It will have come to a great surprise to no-one that at its meeting this week the ICC Executive Board approved the proposed reorganisation of international cricket, including the reduction of the World Cup to ten teams from 2015.

We can only speculate about what resistance, if any, was put up by the three Associates’ representatives on the Board, but if we pore over the ICC media release, trying like Cold War-era Kremlinologists to read in a communiqué the signs of debate inside the Politburo, we can see that the ruling BCCI-led faction may have been induced to make some tiny concessions.

We are, for example, assured that the Board ‘expressed continued support for the global development of cricket’. They could, in all honesty, scarcely have done less, and whether that support actually means anything will only become apparent as practical decisions follow.

One concrete test must now be at hand: according to the High Performance Program funding schedule for 2009-15, the HPP countries should receive next year an increase of over 38% in the most important elements of their grants. A public declaration that that commitment will be honoured in full, and that the further step increases in 2013 and 2015 are also guaranteed, would go some way towards demonstrating that ‘continued support’ is not mere lip-service.

But the potentially damaging effects of the restructuring are not just about money, and the Board put off a decision on many of the central issues for the Associates and Affiliates by referring to its Governance Review Committee ‘any discussion of performance-related ranking and the issue of qualification for ICC global events, including finding opportunities for Associate Members to play ODI cricket’.

So in important respects we are still completely in the dark about what this week’s decisions will actually mean for the 95 countries who constitute the fig leaf for the ICC’s claims that it is, in the words of its own Statement of Values ‘an international organisation with a global focus’ in which ‘everything we do and every decision we make is motivated by a desire to serve the game better’.

It has been a proud boast of the ICC until now that every one of its members had the opportunity to reach the World Cup through the qualification system of the World Cricket League. Indeed, Afghanistan, who fought their way through the ACC tournament structure into Division 5 of the WCL and then all the way to fifth place in the 2009 World Cup qualifier, would be playing in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka next year had the ICC not previously decided to cut the number of participants in 2011 from sixteen to fourteen.

But now even the system of performance-related rankings, by virtue of which Kenya, Ireland and the Netherlands, through hard-won victories over Full member opposition, have reached the main ODI rankings table, is apparently up for review.

The Governance Review Committee, which will consider these matters and report back to the Board, comprises nine of the Board’s sixteen members, including two of the Associates’ representatives: Imran Khwaja (Singapore) and Keith Oliver (Scotland). But with the BCCI and Cricket Australia also present along with Zimbabwe’s Peter Chingoka – obviously a potential loser in any real qualification system for the World Cup – and ICC President Sharad Pawar and CEO Haroon Lorgat there in an ex officio capacity, we have no reason to be getting our hopes up.

The dominant powers in the ICC want an all-Full-member World Cup, and any realistic chance of a jumped-up Associate breaking that monopoly will no doubt be firmly suppressed.

And as for ‘opportunities for Associate members to play ODI cricket’, that could mean anything. What it is unlikely to mean is a determined attempt to persuade the Full members to improve on their lamentable record of scheduling ODI fixtures against the HPP countries. At the worst, it could foreshadow the disappearance of the World Cricket League, and/or the bilateral series which have for the past four years been piggy-backed on the Intercontinental Cup, the very future of which must itself now be in question.

Meanwhile, the Board will be pressing ahead with its plans for the exploitation of what it sees as the vast potential markets of China and the USA. ‘The need to engage expert consultants and staff within China and the United States,’ we are informed by the ICC media release, ‘will be discussed within the parameters of the next ICC Strategic Plan 2011-15.’

So as the door is definitively slammed on the aspirations of the vast majority to reach the pinnacle of world cricket, and the top Associates and Affiliates are effectively informed that they’ve been wasting their time for the past ten years, untold sums are probably to be thrown at the ICC’s two favourites. China’s international record remains awful, and the USA’s efforts to create an indigenous base for cricket have had, to put it mildly, a marked lack of success. But it is them that the cynical, money-grubbing leaders of the ICC, who don’t actually give a twopenny damn about cricket, are making a priority.

The Strategic Plan 2011-15, it seems, will represent a significant shift in ICC policy, whatever fine words its glossy pages may bear about a continued global vision. It will mark the final victory of the culture of great-power politics and corruption over common decency, and of greed over the Spirit of Cricket.

If you think that’s harsh, consider for a moment the ICC’s appalling mismanagement of the Pakistan match-fixing crisis, and the measures which were taken this week, amidst a fanfare of fine-sounding rhetoric about ‘zero tolerance’ and an ‘enhanced competency-based education process’. That’s all well and good, but in the same breath the Board appointed to its Pakistan Task Force one … Peter Chingoka.

That’s presumably the same Peter Chingoka who is the representative on the Board of Zimbabwe Cricket, and who presided over the decline of Zimbabwean cricket earlier in the decade amidst persistent allegations of political abuse, financial mismanagement and downright corruption. I’ve said it before, but really, you couldn’t make it up.