First things first! Ireland will qualify for the T20 World Cup final Qualifier in India next year. Even if only the players who lost heavily to Scotland last week were available they would do it comfortably. With the return of the county players it will be a breeze. Come on, we are talking top six from 14 Associates in home conditions. If Ireland can’t achieve that, well you know the rest yourself.

Of course there will be statements from the team management about taking nothing for granted and focusing on one game at a time. However this is pretty well the same bunch of players who defeated two Test sides in alien conditions a few weeks ago in addition to beating the UAE, who were subsequently demolished in three days in Malahide earlier this month.

The management and players know full well that failing to make the top six, other than due to a horrendous run of washed out matches, would signal a return to the bad old days of Amateur Ireland. This group of players are too professional, talented and committed to the green shirt to contemplate failure. Ireland are favourites to retain the trophy won in Abu Dhabi in November 2013 but that is less certain than qualification as you could make a case for several of the contenders particularly in a knockout game to decide the top six spots. You only have to think back to the blitzkrieg from the Dutch last year to realise that.

That game was lost because the bowlers could not come close to defending 189 and the two completed games against Scotland in Bready did little to suggest that there is much improvement on that score. Apart from the well-established George Dockrell, only new cap Tyrone Kane made an impression. The county players returning for the tournament will enhance the batting, especially in the powerplay overs, but with the exception of the spin of Paul Stirling who has the best economy rate (6.23) of any of the current squad, there will be no enhancement to the attack.

The reasons for the lack of bowling depth and how that might be resolved is for another column in the near future as it obviously has implications for all three formats of the game. There is however one issue that needs to be put to bed as the names of Tom Curran and Matt Dunn have cropped up on the forum regularly in recent times as potential quick bowlers for Ireland.

I notified the Ireland management two years ago about Curran’s eligibility and I understand that someone from the NCU also made them aware of Dunn’s qualifications. On several occasions in the past two years I have enquired about progress on the issue but never got a satisfactory answer. However at the recent UAE match I had a lengthy chat with Richard Holdsworth and I raised the question about the two Surrey lads.

He confirmed that they had both been approached but had no interest in representing Ireland at this point in time. I presume that Dunn, who qualifies for Ireland through his father, is intent on playing for England especially as he was called up to the England Lions squad for two 4 day matches against South Africa A in January although he didn’t make the playing eleven as ironically he lost out to one Boyd Rankin.

Curran holds an Irish passport, which is a family tradition going back to his great-grandfather who emigrated from County Clare early in the twentieth century to settle in what was then Rhodesia. His late father Kevin played for Zimbabwe although Tom was born in Cape Town and next year will also qualify for England on residency.

While you would imagine that a spell with Ireland would give him valuable experience and not impinge on his ambitions to represent another country, he presumably wants to concentrate on his development without distraction.

Of course if Ireland does win the tournament there is little advantage to it other than the actual trophy. In Abu Dhabi UAE finished fourth, having lost to Ireland in the group stage and again in the semi-final and got $250,000 which was exactly the same as the winner. They ended up together in the same group in Bangladesh last year in what was touted by ICC as the first round of the World T20 Finals.

It was of course nothing of the sort but rather another qualifying tournament which was designed to favour the two Full Members, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, in qualifying for the real finals. While the home nation succeeded Ireland beat Zimbabwe but of course lost out to the Netherlands.

The same con trick is being perpetrated next year in India as the full import of the takeover of world cricket by the so called Big Three (although in reality it is one ruler and two supplicants) comes to fruition.

Today we have confirmation that the next 50 over World Cup in England in 2019 will only include 10 teams with the top eight in the ODI rankings in 2018 qualifying automatically and the other four teams on the ranking table, which now include Ireland and Afghanistan, going into a qualifying tournament together with the leading teams in the current World Cricket League. That qualifier is scheduled to be held in Bangladesh, which as we all know mirrors English conditions, although now that the Asians have risen to seventh in the ODI rankings they may not need home turf advantage and we may well see the qualifier switched to the Caribbean, UAE or even eleven placed Zimbabwe to help the vulnerable Full Members.

The one place that you can be certain that it will not be in is on the wickets of currently tenth ranked Ireland even though it actually is closest to the conditions where the Finals will take place.

Chosen to defend the decision on the World Cup and particularly in its impact on Associate cricket was Tim Anderson ICC Head of Global Development. Tim is a decent guy and has worked extremely hard to raise the profile of the non- Full Member nations, so to saddle him the task of attempting to put a positive spin on an indefensible situation is yet another act of cowardice from his Big Three masters.

It is worth going through what he has said as it bears little relation to reality outside the fantasy world inhabited by those in the upper echelons of the ICC.

Anderson said Associates had gained increased respect from Full Members after what he characterised as the best ever performance by Associates in a World Cup. The ICC administrator said that even though there was no guarantee that Associates would be part of a 10-team World Cup for 2019, it would be unfair to criticise the decision to downsize the tournament without considering moves that he felt had opened up other opportunities for Associates.

"One of the things that I think is a bit unfair in the analysis of all of this is that the World Cup is only one of a number of ICC events that take place over a four-year cycle," Anderson told ESPNcricinfo. "Within the same period of time that the World Cup was decided to be smaller, which happened in 2013, the World Cup Qualifier will now include Full Members. That's a significant shift in the structure of the ICC, that a Full Member has to qualify for the World Cup.

"There are more teams in the World Twenty20, going from 12 to 16 which is great. The pathway to Test cricket through the Intercontinental Cup, so that's great. The last decision which was quite recent was having Ireland and Afghanistan on the ODI rankings table for the purposes of qualifying for the World Cup. So effectively they are now part of the ODI FTP. Now I understand the counter-arguments to some of those, that they are not guaranteed games and yes we understand that but the fact that they are part of that family of 12 countries now, I think that's a really important step in the right direction. So I guess the bottom line for me is that even though the World Cup and the reduction of teams is a very emotive issue, there are some other good things that have happened at the same time that may have been slipped over."

Now I am very much in favour of the progress of Associate nations as they actually do make cricket a global game unlike the lip service that is paid to the concept by most of the Full Members. However I am first and foremost a commentator on and supporter of Irish cricket and offer no apology for looking at this through green tinted glasses.

Therefor the reality is that it was fundamentally due to Ireland that this was the best Associates performance at a World Cup and indeed had it not been for Ireland’s performance in 2011 and subsequent lobbying led by Cricket Ireland there would have been no Associates in Australasia.

Anderson states that it is unfair to take the World Cup situation in isolation when analysing the situation and the ICC plan should be looked at in the round. He claims that it is great that the T20 World Cup has gone from 12 to 16 teams which of course is utter nonsense. Before the change was forced on them to have a 14 team 50 over World Cup this year, the justification to go to a ten team event in the aftermath of the 2011 edition was that the way to develop the game among the Associate and Affiliate nations was by T20 cricket. To that end ICC announced that there would be a 16 team T20 World Cup every two years and the indication was that there would be no secondary prequalifying competition. In other words the 10 Full Members would go in alongside the six Associates.

However as punishment for successfully challenging the 10 team World Cup the T20 edition will now be held every four years and at best two Associates will make it to the competition proper. Anderson goes on to make a big deal of the fact that Ireland and Afghanistan are now on the ODI Ranking table for the purposes of World Cup qualifying. While he accepts that there is a difficulty in getting them games he says that they are now part of the 12 country family.

What sort of a family insists that one of the two youngest members have to compete against the next best cousin every few years to retain their membership of the “family”? This will happen even if the two Associate family members were to end up as first and second in the rankings. Even now Zimbabwe are ranked below Ireland and should Afghanistan also go ahead of the Africans it would still be the lower ranked Associate who plays off against the winners of the World Cricket League to determine who stays on the table.

The Associates are not and never will be full members irrespective of how successful they are. Anyway there is no chance of coming first and second as they will never get sufficient games to make any appreciable ascent in the rankings.

My fear at the time that it was announced that Ireland and Afghanistan would be ranked and not have to compete in the World Cricket League was that it could be the worst of both worlds. There would be few, if any, extra matches against Full Members while at the same time the steady stream of mostly ODI’s against the other topped ranked Associates in the WCL would be no more. Getting on the Ranking table is looking more and more like a pyrrhic victory particularly for the most successful side in history outside of the Test arena.

Significantly from Ireland’s perspective Anderson went on to say "We have four Full Member directors including the chairman and the CEO on the development committee of the ICC," Anderson said. "That has never happened before. If you look at it from region to region, Cricket Australia and Papua New Guinea have links. Cricket Australia have just been to Nepal. India [hosted a training camp for] Nepal since the earthquake. These sort of things haven't happened before. Afghanistan played in the Asia Cup and now they are talking about having a qualification event into the Asia Cup moving forward.

"England obviously continue to be supportive. I think [ECB chief executive] Tom Harrison has a very global perspective about developing the game and I think therefore that he will look at things maybe a little bit differently. In Africa, we've just had an announcement that Cricket South Africa is playing an African T20 competition with Kenya and Namibia. The West Indies have great interest obviously in the USA and by extension Canada and the ICC Americas Region and they're doing a lot of stuff. So there's a lot of things that are happening here."

Read those two paragraphs again. The only leading Associate not mentioned is Ireland unless you decide that the sentence "England obviously continue to be supportive.” is a tangential link to support for the top Associate. If that’s what it does mean then sending a development side over to Ireland once every two years at a time when the weather is most likely to be at its worst is seen as being as supportive then the ICC are even sicker than I thought that they could be.

The presence of Srinavasan and Richardson on the ICC development committee is portrayed as a positive indicator of their desire to see genuine progress in the globalisation of the sport whereas in reality it is geared to ensure that Full Members rule and the others should be content with crumbs from the overflowing table.

If you doubt that read the last sentence here. Anderson said the World Cricket League promotion and relegation structure, which has seen teams like Afghanistan and Nepal rise from Division Five all the way to World Cup and World T20 qualification, highlighted the strength of meritocratic structures in Associate cricket. When asked why Full Members don't apply the same standard to themselves, Anderson said it comes down to "membership benefits". I rest my case.

To go back to where I started in this column Ireland will qualify for India but after that does T20 really matter anymore in the scheme of the World game at international level? A handful of matches now and again is hardly worth the effort of putting additional structures in place. After all the Scotland matches in Bready where the first T20’s Ireland had played since the Dutch match in March 2014 which was fifteen months earlier.

I will finish by quoting a regular contributor to the Cricket Europe Ireland forum. I do not know who Donal C is but at times it is hard to disagree with his post yesterday.

“So Zimbabwe, ranked 11, get a spot in a tri series in August with Pakistan and the WI and we get nothing despite being 10?

And its right next door in England??!!

Eff this game honestly, sometimes I absolutely hate this stupid sport and its retarded governing methods