ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat has hinted that Associate bosses knew nearly three months’ ago that a return to a 14-team World Cup would end the Island’s World Twenty20 dreams.Earlier this week the ICC reversed their decision to have only 10 teams at the 2015 event, and cut the World Twenty20 tournament for 2012 and 2014 to 12 teams at the same time.Bermuda Cricket Board executive Neil Speight, one of three Associate Member Representatives on the ICC Board alongside Imran Khwaja of Singapore and Keither Oliver of Scotland, was a part of a decision that Lorgat said all came down to money.According to the ICC boss a 16-team Twenty20 event was predicated on a structure that involved the new World Test Championship and a 10-team World Cup in 2015. Once that changed, everything else also had to follow suit.The cost of keeping those four extra Twenty20 spots for Associate nations is believed to be around $3 million per event, a cost the ICC was unwilling to take on. It is unclear if the implications of packaging the World Cup, the World Twenty20 and World Test Championship together were made clear to the smaller nations in April. However, Lorgat pointed out that the 40 nations were represented on the Board.“I didn’t meet with them (the Associates) personally, but they have delegates (Speight, Khwaja and Oliver) with them who are engaged in these debates,” said Lorgat.The ICC boss said he understood the disappointment the Associate nations must be feeling over the decision, but financial implications had played a part and defended the move as part of a strategic plan to build a ‘bigger, better global game’.“We wanted to have a 10-team World Cup in a 50-over format, which is sustainable provided you have context and you have a proper contest,” he said. “In the World Twenty20, we were prepared to go up to 16 teams competing in that event. In order to balance all of that, it was very much a package decision we had made where funding would have balanced out, the model would have balanced out, the competition would have worked in my view.“Once you change one, you have to see what the implications are on the other. And it was 14 teams in the World Cup and back to 12 in the Twenty20.“The ICC acknowledges their disappointment but the decision to have 14 teams in the ICC Cricket World Cup and 12 teams in the ICC World Twenty20 is a return to the current format for ICC events. We know that development is central to the ICC and our new Strategic Plan 2011-15 is designed to build a bigger, better global game.”While pressure from Ireland forced the ICC to reverse their decision on the World Cup in 2015, Lorgat said there would be no chance of a change this time around.“It was important for us to have made that decision (about the size of the World Twenty20 field) in this conference because the planning for that event is well underway. That decision is pretty much cast in stone,” he said.How that affects Bermuda, or next month’s ICC Americas tournament, remains to be seen. If nothing changes, the event would remain a regional qualifier for the World Twenty20 next year, with 16 teams in the global qualifier fighting for just two places rather than six.If that were the case some countries have already expressed reservations about forking out some $20,000 to attend a tournament they have no hope of progressing from.An ICC official said as much to The Royal Gazette earlier this week. “I can’t see there being an event where 16 teams are fighting for two spots,” the official who declined to be named said. “Why would some of the (lesser) teams bother going?”However, the lesser teams could be left with little choice but to attend. The ICC are planning on implementing a Twenty20 ranking system from October, and a global qualifier would go a long way to deciding where countries such as Bermuda fit into the that system.Speight wasn’t unavailable for comment yesterday.Time to rethink Bermuda’s cricket future see Page 14