warm up's with the bat and scoring some good runs in the West Indies games at Sabina. He will only get better, just ask Ed Joyce how he rates Thommo to see what he says.

We have played something like 120 games against associate nations since 2007 and lost 11 or 12. The fact that this one was in a World Cup obviously means more but I firmly believe that we are still the best in the associate world and in fact better than Zimbabwe, who receive 10 times our funding.

Believe me when I say that no matter how disappointed any fan was on Friday night, you can bet your bottom dollar that we felt worse.

We do feel like we let the country down and know that we have to be better, that we should still be at the World Cup, playing against, and beating the full members. Since losing that game, I have barely watched a ball of the tournament. It's still hurting now.

I got a text yesterday from Brendan Connor our S&C coach saying "difficult journey home, it just wasn't the right time" I guarantee he summed up what all 21 of us were thinking at that time.

What I can promise you is this, that this will not deter us from reaching our goals. As an organisation Cricket Ireland is now an impressive one and one result against the Netherlands, World Cup or not, will not stop Warren Deutrom leading us to where we want to be.

We are a close knit group and pride ourselves on that. We will 100% be back, creating more headlines, beating more full members and reminding the rest of the world of just that.