The issue is structural gaps. One game or two - sure, the 'poorer' side will win, but over a period of time the trend/flow is one way.
That structural gap was even wider 35 years back. PAK had absolutely nothing, WIN was much poorer than now; SAF didn’t existed. It was English County that managing cricket for PAK & WIN, while Kiwis were there about always, but their top 5-6 players were also more of a County player than their domestic player.
In recent times, India has improved their system massively and to a certain extent BD has done so, while others are at similar spot or have declined. SAF’s case is totally different because they are trying to integrate their mass population into the sports - give them few years, by 2027 WC, I am sure they’ll be among the contenders with a black majority team.
WIN is facing a different problem - first it’s not a country rather pack of several smaller countries and for a population of may be 1.2 million, they are unbelievably talented in several sports - soccer, athletics, baseball, basketball, tennis .... and cricket pays least among these. Still, within that scope, they are producing brilliant cricketers, but can’t keep them focused in national interest (one reason is there is no nation). They have taken initiatives for upgrading their system & results are coming - slowly but surely. This WIN has a much better future than it looked few years back.
So, basically just 2 countries are facing a real challenge to upgrade their system - PAK & SRL. And, these two teams are facing a consistent & alarming decline - it’ll go further down for PAK as long as they keep believing the “talunt route”. There was, is, will never be any genetically superior cricketer - it was County system that polished the cream - the day PAK starts to believe this, things won’t take much longer for a positive turn, otherwise this nose dive will accelerate at a faster rate.
Cricket never was a global game & won’t ever be either. It’s a British game, spread, taught by them in past - that too in countries where cricket season didn't cut path with their County season; it’ll remain like that, because cricket isn’t a proper game in that sense, it’s more of a lifestyle thing. Lots of people questions if AUS, SAF ... then why not USA, Canada? Because they don’t know first how it was in AUS/SAF - it was first English pro cricketers that used to tour these Southern Hemisphere countries during their off season (& South Asia as well) which spread the game there; but in North America, cricket is possible only in between May to September (possible in winter in few southern US states, but these were more close to French & Latin sports heritage), when English players were busy in counties - so Yanks invented their own bat-ball game.
I hope ICC believes this and instead of wasting efforts to teach Japan, Korea, China, Arabs, Brazil, Italy, Germany cricket, they focus more on development of AFG, Kenya, Nepal, SLR, SCT, Ireland, PNG.... we’ll have a better cricket world with 10-12 strong teams and may be another 10-12 very good teams.
