Scotland defeated England by six runs in the Edinburgh ODI on Sunday. They scored 371 for five before keeping their cool to secure victory against the No1 ODI side in the world. An Associate nation stunning the top ranked, and arguably the best, side in the world in a pulsating high-scoring ODI.

England will take a long time to recover from this stunning result. Granted they didn’t have star players Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes and Chris Woakes but even so the result will be difficult to digest.

But we are not talking about England losing. We are looking at Scotland’s win. A win that will soon become an interesting footnote in cricket’s history books because this is as far as Scotland can go. There is no World Cup for them to prove this isn’t a flash in the pan and that they can challenge the best in the world.

The ICC decided to restrict next year’s World Cup to a 10-team affair. No place for an ’emerging’ team producing a shock upset. Only familiar faces renewing their rivalries and having no time for any mismatch, which Scotland showed doesn’t have to be the case even if they had lost Sunday’s ODI.

Former Scotland captain Preston Mommsen captured the sentiment among teams lower down the pecking order perfectly.

“I don’t want to call it a World Cup because it isn’t. It is just a tournament with ten teams. It is like a Champions Trophy. Really nail it down. They cannot see the long-term benefits and gains in trying to be more inclusive to the other teams outside of your full member nations and the potential for growth that is there, they are not tapping that,” he was quoted as saying by Wisden India.

There will be no Scotland or Ireland at the 2019 World Cup in England. Two teams who have beaten the hosts in high-scoring ODIs – Ireland chasing down 328 during the 2011 World Cup and Scotland defeating the world No1 side in Edinburgh.

Whatever happens at the next World Cup, we will definitely not see a team out to prove the world wrong and demanding its fair share of the cricketing pie. The ‘others’ have already been shown their place. All the Scotlands of the world can do is make their presence known whenever the ‘main’ teams bother to show up.