Dylan Cleaver: Shortsighted to use minnows just to make up numbers

Matt Machan of Scotland bats during the ICC Cricket World Cup match between New Zealand and Scotland. Photo / Getty Images

Just a day after Ireland's intoxicating win over West Indies, Scotland endured a more sobering experience in Dunedin, a city whose students are not renowned for their temperance.

But the problem was not what happened to Scotland at University Oval, which was really only restricted to a gruesome first few overs, but what has happened to them in the past four years.

So what has happened to them in the past four years, you ask? Nowhere near enough, that's what.

We can blather and moan that the associate nations - Ireland, Scotland, Afghanistan and UAE - serve only to draw out the tournament and boost broadcast revenues, but part of a World Cup's reason for being is to help grow the sport.

We should tolerate sitting through a few mismatches if it means the cricket gospel is being spread, but it is utterly pointless if the ICC just turns around and ignores the minnows again until 2019.

Take their top-scorer Matt Machan, who pulled Scotland back into the match with a pleasing 56 after their disastrous start. He made his debut two years ago and has played 16 ODIs, eight per year. The New Zealand match was just his fourth against a test-playing nation. New Zealand has played Sri Lanka alone in ODIs eight times in the past month.

We shouldn't expect the likes of Scotland to come here off a bread-and-water diet of playing Kenya, The Netherlands and Nepal and be competitive against teams that play on a treadmill of bilateral series.

This World Cup is going to earn the ICC gazillions of dollars on the back of broadcasting rights sold for $2 billion and many lucrative sponsorship deals. This is surely the time to reinvest in emerging territories, not cut them from the game's biggest showpiece.

And we're not talking about hosting tournaments in far-flung places for cricket's motley crew of undesirables. They already do that.

It should be mandatory for teams touring England to tack on a few ODIs in Ireland, Scotland or the Netherlands. Likewise teams touring India or Sri Lanka should be obligated to do the same with Nepal and, at a neutral venue most likely, Afghanistan.

Twelve years ago Kenya made it to the semifinals of the World Cup (albeit fortuitously). Through lack of care and attention, they're miles behind where they were in 2003.

Those in charge of administering the game need to step back and decide what they want their sport to look like. Do they want the same-old, same-old or do they want to risk the odd embarrassment while trying to broaden the sport's appeal and, ultimately, audience?

Unfortunately this a game still steeped in colonial, patriarchal sensibilities, so you fear the worst. It is almost rugby-like in the way it treats its smaller nations like they were something unappealing stuck to the bottom of their shoe for three years 10 months, then lauds the colour and vibrancy they bring to a seven-week tournament.

It is why the megalomaniacal move to put all the power in the hands of the "Big Three" - England, Australia and India - is not just wrong-headed, but shortsighted. They can't make money out of playing Ireland, so they'll ignore them instead, like Australia did to New Zealand for 30 years.

That's a sobering thought, as is this: the biggest mismatch at this tournament to date has not involved an associate side, but was, ahem, England's capitulation to Australia.

Scotland, by contrast, showed real fight in a lost cause.