The ICC’s Associate and Affiliate members go into 2011 in a much greater state of uncertainty than that in which they confronted the year now past.

Twelve months ago, the path ahead seemed to be clearly laid out: beyond the World Cup which was then fifteen months away, there was the prospect of an orderly and dignified qualification process for the 2015 tournament, and if there were question marks over the first-class Intercontinental Cup competition after the ICC’s rather high-handed and arbitrary handling of the current edition, it seemed to have its place in a well thought-out development strategy for the leading countries outside the Test arena.

In the intervening period, of course, the bully-boy tactics of the BCCI, Cricket Australia and their allies – with the support, it seems, of one or two from the Associate countries – have thrown a great deal of that landscape into confusion.

Their apparent determination to cut the World Cup to ten participants from 2015 has, as we have repeatedly argued here, profound implications for every aspect of cricket outside the charmed circle of the Full members, and calls into question the ICC’s commitment to its High Performance and Global Development programmes.

We have, it is true, recently been reassured somewhat by the announcement that there will be a new two-year cycle of the Intercontinental Cup starting in the northern hemisphere summer, even if the final list of participants will be known only at the last moment and based, with characteristic idiocy, on the results of a 50-over tournament.

But the leisurely pace at which the arrangements for the proposed ODI League are being decided means that the three Associates who have made it onto the current rankings table have no idea of what the implications for them might be of the restructuring of international cricket.

Furthermore, the place of the World Cricket League in the New World Order being hatched in Mumbai, Melbourne and Dubai remains deeply uncertain. At the time of writing, the structure which is available on the ICC website still features a World Cup Qualifier in Scotland in July-August 2013, and seems to imply that the much-touted claim that the likes of Kuwait, Germany and Botswana, not to mention the USA and Nepal, have the possibility of doing what Afghanistan so nearly did in 2009 – reaching the World Cup itself from the deepest regions of the League - remains on offer.

That now has, of course, a hollow ring to it, and as things stand it’s hard to see what the future of that tournament might be, or whether it will even take place. Will it revert to being a mere ICC Trophy event, no longer a pathway to the World Cup, as its last five predecessors have been? Or will it be a much smaller tournament, held to decide whether a couple of Associates will be given a token chance to reach the global stage?

It’s just not enough to say, as ICC Chief Executive Haroon Lorgat did again recently, that that’s all OK because the Associates and Affiliates are being given expanded opportunities to take part in the World Twenty20 tournament. It threatens to make a nonsense of the idea of development, if the only path to progress for the developing countries is the hectic hit-and-giggle of Twenty20.

Any coach will tell you that in the normal course of events playing in the World Cup, important as it is for his players, has been secondary to the vital business of the four-yearly qualifying tournaments, with High Performance grants and so on hanging on the results. Their long-term programme was focused on developing their squad for that, so that 2013 was in many ways more significant than 2011.

Over the past few months that has been called into serious question, and national coaches can be forgiven a certain degree of frustration as the ground keeps moving under their feet.

For four of the Associates, though, the 2011 World Cup has acquired an importance it did not have a year ago.

Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands and Kenya always knew that they would travel to the Sub-continent with the honour of Associates cricket resting on their shoulders. But now their performances will be anxiously watched by all those who believe that the contraction of the World Cup is a ghastly mistake, and perhaps also with some trepidation by the architects of that proposal.

Every defeat at the hands of the Full members will be chalked up by the detractors of Associates cricket as evidence for the prosecution, but any victory – and even any thrilling, narrow defeat – will be a graphic demonstration of what it is that the Test countries are so willing to throw away.

It is, admittedly, a heavy burden to lay upon the mostly part-time cricketers from those four countries, but Kenya, Ireland and the Netherlands have shown in the past what can be achieved with dedication, guts and skill. By once again raising their game to those heights, the four qualifiers can do more than pulling off an upset – they can strike a powerful blow for cricket as a world game.