THE END OF AN ERA?

A grey Sunday in London. I flicked on the radio, and then flicked it off again, surprised to find that it filled the room with shrill bleating about football. Something to do with Wayne Rooney's bad language. This is England again, then. The last six weeks have been spent in an alternate universe, where cricket is the national preoccupation, sharing space on the evening news and on the front pages of the morning papers with Libya, Japan and the Wikileaks scandal that has broken around the BJP. A happy place this, for cricket fans, with re-runs of recent matches running uninterrupted in every airport lounge and hotel lobby across the country. Confirmation, if it was needed, that there is no aspect of human experience that cannot be improved by the addition of continuous cricket highlights.

On Friday the County Championship starts. And, cruel juxtaposition this, so does the Indian Premier League. No rest for the wicket. While domestic schedules roll unceasing into summer, for international teams the end of the World Cup marks a natural watershed. English and Australian cricket may measure their life in Ashes urns, but for everyone else the four-year cycle of the World Cup is what they wax and wane around. It was conspicuous that even in the immediate aftermath of Saturday's final both India and Sri Lanka had one eye on what happens next. Both countries are keen to move on into a new era.

"It's important for us to mould the next generation of cricketers in Sri Lanka as well," said Mahela Jayawardene. "I'll try and push myself to do that and be better than I am right now. There'll come a day when I'll feel I won't be able to contribute to this team, that's when I'll call it a day." Jayawardene is 33. His team will now go without the greatest player in the country's history, Muttiah Muralitharan. India are not going to lose Sachin Tendulkar yet, but MS Dhoni, 29, was having similar thoughts. "We earn a lot of money, we get a lot respect and what we are trying to do is to pass it on to the next generation." Both he and the chairman of selectors Krishnamachari Srikkanth have talked about the need to "test new faces in international cricket, build depth and bench strength". Dhoni made it clear that the foundations of this win had been built by Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble and Rahul Dravid, and that come the next World Cup the onus would fall on a different generation.

Muralitharan is the latest member of a golden generation of players who have retired, following Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and the rest of that great Australian team. Ricky Ponting may soon join them. Cricket cannot be sure whether it will be able to call on Jacques Kallis, 35, Kumar Sangakkara, 33, Tendulkar, 37, or Virender Sehwag, 32, come the 2015 World Cup. By then there is going to be a lot of room at the top.

Great players come and go, replaced from underneath as the game renews itself. There will always be stars, but how many of them will have the potential to achieve a similar status in the sport as the likes of Murali, Tendulkar, Ponting and Kallis, all indisputably among the very best in history? Try compiling a list of likely lads under 30 and you will not get very far. Dhoni, as a leader, AB de Villiers as a batsman, and Dale Steyn, as a bowler. After his feats in the Ashes some English fans will add Alastair Cook, but so long as he is not getting near the ODI and T20 teams, that seems a little too presumptuous for my liking. Start looking for players under 25, and you come close to drawing a blank.

There surely were players in this World Cup who will shape the next 10 years, but it takes a degree more foresight to pick them out than it would have in 1996. Virat Kohli is one, though he is yet to make his Test debut, Suresh Raina another. Stuart Broad and Eoin Morgan. New Zealand could build their batting around Kane Williamson. Umar Akmal and Angelo Mathews are two more. Mohammad Amir would surely have joined them, if his career had not run off the rails. These seem like slim pickings, at least in comparison to the riches we have enjoyed for the last 15 years. Harbhajan Singh is 30, Graeme Swann 32, and Sri Lanka did not trust Ajantha Mendis to play in the World Cup final. There is not a spinner in sight who you could even begin to think of in the same bracket as Murali or Warne, or an all-rounder who could come close to Kallis.

These players will also have to grow up under different pressures. They are the first proper Twenty20 generation, and to achieve unqualified greatness will need to excel in three diverse forms of the game. It will only be clear what impact Twenty20 has had on techniques in Test cricket when these players have grown to maturity. Then there is the strain imposed on players by the schedules and the need to switch between formats.

Cricket is about to go through a severe talent drain. And right now no one seems to possess the same sense of predestined greatness that accompanied Warne, Murali and Tendulkar.

THE FINE ART OF SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE FOOT

The ICC may well have good reasons for excluding the Associate nations from the 2015 World Cup. The infuriating thing is that if they do, no one knows what they are, because they have completely failed to tell us.

"The Executive Board confirmed their decision made in October 2010 that the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 in Australia and New Zealand and the ICC Cricket World Cup in England in 2019 will be a 10-team event," read its press release. "The Board agreed that the 2015 World Cup will comprise the existing 10 Full Members."

Why? Regardless of the right and wrongs of the decision – and let's face it, there are far more of the second than there are of the first – the ICC's refusal to even attempt to explain their logic or justify its decision leaves it looking autocratic and inconsiderate. Especially given that the announcement has come immediately after a World Cup in which Ireland, who are now pressing hard against a glass ceiling, played such a key part. It means that there is a considerable weight of opinion on the Associate's side, but nothing at all on the ICC's. In the absence of argument, the public are left to conclude that the ICC is motivated by obstinacy and self-interest.

That may be true, or it may not. But its silence does nothing to improve its image or confound the idea that it has principles other than the best interests of the sport at heart. Its aim cannot have been to shorten the competition – the ICC's broadcast contract with ESPN stipulates a minimum number of matches, so the format in 2015 will be re-worked to ensure that there were just as many games then as there were this time. And if it was felt that there were too many dull games, what about England's 10-wicket defeat to Sri Lanka, West Indies' 10-wicket defeat to Pakistan or New Zealand's 10-wicket defeat to Australia? You cannot mitigate against mis-matches.

The sop offered the Associates is the expansion of the World Twenty20 to 16 teams, and the promise of a qualifying tournament in 2019. You cannot expect to a child to grow strong and healthy on a diet of candyfloss. This is a retrograde move that is going to undo an enormous of good work that has been done to develop cricket around the world in the last 10 years. It is not just Ireland, Kenya, Canada and the Netherlands who will suffer, but every single one of 95 Associate and Affiliate nations, including Afghanistan, Denmark, Namibia, Scotland, the USA, and the UAE, all teams who have been, or should be, capable of playing a part in a 50-over World Cup. And while you may not read about them, real progress has also been made developing the game in countries like Nepal and Papua New Guinea. The World Cricket League was one of the few aspects of the game's governance that the ICC had got indisputably right. And its development work one of the few areas it could be justifiably proud of. Until now.

• This is an extract taken from The Spin, guardian.co.uk's weekly cricket email. You can sign up here. And you can also follow Andy on Twitter.