How A Country Earns Full Membership Of Cricket's Governing Body

Cricket's world body distinguishes between full members and associates, and the gap between them is enormous. Crossing it is an administrative process with a sporting component.

Membership is granted to a board, not a team

The applicant is a national governing body, and the assessment examines its constitution, elections, finances and independence from government interference.

A strong national side with a weak board will not be promoted. The body must demonstrate it can administer the sport durably.

This ordering reflects hard experience. Teams that rose quickly on the field and collapsed administratively left the world body carrying the consequences.

A domestic structure is the central requirement

Full membership implies the ability to field a Test side, which requires players accustomed to multi-day cricket. That habit only comes from a domestic first-class competition.

Assessors therefore look for a functioning long-format tournament with adequate grounds, qualified officials and enough teams to be meaningful.

Building that structure is expensive and slow, and it is where most aspiring nations stall. The competition must exist before the players it produces can be judged.

Pathways and participation are examined

Junior competitions, women's cricket, coaching qualification and umpire development all form part of the evaluation. The question is whether the sport reproduces itself locally.

A board dependent on players developed abroad is not demonstrating a pathway. Assessors distinguish between importing capability and creating it.

This is why nations with large diaspora playing populations still face a long process. Participation must be organized to count.

Revenue sharing makes the decision political

Full members receive a share of central distributions, so admitting one changes what everyone else receives. The existing members vote on the application.

That makes economic considerations unavoidable. A candidate whose market expands the game's overall value is easier to admit than one who simply divides the same pool.

Understanding this explains why some strong candidates wait a long time. The sporting case is only part of what is being weighed.

Status can be conditional or reversed

Membership carries continuing obligations, and boards have been suspended for governance failures or for state interference in their affairs.

Suspension removes funding and participation rights, which is a severe sanction intended to force internal reform rather than to punish players.

The existence of that power is what makes the entry criteria credible. Standards that could never be enforced afterward would not be worth applying at the gate.

For a long time the deep coverage was the closest thing basketball had to a safe answer. Keep the big near the rim, make the guard fight over the top, live with a mid range jumper. Then somebody put a screen on the retreating big himself, and safe stopped being safe.

The action is easy to describe. Standard ball screen on the wing. As the centre backs towards the paint, a third offensive player, usually whoever is guarded by the least reliable helper, sets a screen on him from behind. The big is now being asked to backpedal into a stationary body he cannot see. He fights through and arrives late, or he goes around and the roller has a straight line to the rim, or the defence switches and a guard is left trying to box out a centre.

What I like about it as a piece of design is that it attacks the coverage rather than the personnel. Most counters hunt the weak defender. This one punishes the strong one. The better your rim protector, the more committed he is to that retreat, and the more the screen behind him hurts.

Every defensive answer is uncomfortable. Pre switch the screener before contact, which needs two players to talk through crowd noise while both are watching the ball. Jump the big out to the level and refuse to be a stationary target, which gives up the pocket pass. Or tag the backscreener early with the low man, which by definition opens the corner you were trying to protect in the first place.

None of it is free, and that is the whole point. Good design does not manufacture an open shot. It manufactures a decision where every branch costs something, taken by a defender with a third of a second and eighteen thousand people shouting at him.

The version I would run more often is the fake. Show the screen, never set it, and let the big react to a threat that does not arrive. He hesitates for a beat. A beat is a layup.

Whoever first drew this up understood something coaches say far too rarely, which is that the most vulnerable man in any scheme is usually the one doing exactly what he was told to do.