AS 16 countries were paraded around Jamaica’s Trelawny multi-purpose stadium in last night’s World Cup opening ceremony, six, perhaps seven, were harbouring thoughts of lifting cricket’s most coveted trophy.

All but one of the rest will have been pondering their chances of surviving the next couple of weeks and finding a way through to the so-called ‘Super Eight’ where the tournament, in the eyes of many, will finally begin to generate some excitement.

The odd team out? No prizes for guessing.

Bermuda’s players won’t have been looking any further ahead than their first group contest against former world champions Sri Lanka on Thursday, and certainly not beyond their group finale against Bangladesh more than a week later.

Defeatist? Perhaps. But then Bermuda never arrived in the Caribbean with any remote hopes of progressing beyond the first stage.

Were it to happen it would be recorded as one of the greatest David and Goliath sports stories of all time.

Bar some kind of unthinkable miracle, it won’t.

Bermuda’s own ‘World Cup’ was the ICC Trophy a couple of years ago when they made history by qualifying for the first time and becoming the smallest country ever to do so.

Ever since, the objective has been to shape a team that could compete with cricket’s ‘big boys’ and emerge from the sport’s showpiece event with their heads held high. With the opening game now just three days away, that’s still the goal. And after crushing defeats to both England and Zimbabwe in final warm-up games in St. Vincent last week, it’s no small ask.

Since being granted official One-Day International status by the ICC after their success in Ireland, it’s been a constant struggle for coach Gus Logie and his team. With limited resources to draw upon, they’ve had to rely on basically the same crop of players who got them to this stage in their efforts to advance to the next.

While other Associate nations, such as Holland, Scotland and Ireland, have managed to unearth fresh talent, build on their ICC Trophy success and mould together squads which, potentially, could slip a banana skin under the feet of unsuspecting Test teams, Bermuda have in many ways stagnated.

It’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, as Logie has quickly discovered.

Players in their late 20s and even late 30s, of which Bermuda has its fair share, might be able to marginally improve on technique, fitness and even mental strength — but old habits die hard.

And the manner in which so many of Bermuda’s batsmen ‘throw away’ their wickets as well as fail to milk the quick single, an essential skill in modern one-day cricket, is simply a reflection of the domestic game in which they were raised.

Lack of agility in the field often lets their opponents score runs they wouldn’t be allowed by more formidable teams, and a bowling attack, even with an unlikely star in the shape of Dwayne Leverock among their ranks, relies far too heavily on containment rather than penetration.

All of the above might paint a depressing World Cup picture for the hundreds of Island fans who will descend on the Queen’s Park Oval here in Trinidad over the next couple of weeks.

And if there’s one saving grace, it’s that cricket can be a wonderfully unpredictable game where one individual’s heroics can quickly turn a contest on its head.

With the likes of Clay Smith, Dean Minors, Irving Romaine, Janeiro Tucker, David Hemp, Lionel Cann, Leverock and Saleem Mukuddem in the team, Bermuda has such individuals capable of competing with the best in the world.

Over the course of the last two years we’ve seen all of them turn in outstanding performances against top teams. What we haven’t seen is all of them perform on the same day. And for Bermuda to hold out any hope of success over the next couple of weeks, that’s exactly what has to happen. No longer can one player fail with the belief that his team-mate will pick up the slack.

It’s going to take an enormous all-round team effort.

And, who knows, maybe we will witness a miracle.