This is not to suggest the Philippines’ growth is illegitimate. Rather, it illustrates the powerful incentive to keep numbers rising and avoid a drop at all costs. Combined with patchy oversight, insiders say this creates fertile ground for dishonesty.
Journalist Bertus de Jong, who has covered Associate cricket for more than a decade, put it bluntly: “Scorecard fiddling is utterly endemic”.
Cricket’s disappearing numbers
One key source of transparency has quietly disappeared.
Around six years ago, the ICC stopped publishing its Census, which detailed participation and infrastructure across all Associate Members. The last time the Census appeared in official communication seems to have been a 2020 blog post, with a summary of key figures rather than granular data.
With public data scarce, Play the Game commissioned a survey to all 98 Associate Members, requesting their most recent Scorecard submissions and their views on the system.
Of the 96 reachable boards, 80 did not respond, 10 declined, and just six offered comment. Only Norway shared its data.
Greig White, the Isle of Man’s development officer, said, “all good thank you from our perspective”, adding that any concerns would be raised “through the committees rather than the press”.
“You can manipulate the data”
Given the amateur nature of many boards, a 6% participation rate is unsurprising. More revealing were the comments from those who did speak.
“You can manipulate the data”, said Yousuf Gilani, chairman of Norway’s cricket federation. “How does the ICC quality-check what countries have done, what they have been writing in the Scorecard?”
Gilani said Norwegian cricket does not rely heavily on ICC funding thanks to government support, but argued the Scorecard is still “a good thing to have” for global development.
He disputes how the ICC counted Norway’s data – for instance, claiming the board reported 80 junior women players, not the zero recorded by the ICC. Junior participation is the most heavily weighted category in the Scorecard and therefore the most valuable. As a result, he said, Norway sits one tier lower than it should – costing 70,000 USD in funding – and at rank 44, misses out on ICC voting rights typically granted to the top 40.
He and other sources also criticised the lack of adjustment for geography and demographics.
“Norway has only a three-month season”, Gilani said. “Spain has a nine-month season, and still we’re compared on the same Scorecard. That does not make sense.”
“80% of the countries don’t understand how to report [the Scorecard]”, he added. “It’s only the ICC administration that understands.”
ICC Europe Development Officer Esther de Lange, speaking on the BBC Stumped podcast in April, acknowledged that European cricket boards face significant capacity constraints: “There’s always limited amounts of money available, limited amounts of time for people to do things that need to be done”.