{"id":7307,"date":"2015-03-16T15:57:33","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T19:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/?p=7307"},"modified":"2015-03-16T15:57:33","modified_gmt":"2015-03-16T19:27:33","slug":"why-this-years-associate-crop-is-the-best-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/?p=7307","title":{"rendered":"Why this year&#8217;s Associate crop is the best ever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Wigmore- co-author of &#8220;Second XI: Cricket in its Outposts&#8221; writes for CricInfo:-<br \/>\nWith every passing world event the trends point to Associates becoming more competitive still. The ICC only developed an interest in expansionism in the mid-1990s. Only now is the first generation of cricketers to develop since then benefiting from much-improved domestic structures. Most importantly, there are a lot more of them. Since 2005, official participation numbers in cricket have risen six-fold in the UAE, quadrupled in Ireland and Scotland, and risen by 30 times in Afghanistan.<br \/>\nSo while David Richardson described &#8220;relief&#8221; at the performance of the Associates in the World Cup, those in the ICC who follow them more closely do not share his feelings.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.espncricinfo.com\/magazine\/content\/story\/850235.html\" target=\"_blank\">Full story<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Wigmore- co-author of &#8220;Second XI: Cricket in its Outposts&#8221; writes for CricInfo:- With every passing world event the trends point to Associates becoming more competitive still. The ICC only developed an interest in expansionism in the mid-1990s. Only now is the first generation of cricketers to develop since then benefiting from much-improved domestic structures. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7308,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions\/7308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}