How many countries have teams?

I'm ignorant, I admit it.  :-[ But why are there not more countries doing cricket? It seems that it started as British sport and expanded mainly to the countries with British colonies or a lot of other British influence, but it also also expanded to places like Pakistan.

Okay, I just did some looking, and apparently America and Russia have cricket teams, and yet I did not know this. Why do you never hear as much about them?

Many countries associations are not recognized by ICC like recently the cricket association for united states was de-recognized.

Moreover, unfortunately ICC doesn't provide proper opportunities for non playing test nations to compete and gain recognition and this impacts the progress of the game in those countries and eventually impacts the entire game.

Hopefully this changes in the future.

Thank you for the info, @gamer2x. Why would so many not be recognized? Are the regulations too stringent, or the recognition too expensive, so that many countries do not want to go through the process?

It does seem that it would be a benefit to them, as well as the individual teams, for as many to be recognized as possible.

I bet it's because many nations, or America in particular don't want certain sports to break into the American market.

It's all based off of personal interest, people don't care. If they didn't invent it, they don't want it all over their market. I don't think America is ready for a whole different culture of sports game like Cricket.

In order for the associations to be recognized their national teams have to play specific number of matches and the associations need to follow a specific hierarchy which is not possible without proper cricket infrastructure all over the country.

As for the nations not being able to play specific number of matches per year, again the ICC is to be blamed for this because they don't encourage such fixtures because Lets say, India vs Ireland would draw much lesser revenue as compared to India vs Australia.

In all this politics and greed the game is the one which suffers.

In regards to the USA I think you may have a point and you only have to look at the most played, and most popular sport in the world, football (or soccer) to see that introducing a new sport is hard work. Soccer (as they like to call it) as been over there a number of years now and it's only just starting to take off and become popular and even that is only in a certain number of states.

All of that makes sense. However, I think you'll find that football/soccer is actually quite popular in the USA. It may not be as popular as a competitive sport, however it is everywhere in schools. You only have to flip the telly onto almost any American family sitcom to see the soccer mom dropping her kids off at practice.

But yeah, I get what you're saying.