ASSOCIATES IN 2019 Associates in 2019: The more things change... Bertus de Jong Share Tweet

The new CWC League system has room for just 20 Associate sides in total, whilst regional one-day competition appears to have been abolished altogether ©Getty

As the raft of changes to the structure and status of international cricket below the top tier which the ICC announced last year took hold in 2019, the competitive landscape of Associates cricket in some ways looks markedly different in 2019 compared to the familiar cycles of the preceding decade. Yet whilst the reforms to the calendar and constitution of the international game outside top 12 are not merely superficial, for the ICC's 93 "other" members, familiar challenges, problems and indeed concerning trends look set to persist into a fresh decade.

The World Cricket League - the innovative double-ladder structure of round-robin divisional tournaments that had both provided the qualification ladder for the three most recent World Cups and defined the landscape of international fifty-over cricket for Associate countries for the past decade - finally drew to a close in early April, hosts Namibia winning the final tournament in the form of Division 2 at Windhoek to secure ODI status and a place in the new CWC League 2 for the coming cycle along with Oman, Papua New Guinea and the United States.

The new league structure, designed in consultation with the Associates themselves, was broadly hailed as an excellent solution given the financial constraints facing the ICC and its participants, but if the format is laudable, it nonetheless continues a trend in evidence throughout the preceding decade, that of a progressive reduction in the number of sides included in ICC 50-over competition.

Ten years ago, the World Cricket League comprised a total of eight divisions encompassing 38 teams, with regular regional fifty over qualifiers below that. As divisions were progressively scrapped that would shrink to 24 teams by the final cycle. The new CWC League system has room for just 20 Associate sides in total, whilst regional one-day competition appears to have been abolished altogether, leaving 63 of the ICC's 105 members without any competitive one-day cricket at all.

The squeeze on lower-ranked Associates in terms of one-day opportunities has been matched at the other end of the table as the 50-over World Cup has become progressively more exclusionary. 2019 saw the first edition of the pinnacle 50-over event to feature just 10 teams, without any Associate representation. Despite the poorly-conceived, month-long group stage threatening to become a procession, a couple of unlikely results injected some limited late jeopardy.

The inevitable recency bias in retrospective assessment means that the thrilling (if controversial) final was enough to ensure the event was seen a qualified success for the ICC, and thus a disaster for Associates. Coupled with the abiding failure of most pundits and decision-makers to understand how tournament structures determine the likelihood of mismatches, tournament length and persisting jeopardy, the last few games of the 2019 edition were doubtless sufficient to obscure the manifest shortcomings of the format, and the prospect of an expansion for 2023 remains remote.

With the chances of a turn on the world stage remaining remote, and the role of the new leagues as a qualification pathway thus somewhat academic, Associates will rely for exposure on a raised profile for the new competitions themselves, of which there is little hope on current evidence.

The World Cricket League, despite reliably providing some of the most intense, close-fought and high-stakes cricket in the international calendar suffered throughout from a near-total lack of promotion and lamentable under-exposure, ran its decade-long course without ever breaking into the mainstream cricketing consciousness, with even journalists and commentators outside a select few generally only dimly aware of its existence.

Likewise the opening rounds, both of the CWC Challenge League and CWC League 2 have seen no consistent coverage, with the ICC unable to organise any sort of broadcast coverage beyond what the boards themselves occasionally and haphazardly throw together.

The upshot is that qualification for the 2023 World Cup has begun in familiar obscurity, with most cricket fans entirely unaware that the new competitions have commenced.

Things are a little more positive in the shortest format, with a welcome side effect of the extension of T20I status to all of the ICC's members being the increased visibility of Associate fixtures, even if records falling in matches that would previously have gone by unnoticed by most of the cricket world have generally prompted little more than poutrage and hand-wringing from self-appointed defenders of statistical sanctity, the effect has nonetheless been to raise the profile of lower-ranked countries that had previously been ignored.

Yet the structured ICC competition in the shorter format suffers from the same under-promotion as the 50-over game, with the series of regional T20 World Cup qualification finals that took place this year largely flying under the radar, though USA Cricket did set up a live stream for their ill-fated outing at the Americas final in Bermuda, there was again no consistent broadcast coverage. Even for the Global Qualifier, held in Dubai in late October, barely half of the matches were broadcast.

The tournament itself was once again well-organised, closely contested, and produced some superb cricket, with the exemplary format ensuring there was not a single dead rubber to be seen. In short, the tournament serves as a phenomenal showcase for the Associate game, one of only two such events - the other being the 50-over WC Qualifier - that sees Associate cricket break into mainstream news cycles. The news, therefore, that the event may be scrapped for 2021 is unarguably the most alarming news of the year.

If the new structures rolled out for international fifty and twenty over cricket can be seen as a qualified, if low-profile success, the outlook for the longer format looks dire indeed. Despite the lack of any formal announcement of its demise, the strange death of the Intercontinental Cup is likely the most significant outcome of the Associates competitive revamp. Speculation was rife in the absence of any news on the First Class competition's future when the overhaul was announced last year, but now, two years on from the last round of fixtures, it is safe to say that the competition is dead.

Though Nepal signalled their continuing interest in red-ball cricket, arranging a single three-day game against a touring MCC side at Kiritpur in November, 2019 was the second year this decade not to see a single international First Class international between two Associate sides. With the prospect of a revival or replacement looking increasingly implausible, it is difficult to imagine how senior associate sides can make a case for Test status.

Though full membership of the ICC has been notionally decoupled from participation in the game's most prestigious format, it would seem that Ireland and Afghanistan are likely to be the last countries to join the Test-playing club for the foreseeable future.

Increasingly, Associate teams have had to rely less on the ICC for both - for fixtures (especially in the longer two forms of the game) and for revenue. Yet whilst the USA appears to have moved quickly on from the disproportionate ICC funding which it had received in the past to an eye-catchingly ambitious commercial partnership with American Cricket Enterprises supposedly worth as much as a billion US dollars, other Associates have struggled to find reliable sponsors or partners.

While the past year has seen even full member franchise leagues struggle to find adequate financing or appropriate commercial partners, under-resourced Associate boards have found the going equally tough.The most high-profile example of such difficulties was the last-minute cancellation, just days before it was due to commence, of the inaugural Euro T20 Slam, a collaborative project between Cricket Ireland, Cricket Scotland and the KNCB with GS Holding, the same outfit behind Canada's GT20 franchise tournament, where the first signs of trouble had emerged when a pay dispute resulted in a two-hour delay to the Toronto Nationals match against the Montreal Tigers. The European franchise league was officially postponed a week later, though it is still uncertain whether next years' edition will go ahead.

What is clear is that revenue deriving from foreign-backed leagues aimed principally at foreign markets is likely to prove ephemeral at best, as Cricket Ireland have found to their cost. Whilst several domestically-driven initiatives have also foundered - most notably the Hong Kong Blitz - the comparative success of Nepal's private domestic T20 competitions suggests that a local focus and more limited ambitions may prove a more durable model in the long run.

More concerning even than the risk to Associate board's bottom line when backers fail to deliver, is the outsized risk of corruption of competitions hosted by under-resourced boards and featuring otherwise modestly-paid players. Eyebrows were raised in December when several bookmakers pulled their markets for Qatar's new T10 league mid-way through the competition, and sure enough the ICC announced an anti-corruption investigation with days of the tournaments conclusion, citing several late changes to the financing and ownership of several franchises.

Close to 90% of international players suspended by the ICC on corruption charges this year hailed from Associate countries, underlining just how vulnerable poorly-compensated Associate cricketers are to the predations of fixers, with their home boards ill-equipped to to prepare or protect them even as the growing profile of the Associates cricket, and especially the proliferation of low-cost live streams, makes the Associate game an increasingly attractive target.

Despite the comparative success of the roll-out of the new Associate competitive structures in both white-ball formats, the general mood amongst Associates, especially high-performance Associates, remains one of cautious pessimism. The ICC's development division is to be commended for continuing to "do more with less" over the past year, but there is little hope that their efforts will be recognised, much less rewarded, by the full member boards that continue to wield the real power in Dubai.

The growing conflict between the ICC and a newly confident and combative BCCI, now free of the constraints of the CoA, looks headed toward another showdown reminiscent of the partially rolled-back "Big 3" reforms of 2014, the likely result of which will be a further squeeze on the funding available to support second and third tier ICC events, as well as the portion of the ICC's revenue surplus disbursed to Associates directly.

Meanwhile there has been no shortage of naked politicking amongst the Associates themselves, with a remarkably public campaign to unseat the Netherlands' Betty Timmer as Associates representative on the Chief Executives Committee seeing an extraordinary pair of pseudonymous attacks published on the Africa Cricket Association's official website.

Timmer's eventual ouster signals something of a power-shift away from the higher-ranked Associates (with none of the ODI-status countries represented on either the CEC and Development Committee) toward those at the bottom of the ladder, who look set to prioritise more and more equitable direct disbursements from the ICC over performance-dependent funding and indeed ICC pathway events themselves.

At the same time the departure of several key staff members, including ICC Europe head Ed Shuttleworth, Participation Pathways Manager David Szumowski, and High Performance Manager Richard Done - all of whom will be stepping down in the new year - will inevitably erode the institutional capacity and expertise available to the already-overworked ICC development section.

In short, the omens off the field augur ill for high-performance associates especially, and it is unlikely that the remedy is to be found on it. The coming year nonetheless will offer some rare opportunities for the top-ranked teams to make their case on the global stage. The Netherlands kick off their CWC Super League campaign against Pakistan in June, whilst Scotland have secured fixtures against New Zealand and Australia in the coming season.

The tweaking of the T20 World Cup format also means than come October at least one, and perhaps as many as Associate set to progress to the main phase of the tournament, where a strong showing might at least offer some reproof to the exclusionary trend that has characterised global events in recent years. History suggests, however, that there is little Associates can do with bat or ball to impact outcomes in Dubai even at the best of times, much less in the midst of Full Member power struggles of the sort that loom on the horizon again.