The World Cup is, in essence, two events. The first is a celebration 
of the sport worldwide in all its glorious technicolour. The second is a quest to crown the best team on the globe.

The 2019 World Cup will, like having a 
full English breakfast without bacon or 
hash browns, be only half complete. It will still anoint a world champion; it just won’t celebrate and promote cricket around the world. A game which aspires to be the “world’s favourite sport” is lumbered with a 10-team World Cup and, for the first time, will feature no Associate nations at all.

The paradox is that never has cricket’s globalisation been more promising. Last month’s World Cup Qualifier in Zimbabwe was a wonderful distillation of how competitive the one-day international game is.

And so, rather than being remembered 
for three weeks of intoxicating cricket, the epitaph for this tournament was Scotland being knocked out by five runs on the DLS method against the West Indies, minutes 
after an egregious umpiring decision. Having overcome profound obstacles – only four ODIs against Full Members in the previous three years; receiving one-eighth the ICC funding
of Zimbabwe; and numerous premature retirements due to their paucity of funding and fixtures – they deserved better.

The sadness is that the disconnect between the work done to globalise the sport and the rapacity of the largest Full Members has never been greater. As Sikandar Raza, the Zimbabwe all-rounder and Player of the Tournament, put it in his extraordinary acceptance speech: “When I started playing cricket I thought it was to unite countries, players, of different backgrounds, coming together to play this beautiful sport. Unfortunately we see that is not going to happen in next year’s World Cup.”

Next year’s tournament in England and Wales manages an extraordinary conjuring trick – it has four teams fewer than the 2015 World Cup and takes two days longer. It is a damning indictment of the greed and short-termism of 
the largest Test nations – and their ignorance, or inability to grasp, both the sterling on-field improvements and long-term commercial opportunities beyond the Test world.

England fans should know the decision to contract the World Cup – making the tournament both fatter and less inclusive – has been driven by their own representatives in the ICC. Giles Clarke, the ECB’s long-time delegate 
in the ICC, explained this mindset best in the 2015 film Death of a Gentleman: “I have every right to put my board’s interests first.”