The T20 World Cup is a lot like the NCAA basketball tournament, one of my favorite events on the sports calendar every year. The first weekend of the tournament is constant basketball from Thursday to Saturday for the men, and through Monday for the women. It is a feast of sport with few peers on the American calendar.
The women’s tournament tends to be pretty chalky in terms of top seeds advancing, but the men’s tournament has traditionally produced more upsets and has a clear flow. The first weekend is for the chaos; close calls, upsets, viral heroes who will be forgotten in a few weeks, iconic memes when a 1-seed crashes out. The second weekend is for the powerhouses, where all the feelgood stories are purged and you’re forced to endure Duke and Kansas for the 5,000,000th time. The first weekend is appointment viewing, but I can’t even tell you the last time I watched the second weekend. Probably during the Saint Peter’s Peacocks’ “Strut of Destiny” in 2022.
At the T20 World Cup, the Associates are all out of the way, and now it’s time for the Super 8s, what cricket’s most insufferable jagoffs will call “the real World Cup.” They can also talk about the Associates in a safe, patronizing way, talking them up for how they “pushed the Full Members” without the discomfort of a major upset that requires them to learn anything new about the international landscape. Zimbabwe had four of the five best players in their matchup with Australia and everyone still talked it up as an upset, as if we haven’t been disproportionately exposed to the talents of prime Blessing Muzarabani and the “talents” of late-career Glenn Maxwell over the last 14 months. Hell, Ireland was repeatedly referred to as an Associate Member on the TV broadcast of their matchup with Sri Lanka, something they haven’t been for a decade.
If Full Members are getting sidelined from cricket’s mainstream discourse, Associates have little chance of making headway. Their players understand that the deck is currently stacked against them. They understand that, by default, nobody in international cricket cares much about them, and the T20 World Cup is pretty much the only time they get a true international audience and any real international press coverage that isn’t You Won’t Believe This Random Guy Took 6/14! Their players were not about to let that opportunity go to waste. Shayan Jahangir, Bas de Leede, and Saad Bin Zafar all pointed to the need for Associates to play more regularly against Full Members to actually grow their presence in the sport. This is especially true, as Bin Zafar points out, for AMs outside Asia. Nepal, the UAE, and Oman all get opportunities via events like the Asia Cup, and Nepal and the UAE both played bilateral series against FMs in 2025, securing wins that could help them on any future quest for Full Membership. If the game is to proliferate outside its hotbed in the subcontinent, teams elsewhere need opportunities to play against FMs either from South Asia or from elsewhere.
The sharpest message, however, came from Logan van Beek ahead of the Netherlands’ matchup with the USA: that pursuing Full Member status is a fool’s errand for the Dutch, that Test cricket isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that they are better able to focus on white-ball cricket as an Associate.
It is possible that van Beek’s statement will be used by bad-faith actors among the existing Full Membership to further their interests in keeping Test cricket small. See? Even THEY don’t want to play Test cricket! Why should we make them do something they don’t want to do? But van Beek’s statement is really more of a condemnation of the way the ICC has handled Ireland.
In its days as an AM, Ireland was a giant killer. Wins over Pakistan, Bangladesh, England, and the West Indies at the Cricket World Cup were indicative of the Irish banging on cricket’s glass ceiling even as it lost players like Eoin Morgan to England. Once they got Full Member status, however, they were left to flounder, and that reputation has all but fizzled in the last two T20 World Cups under Paul Stirling’s captaincy. They lost to Canada in 2024, and their only win this time around was over a miserable Oman squad that put in one of the most shocking performances in recent memory in international sport. And that team somehow beat Zimbabwe in a warm-up match!
To van Beek’s point: since the end of the 2024 T20 World Cup, Ireland has played 19 T20Is. The Netherlands has played 22. Nepal and the UAE have played far more, with ample games against Full Members. The disparity in ODIs is even more pronounced, with Ireland playing only nine and the Netherlands playing… a lot more than that! Ireland did all of this so they could play four tests, winning one against Zimbabwe at Stormont… the first and only test at that venue. Ireland has played 12 tests total in the last eight years. It’s fair to ask if the juice is worth the squeeze for any Associates aspiring to play test cricket when the system is perfectly willing to kick them in the cookies for daring to abandon the structure of World Cup qualifiers and the Cricket World Cup League 2, a structure where they play lots of competition against peers but don’t get to measure themselves against the best… kinda like mid-majors in college basketball. Meanwhile, there is no red ball cricket in the Netherlands at all. Players like van Beek, de Leede, and Paul van Meekeren are able to play First Class cricket in other countries, but Full Member status for the Netherlands would render that difficult or impossible, leaving Dutch players less able to make a livelihood out of playing cricket. That’s a gap that a franchise league, like the one the KNCB is trying to launch in conjunction with its Irish and Scottish counterparts, would struggle to fill.
Ireland’s situation is showing signs of improvement at the start of the next ICC rights cycle. A permanent stadium begins construction in March, although it may not host games for a while, and they will finally be included in the World Test Championship beginning with the 2027 cycle along with Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. The Associates got a 10% revenue bump for 2026, but that’s not what they asked for. Money is not necessarily a bad thing in this case - it could pay the players more or hire more full-time staff or support the women’s teams that are lagging behind the progress of their male peers in most Associate countries - but it’s not a substitute for the opportunity and exposure against Full Members that the Associate players are unified in asking for. Given the fractious and contentious nature of basically everything in cricket’s politics, the consistent message on this point really drives home the need for it. When those same players are wondering if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - Full Member status and test cricket - is even worth chasing, that could easily boil over into a crisis of indifference toward the sport’s growth. Like the indifference I feel on the second weekend of the NCAA tournament.