“It’s hard to comprehend that there’s only going to be a 10-team World Cup. After all the hard work we’ve done, it’s a rough one to take. It’s a tough pill to swallow right now.”

Kyle Coetzer, the Scotland captain, made this gloomy conclusion after his team’s performance in the World Cup Qualifiers. It was something to be proud of: they beat Nepal, Hong Kong, and new Test teams Afghanistan, and tied with hosts Zimbabwe as well.

A dubious LBW call pegged them back in the DLS equation, in a must-win game against the West Indies. When rain arrived, they lost by 5 runs, evaporating their World Cup dreams and 700,000 pounds of funding. The ICC had not deemed that game (or any other in the Qualifiers) important enough to include the Decision Review System.

Brendan Taylor left a lucrative County contract to be Zimbabwe’s leading bat again, in front of passionate home crowds. He had not been paid for the last two months, as Zimbabwe Cricket had no funds to even host a home Test. His team bested Nepal, Afghanistan and Hong Kong, apart from beating Ireland by a handsome margin. Under the DLS system they lost narrowly to the UAE, by 3 runs. Since their first appearance in 1983, this is the first World Cup they will not play.

The 2019 edition features an all-play-all format that means a guaranteed nine league games each for India, Australia and England. The “Big 3” stay alive in the tournament till the latest possible time, which is projected as mountains of revenue for the broadcasters, and streams of ticket sales for the home board. This bounty of short-term commercial gains comes at the cost of the Associate nations. The top 8 ranked teams have gained automatic qualification, while ten other nations vie for a paltry two spots.

In the backwaters of world cricket, teams are made of day workers, with no job security in cricket, and with only passion to propel them.

Being good at the game is the slow work of decades: it took Bangladesh 18 years of Test status to become a formidable force at home. Only by providing maximum exposure to the aspirants to the highest tiers of cricket can we make them better.

However, on the ground, these teams are stuck in a deathly cycle: since bilateral matches are at the mercy of cricket boards, the “big” nations scarcely play them. The lack of exposure to top-level cricket means barren expanses of stagnation, with no improvement in skill. It also means they can never improve their rankings to qualify for the World Cup, which is sometimes the only stretch of high level international cricket they can look forward to.

All this despite the acknowledgement that giving more fixtures to the Associates is crucial, by the former ICC Chief Executive Dave Richardson, far back in 2015. Add to that the meagre funding they receive, and it’s impossible to be hopeful for the future of cricket in these countries.

Ireland have beaten Pakistan, England and West Indies in the past three World Cups, and will not be playing the next one. Their captain William Porterfield has been a vocal critic of the ICC stance of contracting cricket’s premier event, and he best sums up the grim situation for the Associates:

“A lot of teams will leave here with nothing in their pocket. Scotland have come so close and yet so far themselves, but what have they got to look forward to for the next few years? It’s going to be so hard for them to try to get money out of the ICC to improve things.”

The financial aspects aside, the excitement and visibility of playing and succeeding to any measure at a World Cup instills self-belief in a nation’s cricket, and inspires generations to take up the game. The rise of cricket as India’s most loved sport was born as an underdog team conquered the world in 1983. Sri Lanka, minnows in 1987, were champions just nine years later. In contrast to these success stories of the past, Scotland’s Calum MacLeod recently lamented that the current generation will have no inspiration like his own: his country’s showing at the 1999 World Cup.

One case against the presence of Associate teams is the occurrence of more one-sided games, but a closer inspection of the 2015 World Cup shows it holds no water. Taking the margins of 50 runs or 5 wickets as the threshold for a one-sided result, just 7 out of 26 matches between Full Members were “close”, while the same figure for Associate versus Full Member games was 5 out of 20. The proportion of close matches between the Associates was 7 of 22. We see that “close” games occur with almost identical frequency, regardless of the standing of the sides (credit to @HeliocentCric ).

The argument for the commercial benefits of a ten-team world cup has already been deflated by Russell Degnan in this detailed dissection. What is the rationale, then, behind a tournament that runs longer than its predecessor, and risks dead rubbers at the end of a bloated league stage?

By denying newer teams the opportunity to compete, the ICC has thwarted the chance for endless rousing narratives, and the potential to create new fans and cricketers in markets yet unexplored. Through this combination of myopia and avarice from a body that is supposed to run the global game, cricket runs the risk of dwindling to an elite club of a few nations playing each other.

The unfolding of this sorry tale of immense consequence has been away from TV coverage, and thus away from mainstream public consciousness. At a time when other sports are expanding the number of teams in their world championships, the cricket variant has declined, going from 16 in 2007 to 14 in 2015, to 10 participants in 2019. The exclusivism of the ICC towards teams that leave their everyday lives to play the game for the sheer joy of the game should be worrisome to any fan of cricket.

Between an Afghan who has defied the ravages of war to spin the world out, and the unbridled passion of the Nepalese fan supporting a fast-rising underdog team, new countries bring their own flavours and fans, enriching the landscape of cricket. Thus, expanding the game, apart from promising long-term commercial gains, is pregnant with the endless possibilities of heartening stories. What we need now, is raising our voices against this callous orchestration of heartbreak.

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