So it’s official: the chief executives of a clear majority of the Test cricketing nations don’t give a twopenny damn about the future development of the sport which supports their globe-trotting executive lifestyles and their overblown obsession with power.

By voting at this week’s meeting of the ICC Chief Executives’ Committee for a 14-team format for the 2011 World Cup they have effectively delivered a kick in the teeth not only to the dedicated part-timers and unpaid volunteers who work for the promotion of cricket outside the privileged circle of the Full members, not to mention the players who often make substantial sacrifices in their professional and personal lives in the cause of the game they love, but also to those within the ICC itself who have laboured to create and foster the global development programme.

It doesn’t, of course, come as a surprise. Nobody who has observed the reluctance with which the Test countries have responded to the possibility of organising ODIs against the top Associates, or even to set up fixtures involving the Associates and their own A sides, could have expected anything other than the shameful decision to back a proposal which runs against much that has been achieved in the past eight years.

The plain fact is that this decision – which still has to be ratified by the full ICC Board – is a humiliating retreat from that ambitious vision for cricket’s expansion which has been so lavishly touted in successive versions of the ICC Strategic Plan.

It is true that not all the six qualifiers for the 2007 World Cup performed at the same level of distinction, but Ireland’s magnificent achievements were in themselves a sufficient vindication of the policy. And who would have predicted at the end of the World Cricket League tournament in January that it would have been the Irish who would set the Caribbean alight by beating two Test countries and tying with a third?

Let’s be quite clear: the proposal to go for a 14-team tournament has nothing to do with producing a more streamlined event than the absurdly drawn-out competition we saw last year. It would be perfectly possible to achieve that desirable goal with 16 teams – or even 18.

No, the blow which now seems virtually certain to be delivered to the so-called minnows of the game is motivated by a much more cynical desire: that of certain Test nations to minimise the chance of their suffering a repeat of the humiliations which were the result of their own inadequacies in the Caribbean, and of the commercial arm of the ICC to ensure that the profits from the event are as huge as possible.

It is a situation which starkly highlights everything that is wrong with the governance of modern cricket.

Embittered – and not without some justification – by decades of domination of the game by the power of Lord’s and its allies, the new elite of Asian countries and their allies exert their grip on the ICC at every opportunity.

Backed by powerful commercial interests and the frequently fanatical support of millions of fans, they don’t hesitate to use their permanent majority on the ICC board to get their way, on such issues as the appallingly mishandled Hair affair and the Indian demand to drop an umpire during the recent series in Australia, and now on the format of the next World Cup.

It isn’t too late. Not quite.

But who could for a moment dare hope that when the ICC board – who are, after all, the paymasters of the very CEOs who have recommended a 14-team format – meets on 18 March it will reverse the decision in the interests of the wider expansion of the sport?

It appears that the die is cast, and that the Associates will be sacrificed to the self-interest of a small but mighty band of unprincipled opportunists.